The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism by Adam Potkay (review)

205 ADAM POTKAY. The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2007. Pp. xiii ⫹ 304. $99. ‘‘Angels can fly,’’ Chesterton wrote famously, ‘‘because they can take themselves lightly.’’ For the most part, so does Mr. Potkay and the result is an insightful study, serious but not solemn, of ‘‘the ways in which joy has been addressed in Western literature and art, philosophy and religion, psychology and statecraft.’’ For Mr. Potkay , the ‘‘best concise definition’’ of joy is Locke’s ‘‘a delight of the Mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a Good.’’ Key is his differentiation of joy from seemingly similar concepts like happiness (‘‘Joys are modifiable in ways that ‘happiness,’ a noun without a plural, is not’’), preparing for labels that help to sort several types of joy. For example, the penultimate chapter on ‘‘tragic joy’’ treats Richard Wagner, Nietzsche, and Yeats. Another important difference between joy and happiness is that the former frequently involves a loss of self, at least partially, while the latter is usually self-exalting. Mr. Potkay draws distinctions also between joy and simple pleasure, grace, schadenfreude, and ecstasy. The chronologically arranged remainder of the book begins with classical and biblical conceptions of joy, and here we have an excellent example of Mr. Potkay’s method, cross-disciplinary but always clear: ‘‘the Gospel of John grounds joy in a community apart, a world elsewhere, and it does so in conscious opposition to the world as it is. . . . It is this dualism . . . , its strict opposition between the elect and everyone else, that has at times been interpreted to disastrous effect—for example, the Nazis were fond of John’s association of ‘the Jews’ with ‘the devil’ in 8:44.’’ Several chapters later Mr. Potkay has a brief and fascinating (albeit chilling) discussion of an autobiographical essay by a death-camp survivor, ‘‘Singing the Ode ‘To Joy’ in Auschwitz’’ (published 1995), in which he suggests that the writer perhaps ‘‘intended something like a Nietzschean tribute to tragic joy, the joy one feels in the power of the life force (even) as it destroys its heroes.’’ Chronology orders this book but the connections Mr. Potkay discovers give it its meaning. Early on, Mr. Potkay advises us that ‘‘poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake and Shelley, are the rock on which this study is built,’’ but Scriblerian readers will find their particular interests enriched. A discussion of how joy became a sign of election and ‘‘joylessness came to be seen as a sign of the Spirit’s absence from the life of the individual believer and from the corporate church’’ begins, not surprisingly, with Luther, then moves through Spenser and Donne, and concludes with readings of Bunyan and Robinson Crusoe. This section makes a strong case that ‘‘within English Protestantism as it develops between James I and the early Hanoverians, ‘joy’ becomes appropriated—by the advent of Methodism, definitively appropriated—by those who oppose if not a temporal then surely a national church: Puritans, Independents , Dissenters.’’ Mr. Potkay moves gracefully between generic and historical criticism, as when he points out, ‘‘the confession becomes a new form of romance; the synthesis of old romance and new emerges with the modern novel.’’ Bunyan, of course, is at the beginning of this change. In Grace Abounding, the narrator’s ‘‘enormous sin, and thus his distinguishing characteristic, is washed away before his nar- 206 rative begins. We know from the start, then, that his shall be a tale told by an assertive self whose selfhood will, in the course of the telling, cease to matter.’’ Defoe’s (fictional ) spiritual autobiography differs from Bunyan’s in its relative indifference to community: Crusoe’s ‘‘curiously a-social life, spiritually independent from neighbor, given to using others instrumentally . . . may be taken as a foundational myth for liberal Protestant individualism, for the ‘sanctified’ but unmoored forces that, in the last three hundred years, have shaped much of the world.’’ Mr. Potkay sees the ‘‘ethical joy’’ popularized by the third earl of Shaftesbury as a short-lasting countertrend to this liberal Protestant strain, which he now calls ‘‘Christian joy.’’ ‘‘For the Christian,’’ he writes, ‘‘the ethical life is never...