Big God Research Articles

Anthony Burgess as Literary Biographer


 
 
 
 This chapter addresses some questions of literary form and biographical method arising from Anthony Burgess’s biographies of Ernest Hemingway and D. H. Lawrence. A new connection is established between Burgess’s unsuccessful first attempt to write an autobiography in 1977 and his growing interest in the potential forms of biography, which he explored in novels and non-fiction books in the 1970s and 1980s. A close examination of two specific works, Ernest Hemingway and His World (1978) and Flame Into Being (1985), allows us to chart the evolution of Burgess’s biographical method, which he went on to redeploy in his two volumes of formal autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God (1987) and You’ve Had Your Time (1990).
 
 
 

When god is watching: dictator game results from the Sursurunga of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT The influence of religious beliefs on social complexity is a fairly straightforward account. The possibility of social life beyond a face-to-face community exists when supernaturally sanctioned prosocial moral norms include an expanding circle of humanity—that is, when non-kin are treated as kin. This paper describes an effort to gain a clearer picture of the ways in which belief in a moralistic deity affects people’s behavior toward others, including distant coreligionists and faraway strangers, using Dictator Game (DG) play among the Sursurunga of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. The DG experiments employed two conditions: a Local God condition and a Big God condition. Two predictions were made about the recipients of greater allocations of money in the Big God condition: (1) a distant coreligionist over a member of one’s kin group, and (2) a faraway stranger over a distant coreligionist. A final prediction was that (3) all allocations to oneself would be lower in the Big God condition than in the Local God condition. Only predictions (2) and (3) were supported by the results. An unexpected and surprising outcome was that after playing DG, participants who kept more for themselves tended to view God as less moralistic and less punitive.

Big Gods, socio-cultural evolution and the non-obvious merits of a sociological interpretation

ABSTRACT Much of the recent, renewed interest in the cultural evolution of religion has been driven by findings in experimental and cognitive psychology, and, as a result of disciplinary boundaries, sociologists have engaged very little with this new data and theory. In order to bring sociology formally back into this discussion, we provide in this paper five sociological sources for the birth and diffusion of ‘Big God’ ideation (with monotheism serving as a paradigmatic case). Agentically, we suggest that Big God beliefs assuaged existential anxiety, aided in elite legitimation and were useful for religious entrepreneurs hoping to establish new institutional fields. Structurally, we suggest that Big God beliefs may have been an epiphenomenal attempt by people to symbolically represent the centralization of political authority and the intensified use of new technologies. We conclude with a general theory of the cultural evolution of Big Gods that integrates these agentic and structural explanations.

God is Big in Africa: Pentecostal Mega Churches and a Changing Religious Landscape

This Outlook paper reflects on the adjective “mega,” in contemporary African Pentecostal discourses. This is a version of Pentecostalism that holds that not only is God a big God but that everythin...

Aesthetics as an Aspect of Good in Enderby Novels by Anthony Burgess

<p>This article considers the interaction of ethics and aesthetics in A. Burgess's worldview. It is based on an analysis of the novels about the minor poet Enderby, who is interpreted as the writer's alter ego. The material for the article is represented by the novels "Inside Mr. Enderby", "Enderby outside", "The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End", "Enderby's Dark Lady", or "No End of Enderby". Particular attention is paid to the personality of the protagonist and his worldview. In the course of the analysis, the superficial interpretations of Enderby's image and the system of his relationships with the outside world are rejected in favor of deeper ones, arising from the system of the author's outlooks on creativity. The material of other writer's novels is also attracted to the study ("A Clockwork Orange", "The Wanting Seed", "Little Wilson and Big God", etc), where his religious and ethical views are most clearly manifested. The analysis of Burgess's search for faith, his path from congenital Catholicism through Manichaeism to the development of his own religious and ethical picture of the world has been performed in this paper. It has shown that according to Burgess the Beauty is of primary value and the writer is seen as the creator of such a world view where the original duality of reality can be overcome through the language.</p>

Monotheism versus an innate bias towards mentalizing.

Norenzayan et al.'s account for the spread of monotheistic "Big God" religions sees these religions originating as by-products of innate cognitive biases. These biases produce polytheistic rather than monotheistic systems, however, and so do not explain the origin of monotheism. Accounts where monotheism arises from polytheism (for political reasons, for example) appear better able to explain the spread of monotheism.

Clarity and causality needed in claims about Big Gods.

We welcome Norenzayan et al.'s claim that the prosocial effects of beliefs in supernatural agents extend beyond Big Gods. To date, however, supporting evidence has focused on the Abrahamic Big God, making generalisations difficult. We discuss a recent study that highlights the need for clarity about the causal path by which supernatural beliefs affect the evolution of big societies.

