Trauma and transformation: the political progress of John Bunyan

Abstract

Vera Camden (ed.), Trauma and Transformation: The Political Progress of John Bunyan, Stanford, Ca., Stanford University Press, 2008, pp. xiii + 185, hb. $55.00, ISBN: 978-0-8047-5785-0.Twenty years ago, around the tercentenary of John Bunyan's death, two books - N. H. Keeble's landmark critical anthology and Christopher Hill's biographical study - heralded a renaissance of scholarly interest in the tinker-author. This attention has matured in myriad ways since 1988, with significant recent scholarship - Isabel Hofmeyr's 'transnational history' of The Pilgrim's Progress, and the essays collected by W. R. Owens and Stuart Sim on the theme of Reception, Appropriation, Recollection - evincing unprecedented historical, methodological, and theoretical sophistication. Vera Camden's new anthology sets tough new standards for Bunyan scholarship in particular, and for intellectual collaboration in general. Both individually and collectively, the contributions to Trauma and Transformation reveal a network of cultural 'fault lines' that run far beyond the nonconformist frameworks that remain a staple of Bunyan studies. They initiate a timely reassessment of Bunyan's career and its place within early-modern literary history.Trauma and Transformation originates in unique circumstances. Most of the essays began life as papers delivered to a 2001 conference of the International John Bunyan Society, held in the United States just weeks after the 9/11 bombings. This grim coincidence could have encouraged a sentimental slant. In Camden's organisational and editorial hands, it lends poignancy and heightened cultural relevance to the theme of religious difference and, indeed, to the spirit of collective intellectual endeavour: 'it seems uncanny', Camden writes in her introduction, 'how our ongoing crisis appears to have been adumbrated in the cultural cataclysms of Bunyan's England'.The volume is anchored in the premise that the decapitation of Charles I caused a fundamental rupture in the national sensibility. It is also predicated on a chronological coincidence which, again, is much more than an easy motif. Camden notes that the milestones defining Bunyan's adulthood - his coming of age, and his death - fell respectively within the years of two national rites of passage: the regicide of 1649, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This neat observation leads to a more subtle and pressing one: followers, readers, and researchers of Bunyan have focused almost exclusively on the Restoration phase of his career (1660-85). These dates bound not only the bulk of Bunyan's literary career, but also the defining period of nonconformity - the time of the 'great persecution'. Imprisoned at the Restoration for refusing to go through the motions of Anglican cooperation, Bunyan has inevitably been contained, to broader and narrower degrees, within the framework of dissent. These essays point out, cumulatively, some obvious facts that have not been stated before: that Bunyan lived through violent constitutional upheaval long before, and a few years after, the Restoration; that the personal and the political are seldom differentiated into black and white; and that Bunyan's silence over overtly political events does not mean he was not affected by them. Probing between the lines of Bunyan's writings, and of his documented biography, they open up significant new perspectives which suggest that the strict-nonconformist Bunyan of popular and scholarly familiarity is known partially and reductively.Following Camden's lucid introduction, Peter L. Rudnytsky controversially identifies T. S. Eliot's theory of 'dissociation of sensibility' as 'the single most seminal contribution to English literary history of the twentieth century'. He argues for the psychoanalytic notion of a 'primal crime' - the transgression, or fall, or 'epistemological rupture' caused, he states, by the decapitation of Charles I; the consequence of this fissure is a traumatised self-consciousness which suffuses the works of authors such as Milton and Marvell. …