Saturday’s Silence: R.S. Thomas and Paschal Reading by Richard McLauchlan (review)

While poring through works of poetry in search of primary material for my dissertation, I read all of the published poems of R. S. Thomas. In the end, I decided not to go with the Welsh poet’s work, concluding that, however engaging, it was “too bleak” for my tastes. It was only years later when I returned to it, and began to teach it, that I realized how shallow my own reading had been—how I had not “sat” with this remarkable corpus long enough to appreciate the richness of Thomas’s achievement. Richard McLauchlan’s Saturday’s Silence offers an exemplary rebuke to my own neglect. It is as much a model of attentive reading as it is an original study of Thomas’s poetry.

The subtitle announces this quality, and intent. By fixing our attention on the poems through protracted close reading, McLauchlan directs his study towards the nature of reading itself. As he states in his introduction, his book proposes “that the activity of reading the poems may become a practice of spiritual discipline,” leading, he adds, to “an improved quality of attentiveness” (2). Reading as a spiritual discipline may lie far from the usual focus and reading practices of literary criticism, but McLauchlan insists that we have not fully heeded the effects generated by Thomas’s poetry unless we regard them in such terms, terms that include a conscious engagement with the Paschal mysteries of Holy Saturday. In this way, “Paschal Reading,” as the book’s subtitle renders it, offers a unique, and in this reviewer’s opinion, fruitful approach. It is this approach, however, that may spark controversy among literary scholars, as Saturday’s Silence stands out as much for the author’s own poetics as it does for his interpretation of Thomas’s.

Of paramount importance to McLauchlan’s undertaking is to align his readers with the methods and promise of reading Thomas devotionally, which he labors to substantiate in his introduction. In broad terms, he seeks to weave together three strands of inquiry: (i) a “stereophonic reading” of Thomas’s poems, by which he means attentive close reading that does not “look for stages or progressions through the work” (5), but allows the poems to illuminate each other within a unified corpus; (ii) theological reflection on the Holy Saturday moment of the Passion narrative, or Triduum (which, he contends, has its own “stereophonic” dimensions, 6–7), as well as on the nature of spiritual disciplines; and (iii) consideration of how readers’ engagement with the poetry contemplated in these terms can facilitate their own spiritual formation, and transformation—applying what he calls Thomas’s “Holy Saturday poetics” to what we may call McLauchlan’s own form of devotional poetics. The promise of this trifold approach, he argues, is “a metanoia [renewing of the mind] for the reader, achieved by means of a transforming encounter with the silence of Holy Saturday” (2; cf. 15). In sum, McLauchlan rehearses the Passion and, especially, the Holy Saturday narratives through the lens of Thomas’s engagement with its Paschal themes, conducting his readers through a “paschal poetic practice” (13) meant to provoke and guide their faithful response. As he insists towards the end of his introduction, that response includes chastened and renewed language. Citing Rowan Williams’s contention that Christ exposes our untruth while revealing God’s truth, such that we must “follow Christ into the abyss of Holy Saturday, into silence,” McLauchlan advances what he declares a central claim of his argument: that “to read Thomas with attentiveness is to practise the demand placed upon the believer that Williams articulates,” i.e., in order “to remain responsible . . . in our use of speech” (13). We are to follow McLauchlan, then, as he follows Thomas into that Paschal space, showing among other things “how reading the poems allows for the enactment of this ‘making-responsible’” (14). [End Page...