Coerced coordination, not cooperation.

Norenzayan et al. propose that Big God (BG) religions are large-group cooperative enterprises that promote internal harmony and higher fertility, resulting in "mutually beneficial exchanges" for those involved. We examine the possible distributions of costs and benefits within BG religions and propose that they are, instead, successful coordinating mechanisms that rely on intragroup competition and exploitation between the classes and sexes.

Hell of a theory.

The theory of group-selected Big God religions is a master narrative of cultural evolution. The evidence is a positive manifold of correlated assumptions and variables. Although provocative, the theory is overly elastic. Its critical ingredient-belief in Big Gods-is neither necessary nor sufficient to account for in-group prosociality and discipline. Four specific issues illustrate this elasticity.

Complex societies evolved without belief in all-powerful deity

Emergence of politically sophisticated societies may be assisted by faith in supernatural spirits, but does not need "big God" religion.

The Big Man of the Big God: Popular Culture, Media, and the Marketability of Religion

The Big Man of the Big God: Popular Culture, Media, and the Marketability of Religion

African pentecostalism: an introduction

1. Oriki: Genealogy and Identity in Pentecostal Historiography 2. Bakuzufu: Contested Identities and the Quest for Power in African Christianity 3. Moya: African Charismatic Initiatives and Classical Pentecostal Missionaries 4. Mademoni: African Instituted Churches in Pentecostal Rhetoric 5. Aliliki: Charismatic Resurgence in the 1970s: A Regional Comparison 6. The Big Man of the Big God: Pentecostalism, Media, and Popular Culture in the 1980s 7. Elijah's Mantle: Pentecostal Re-evangelization of Africa in the 1990s 8. Gendered Charisma: Charisma and Women in African Pentecostalism 9. Sankofa: Pentecostalism in the African Map of the Universe 10. Masters on Horses: The Roots of Pentecostal Public Ethics 11. Tembisa: Pentecostal Political Theology and Practices 12. Child of the Bondwoman: Islam and Sharia In Pentecostal Rhetoric: A Nigerian Case Study 13. Standing on the Word: Pentecostal Theologies 14. Reverse Flow: Pentecostalism and Immigrant African Christianity

“Unhappy all the Time”: Religion in Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers

I like Somerset Maugham's stuff tremendously [...,] but I should think he was unhappy all the time, wouldn't you? He was an unpleasant man. --P. G. Wodehouse, 1975 interview W. Somerset Maugham appears in thin disguise as Kenneth Marchal Toomey in Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers (1980), the supposed memoirs of a literary lion who derides himself as an indifferent and overrewarded scribbler (278). Although Maugham was particularly religious and certainly Roman Catholic, Burgess gives his protagonist a strong Catholic background. Toomey says that he was born into the faith but, not able to believe (338), proposes to die out of it. Meanwhile he has a friend who becomes the Pope. In fact, the book begins with Toomey's being asked to help make the dead Pope a saint. The way in which religion shapes the principal character (and the literature he produces) in Burgess's satiric masterpiece is file main focus of this essay. Using only his middle names, John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917-1995) wrote more than 60 books, including television and film scripts as well as his own memoirs (Little Wilson and Big God [1987] and You've Had Your Time [1990]). In 1983 Garland Press published Paul Boytinck's Anthony Burgess: An Enumerative Bibliography with Selected Annotations, which ran about as long as Earthly Powers--some 600 pages. Earthly Powers is a title that betrays Burgess's constant preoccupation with word play. Earthly Powers, however, is more than playing with language, as Burgess did when he invented Primitive Indo-European for Jean-Jacques Annaud's film The Quest for Fire (1982) or a Russian-influenced British jargon for A Clockwork Orange (1963) or an Elizabethan dialect for a memoir of William Shakespeare's time, Nothing Like the Sun (1964). In Earthly Powers Burgess's lifelong interests in music (he was a talented composer, an erudite music critic, and the author of a 1974 novel about Ludwig Beethoven, Napoleon Symphony), in the works of James Joyce (he wrote an excellent introduction to that difficult author), and in religion (he stunned us in 1985 with The Kingdom of the Wicked, which is nothing less than a retelling of the Acts of the Apostles) all appear in the satire of an octogenarian author looking back over his career and the literary society in which he achieved fame. Other authors have spoken through first-person narrators--from the Emperor Hadrian to Huck Finn, from Felix Krull to Holden Caulfield. Burgess lets the subject of the satire indite and indict himself. All the while Burgess is engaged in what he said was his constant aim in literature: to clarify moral choice in dealing with life's problems. Here and elsewhere he takes an Augustinian tack in recognizing our fallen human nature. We see the flawed character of the central character and the many shortcomings of his lifestyle as the rather nasty old man gives the raspberry, the finger, or the ax. Toomey is supposed to be as successful as Maugham, and he certainly is as curmudgeonly as Evelyn Waugh and as homosexual as Angus Wilson. (Waugh once said he would have been even nastier had he converted to Catholicism.) Toomey teaches, as it were, by bad example, and we cannot but feel some sympathy with this anti-hero. The Bad Guys, whether Richard III or Macbeth or lesser mortals, are always interesting and often truer to life than most of the Good Guys depicted in literature. Toomey has spent a long life nursing his nastiness. Now he has decided to strike out against a whole range of targets, many of them quite deserving of excoriation. As in all truly successful satire, we do entirely despise him; we rather like him. In fact, we are pushed toward loving him because we want to tell him that lack of love is his basic problem. As with all the most trenchant satire, however extreme he may be, Toomey is merely farcical; he is human and tragic. …

