Adam Sep 05, 2012

did not like it bookshelves: 1500-s-1700-s, prose

's review

The Pilgrim's Progress, or Christianity for Dummies by John Bunyan.



So... John Bunyan was a crazy and apparently exceedingly stupid man who wrote one of the most popular books ever in the Western literary tradition. I write of this book, obviously. The book's popularity and even its status as a Historically Important Classic is a harsh reminder of how immensely stupid and crazy humans, generally, are and always were. Because this book's status is such a harsh reminder of that fact, it's basically the most depressing thing you could ever read, if you have some level of intelligence.



Of course, the book is not a novel really, but an allegory, and it does indeed have Historical Importance, if you're one of those insufferable fucks who think we should give the remotest semblance of a shit about the several hundred year old ramblings of a lunatic. It has Historical Importance because it's part of the English Puritan literature of the time and basically is relevant w/r/t that theology and its various dimensions and how this is, although batshit stupid even for the time, important, maybe, to understanding the progress of the arts and what not at the time, and how this fits into the rise of culture post-Middle Ages etc.



Except, you know, allegories had existed for a long-ass time before this thing reared its ugly head, and some of them were complex and balanced and literate and so on, including those in, uh, the Bible. Plus, there was a lot of very good literature before this came out, including in the religious tradition (see Milton, see Donne, and see others), so this thing's brutal awfulness is really inexcusable as "of the time" or whatever. No, it's just bad.



I opened this review/rant by calling this Christianity for Dummies, which is basically what it is. True, its explicit Protestant theology was different and what not, and this probably mattered a long time ago. But it reads, and probably has read for a long time, as Christianity for Dummies. You see, Bunyan's allegory can't even be called thinly-veiled. It's basically one insufferable lecture/sermon. I guess on a technicality it qualifies as an allegory, but it has to be the most ham-fisted and ridiculous allegory I've encountered. Here's a list of characters, which aren't really characters as such I suppose, because basically the names cover the whole deal; unlike other allegories, where a character may represent something or quality, here the names are it, there is no actual representation: Christian, Evangelist, Help, Worldly Wiseman, Hypocrisy, Discretion, Piety, Prudence, Charity, The Interpreter, Faithful, Talkative, Mr. By-ends, Hopeful, Giant Despair, Diffidence, Temporary, Mercy, Mr. Great-heart, Old Honest, Mr. Fearing, Mr. Feeble-mind, Valiant-for-truth.



"Oh, but it's of the time, Adam. Sure compared to anything written after it that's just hilarious and sad and not even endearing and after ten pages just infuriating, but it's of the time."



Shut the fuck up, strawman. Compared to most things written before it, again, including the fucking Bible itself, which most of this is a simplified rehash of with the slight narrative frame of A Man's Journey to Salvation, it's also just totally insanely stupid and infuriating.



But besides the fact that this is just terrible when it comes to any formal criteria, it's also just impossible to read if you're a non-believer or even anything resembling a modern Christian. The intensely spelled-out lessons here are either the worst ones you could choose from the Bible, or the product, ironically, of years of stupid Catholic theologians' bullshit, or they are, more rarely, really of the time in that they're newfangled Protestant things that still lie coiled at the heart of the darkest and most unpleasant aspects of contemporary Western culture.



But even if I didn't find this whole thing morally disgusting on nearly every level, it's just horrifically bad. It's shit allegory, shit fiction, shit everything. Written in prose bad even for the time, because you know, there was other prose written at the time. Take a look at it. It's not this bad.



And get this: nobody needs to read this today. Nobody. You can just, uh, talk about it, if you need to cover it and its content for historical purposes in the study of literature. There is absolutely no reason to actually read the thing because it has absolutely zero literary quality, or relevance, or importance. Here's everything you need to know about The Pilgrim's Progress, or Christianity for Dummies: it's real stupid, anything in it that's remotely interesting is in the Bible, or in books about the Bible, or about Christianity, that are far better than this, and it's just a hideously boring thing written by a lunatic, though it's popular because some people need to read things like this to dangerously simplify and remove any quality and intelligence from old myths and allegories, and write them anew in a supremely bullshitty manner. To the extent that this is Historically Important, that importance is in knowing about it and what the deal is with it. But you shouldn't actually read it, unless you're a masochist.



And really, I'm not the kinda guy who thinks you should never read old books. I just named Milton and Donne as two examples of near-contemporaries of Bunyan who are, uh, good writers, and as such still relevant in a literary sense, and who also are relevant in a historical sense, but much more so than Bunyan. Because this book has no relevance in a study of the history of allegories, in the study of the history of the novel, or poetry, or anything other than the persistent and sad idiocy of human beings, who have taken it upon themselves to translate this thing to more than a hundred languages, and also to still talk about a complete piece of shit like this centuries after it was written, instead of doing something real Christian like helping others, doing something real literary, like reading almost anything else, or doing something better and more important with their basic human existence, like just talking to another person, or just sitting still and doing nothing.