Enchanting the Reader in The Pilgrim's Progress

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 12; p. 70
• Main Author: Chong, Kenneth
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2006
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Bunyan, John (1628-88); English literature; Reading
• ISSN: 0954-0970

(PP 56) Following this is a commonplace exchange in romance of verbal assaults ('flitings'), which merely foreshadows the physical assaults that take place between a knight-errant hero and a foe whose scales, flaming breath, wings, 'yelling, and hideous roaring', Sharrock notes, 'resembles the Egyptian dragon with which St. George fights in Richard Johnson's Seven Champions of Christendom' (PP 60, 322): Hee gave such a terrible yell as though it had thundered in the elements: the bignes of the Dragon was fearefull to behold, for betwixt his shoulders and his tayle were fiftie foote in distance, his scales glistered brighter than siluer, but farre more harder than brasse, his belly of the colour of gold, but more bigger than a Tun. [...]weltred he from his hideous denne, and fiercely assailed the sturdie Champion with his burning winges, that at the first encounter, hee had almost felled him to the ground: but the Knight nimbly recouering him selfe, gave the Dragon such a thrust with his speare, that it shiuerd in a thousand peeces.18 The parallels between the physical features of Apollyon and the Dragon (which also associate them with the devil) are as obvious as the ones between the action of the plots; both episodes contain a long-drawn-out battle that seemingly ends with a decisive stroke by which the enemy is finally vanquished.19 These parallels invite the reader not only to note the allusions but to take on the nanative assumptions that inform romance. [...]it is never clear what Christian is 'perswaded' by, which means that is not even safe to say that his action (insofar as it is his) is 'an exercise of the will'.31 (Conceivably another agent may have been responsible for bringing the memory of the promise into mind.) The causal and sequential links, then, are dissolved by a revelation to which they are supposedly tied, and the net result is a reader who is disabused of an interpretation that views the world as a romance - a world of suspense, crisis, tension, change, sequence, progression, climax - an interpretation that is, in short, hostage to plot-thinking. Typical examples include the gloss 'The Cruel death of Faithful', which pre-empts the actual end of Faithful in the main text; 'They thanked him for his exhortation', which reiterates when Christian and Faithful thank Evangelist; and 'They that fly from the wrath to come, are a Gazing-Stock to the world', which condenses the felt meaning of the scene in which Christian leaves the City of Destruction (PP 10, 87, 97). [...]it is through these and other marginal notes, Davies contends (following N. H. Keeble), that 'Bunyan can impose (or at least attempt to impose) his authorial control over the reader's response to the text', for by employing them he can 'police the narrative' and 'conspicuously act to keep the reader from being overly enchanted by the overtly imaginative aspects of the narrative'.35 I agree that Bunyan adopts marginal notes to check the impulse of his readers who so easily tend to enchantment; but there are times when even that impulse is not checked but promoted. According to Charles Firth, in his 'Introduction,' in The Pilgrim's Progress (London: Methuen, 1898) (repr. in The Pilgrim's Progress: A Casebook (London: Macmillan Press, 1976), ed. by Roger Sharrock, pp. 81-103), pp. 88-89, St George, one of the heroes of this work, is undoubtedly the 'George on Horseback' Bunyan speaks of in A Few Sighs from Hell.