Simulated Cities

SIMULATED CTTÏES/Jeffrey Hammond THE FANCYAPARTMENTbuUding near the shore, a gleaming white tower withblackbalconies, suddenly transforms Ulto a pinched gray hulk scarred with graffiti. Single-famUy homes nearby start doing the same, their green lawns flickering Ulto dusty lots. I glance at what was, a few moments ago, a water tower, but in its place stands a pUe ofbrown rubble. This calls for fast action. I ctick on the utilities button and the demotition button, and my cursor changes into a tiny bulldozer that I aim at the rubble. Ctick: blam! I race back to utilities, ctick on "water structures" and choose "water tower." I swing back to the site, ctick and watch as a new water tower appears. I ctick on the underground view, verify that the new tower is hooked up to the water system; the parched areas of lightbrown gradually turn blue. When I return to the surface, the neighborhood is already starting to rebuild. To my relief I see that a new apartment building, this one in red brick with bay windows, has just popped Ulto sight. This is great fun, though not without the unease that comes from doing something that goes against the gram. For nearly twenty years, ever since buying a boxy Kaypro Tv* for my writing, I have steadfastly regarded computers as working tools, dismissing the gaming world as the proper turf of Gen-X slackers—no place, certainly, for an adult with work to do. It was only last year that I finally got a machine with a sound card and CD-ROM, mostly because it has become nearly impossible to find one without these things. The mania for multimedia has always puzzled me. Haven't we always had natural multimedia, our eyes and ears ready to gratify us plenty at the appropriate time—that is, when the computer is off and we're not working? The animated city on my screen is proof that our deepest desires run counter to our deliberate choices. It's not the rehearsed speech that reveals the soul but the Freudian slip. Not the firm handshake but the quavering voice and averted eyes. My superego might be gratified whenever Tm clattering away Ui WordPerfect, but my sullen, persistent id seems most at ease when no one is looking and a simulated city fills my screen. My Freudian cyberslip is SimCity 3000, and it is hardly a new vice. Despite my long-standing insistence that computer fun be rigorously subordinated to computer work, this weakness dates back to the Pleistocene days of SimCity Classic. Sound card or no sound 34 · The Missouri Review card, SimCity has always been one computer game—the only computer game—that has seemed to me worth playing. Now I mark out a residential zone Ui green and watch, mesmerized, as tiny houses and yards pop Ulto view. I can do this for hours, suspending my precious work Ui favor of the deep, hypnotic timelessness of barely conscious play. What horrible truth ties beneath so blatant a betrayal of deliberate selfimage and best intentions? If ancientAthens had developed multimedia computers, Socrates might have insisted—to everyone's irritation—that the unexamined game is not worth playing. It's probably true that all games should be examined, and closely. Psychologists and anthropologists teU us that play offers a teUing key to our deepest natures, and who am I to argue? As I ctick a marma Ulto place, it occurs to me that something must be going on here. A middle-aged man's addiction to SimCity is not, at first glance, terribly reassuring. Megalomania is a distinctly possible cause if you find yourself hooked on watching tiny people make their way through a city that is under your complete and exclusive control. Given that these tiny people depend on their "mayor"—on you—for their very existence, SimCity might seem an ideal pastime for a frustrated control freak, a small person playing a very big God. Indeed, the box copy for the latest version calls the game "The Ultimate Power Trip." The documentation breezily invokes the underbeUy of gamesmanship when it urges the user to "get creative and unlock that shady Machiavellian...

The Expatriate Locked in the Confessional: Anthony Burgess'sLittle Wilson and Big Godand its British Reception

The Expatriate Locked in the Confessional: Anthony Burgess's<i>Little Wilson and Big God</i>and its British Reception

Little Wilson and Big God

Little Wilson and Big God