Biblical allusions in Thomas Foster's approach to reading literature

¶ … value of literature must apply to all human beings alike, not to some group…Men [and presumably women too] ought to value literature for being what it is; they ought to value it in terms and in degrees of its literary value…" (Draughon, Earl Wells, 2003, p. 114).

Literature is available to the literate person for many reasons. For one reason and purpose, literature is entertaining and provides for the reader a fascinating excursion anywhere in the world -- or the universe -- without the reader having to leave his or her comfortable chair. But there are many other reasons why literature should be read, and those will be presented in this paper.

How to Read like a Professor -- Thomas C. Foster

Professor of English Thomas C. Foster (University of Michigan) points out that readers of great literature get a taste of the wisdom from what many writers consider the greatest resource for themes and morality lessons, the Bible.

Foster reviews the many iconic authors and poets that lifted ideas from the Bible, including writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, John Milton, Chaucer, John Donne, Tony Morrison and James Baldwin, among many others. Why is knowing that great literary figures use Biblical ideas and events important? Part of the learning process in reading great literature is knowing the sources of the authors' ideas, Foster explains (Foster, 2003, pp. 53-54).

Is Foster a Bible scholar? No. But he is always interested in giving literature a "resonance test" to explore an idea or an incident or a character in a story that "…seems to be beyond the scope of the story's or poem's immediate dimensions" (54). And if something within the story resonates "outside itself, I start looking for allusions to older and bigger texts," he adds (54).

On the subject of Baldwin, Foster gives the reader an opportunity to learn how to make reading literature more interesting than just reading and turning a page, reading and turning a page. Foster makes a point of referencing Baldwin's short story Sonny's Blues; at the conclusion of the story, the narrator sends a drink up to the bandstand, to his younger brother Sonny who is playing his saxophone. Sonny has been something of a wild person, a troubled heroin junkie who spent time in prison and wanted to play jazz but never got it together until recently. His older brother, the narrator, is a successful Black middle class teacher. Foster explains that after Sonny takes a sip of the drink his brother has sent to him, and before the musically talented Sonny launches into the next song with his saxophone, Sonny sets the drink up on the piano.

Foster was impressed with the writing in this scene. The drink shimmers "like the very cup of trembling," Baldwin wrote. When Foster read that passage the first time he didn't know the origin of the phrase, but he knew it was special. The story of Sonny's Blues is "rich and full," he said, and the way Baldwin presents the "pain and redemption" was so very compelling, Foster didn't think about that phrase until he had read the story several times.

A little research revealed to Foster that Baldwin was a minister's son, and that Baldwin's most revered book was Go Tell it on the Mountain, so Foster made a search through the Bible. Sure enough, the phrase -- "like the very cup of trembling" -- came from Isaiah 51:17 (Foster, 55). In this chapter Isaiah is referring to the "cup of the Lord's fury" in the context of sons who have "lost their way, who are afflicted, who may yet succumb to desolation and destruction," and this certainly describes the narrator's little brother Sonny (Foster, 55). Hence, the point of using Foster's narrative in this paper is that reading literature closely, and working through important literature more than once -- as C.S. Lewis suggests in the next section of this paper -- one can solve riddles, find the origins of transformational language and phrasing, and quite frankly, learn more than just the inspiration or idea-development that comes from reading superficially.

On page 56, Foster relates the joy he discovers by digging deeper into the literature. Of course, not every reader is going to be as investigative as a professor of English, but the point here is that knowing where that phrase came from means the alert reader no longer just sees the "sordid story" of a jazz musician and his teacher brother. With the link to the Bible, the story "…resonates with the richness of distant antecedents" and it no longer is "locked in the middle of the twentieth century"; hence, it never grows old, Foster concludes (56).

Reading Literature is a way of Learning History

Much fictional literature is historical in nature because writers use real-world themes and incidents, and therefore readers learn about events in the past that have relevance today. Mark Twain's iconic book the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (AHF) is a case in point. In the novel, which takes place in the South in the middle 1800s and was published in 1885, uses the ugly word "nigger" 214 times. Of course that word was commonplace in Twain's lifetime, and the book is historically accurate on many levels. Adroit middle school and high school teachers have used the Twain novel to open students' eyes to the racial hatred and political realities of a divided nation after the Civil War. There is an open door to American history in this novel.

That said, in the eyes of some important literary figures -- like William Styron, Robert Penn Warren, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and W.E.B. Du Bois -- Huck Finn was a very important piece of the American literary portfolio. In fact, iconic poet T.S. Eliot wrote that Huck Finn was a character in the "company of" enormously important fictional characters like "…Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Hamlet and other great discoveries that man has made about himself," Robert Fikes writes in the Western Journal of Black Studies (Fikes, 2011, p. 241).

Still, in the 1950s in America, Blacks in key places began agitating against AHF, due to the many references to the "N-word" and also to the portrayal of Jim, the runaway slave, as an "accommodating… minstrel-like" character. As a result of these protestations against language in the book, many schools and libraries took the book off the shelves. Moreover, in 2011, a new edition of AHF was publishes without the "N-word" (instead, the publisher used "slave"). The reader of literature should know not just about the value of the novel in its original form, but the alert reader should also understand the history of why the book was controversial, and still is.

In conclusion, everyone, not just students, should read literature and when there are extraordinarily profound and vibrant phrases within the literature those phrases and ideas should be examined for origins. Moreover, as C.S. Lewis stressed, great literature should be read over and over again, and literature should be read in order for the reader to gain a grasp of what has gone on before -- the history of the world and the history of the United States.