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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Brian Wicker has written a very curious book. A rough summary of its contents will indicate the obvious sense in which it’s curious: the second part consists of six critical studies, of Lawrence, Joyce, Waugh, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet and Mailer; the first, theoretical, part includes an analysis of metaphor and analogy in relation to Saussure and Chomsky, a comparison of homopathic and contiguous magic with myths and fairly-tales, an excursus on causality in science linked with comments on angels and ecology, and a chapter that brings together discussions of religious language, Whitehead and Teilhard, and the differing narrative structures of Old and New Testament stories. It’s a brave author and publisher who can expect a readership for such a work. But it’s the kind of argument that links these components that I find really curious, since I remain very unclear just what Wicker is arguing for. There are two major difficulties: the overall argument seems to be trying to establish a kind of natural theology, a queer kind of proof that God exists, though Wicker’s formulations of his case never quite commit him to this; and secondly some of his basic arguments seem to me so dubious that, given my respect for Wicker’s previous work, I can only conclude that one of us is deeply muddled but remain uncertain which.
1 The Story Shaped World. Fiction and Metaphysics: some variations on a theme, Athlone Press, London, 1975Google Scholar. Some of the variations have appeared in New Blackfriars (December 1972, January 1974, May 1974) and in The Prose for God, ed. Gregor, and Stein, , Sheed & Ward, 1973Google Scholar.
2 Wicker cites Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) pp. 3–4, which is, however, only a brief summary of the conclusions of Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964). Wicker neither examines nor defends Chomsky's arguments in that (early) work.
3 Wicker quotes McCabe, appendix 2 to Summa Theologiae, (1964), but McCabe's formulation seems to me both subtly different and more satisfactory: A cause is thus a thing exerting itself, having its influence or imposing its character on the world (102).
4 Wicker's first Note (107) acknowledges that ‘The justification for analogous usage … itself depends on an analogous use of “cause”’, and that ‘This argument is clearly circular’; but his attempt to deny that the circle is vicious seems to me both specious and self‐destructive.
5 My treatment of this poem clearly raises problems of whole/part relations (‘organic form’?) and ‘quality’ (why is either version a good poem?) that Wicker doesn't examine. Note that the ‘shorter version’ could almost have been written by a Robbe‐Grillet.
6 Cp. Wicker's earlier odd use of ‘causal historical’ to account for some metonymies; what is involved there is the relation between logic and history (e.g. the relation between Hegel's Logic and Marx's Capital). This reference to the ‘two‐party system’ is, surprisingly. one of the very few to politics—unless one so classifies the discussion of ecology.
7 Cf. the discussion in chapter 4 of ‘Yahweh’ as a literary ‘character’; the question of the cognitive force of literature underpins the whole book, but I'm not sure that it can be solved along Wicker's lines here, that ‘stories are good, and sometimes necessary, to think with’. Perhaps related to this are the questionable phrases description, and in a sense, explanation‘ (43) and’a coherent religion cannot do without a philosophical belief in God (99n)—both emphases mine.
8 New Blackfriars, December 1973, August and October 1974, July 1975, February 1976. It's worth noting that Wicker's essays on Joyce, Beckett and Robbe‐Grillet seem to me the least satisfactory; Derrida has affinities with all three.
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