New Testaments: Cognition, Closure, and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660–1740 by Michael Austin

Abstract

Reviewed by: New Testaments: Cognition, Closure, and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660–1740 by Michael Austin Elizabeth Kraft Michael Austin. New Testaments: Cognition, Closure, and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660–1740. Newark: Delaware, 2012. Pp. xv + 161. $70. Mr. Austin’s elegant study of the literary works and their sequels produced in England in the eighty-year span from the publication of Milton’s Paradise Lost to that of Richardson’s Pamela is grounded in two pertinent observations, one more compelling than the other. The first, and the less exciting, has to do with the structure of the human brain, the countervailing compulsions that drive it to both long for and to resist closure as well as its creative capacity for reconciling contradictions that would otherwise create painful “cognitive dissonance.” The second, and far more powerful, observation is that for the period he considers, the Christian Bible, comprising two intimately related, but fundamentally different, testaments to the shape and significance of the human encounter with the divine, provides the deep narrative structure and the figural logic for the period’s publication of narrative sequels—and, indeed, for the period’s nonliterary readings of the world. The cognitive drive toward both concluding and continuing stories, toward closure and open-endedness, is far too evident to dismiss. Mr. Austin justifiably draws our attention to his being within his scholarly rights to invoke personal, popular, and scientific evidence. After all, for emotional, social, and evolutionary reasons, we are never truly [End Page 84] through thinking about the things that move us and matter to us as the phenomenon of the sequel demonstrates. That said, the distinct virtue of Mr. Austin’s study lies less in his observations about such perennial desire than in his figural readings of the works he features in this book and in his explanations of the logic that drives, infuses, and emerges from them and their sequels, Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Robinson Crusoe, especially. Here, his study is groundbreaking. Mr. Austin’s interest in the reading of the texts is in their specific contributions to their situations and times. And by this finely tuned focus, he radically changes our sense of the literary world he describes. He begins his study with “God’s Sequel,” that is, the New Testament. This collection of disparate but related sacred texts constitutes the first sequel, establishing the paradigm for sequels. In differing from its parent text in essential ways—style, tone, genre, organization, or even, as in this case, language, the sequel, though not conceived when the first work was written, is fundamentally tied to its original by figural logic; symbols, character types, themes, and motifs are reintroduced in such a way as to require reinterpretation of the original text by which certain problems are rethought and resolved. Typological Christian scholarship, where the Hebrew Bible is read as prefiguring the life of Christ, is the grounding for Mr. Austin’s understanding of the sequel. Inasmuch as his key texts are written by dissenting authors who were trained by their religion to read the world as “God’s Sequel” to His first sequel, his method is bound to illuminate. And, indeed, Milton, Bunyan, and Defoe emerge in this book as Puritan readers and writers whose habits of mind are typological and whose works reveal that. The great strength of Mr. Austin’s book lies in his placing us in the historical moments in which Milton, Bunyan, and Defoe were inspired to write sequels and the ideological contexts of their drives to clarify what might have been missed in the first story or to reconcile what was left dissonant. Why did Milton choose to center Paradise Regained on Christ’s temptations rather than the annunciation or the crucifixion? Here is why: Figural logic of the text of Paradise Lost demands the reappearance of Satan, and figural logic of the politics of 1671 demands that the Messianic role be newly understood as spiritual, not political. Paradise Regained reflects Milton’s own waning confidence in millennial hopes that “political action and physical force” would usher in “God’s Kingdom” on earth. Why did Bunyan focus his sequel’s attention...