Texts that focus on Christian topics, or include biblical references or Christ figures, require careful interpretation, not rash conclusions.
From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith
In the quotation above, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin insist that like most good interpretation, parsing the relationship between Christianity and a specific piece of literature requires time and care. Below I try to think through how I will demonstrate that time and care in my intro to literature class, specifically in how we read our short story collection by Jhumpa Lahiri.
While not a Christian, Lahiri writes about the spiritual dimension of humanity in several of the stories we read from her collection Interpreter of Maladies. This is clearest in “This Blessed House” where a newly married couple who is culturally Hindu discovers a series of Christian artifacts hidden throughout their new home. A young girl finds peace through prayer in the moving story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.” A visit to a religious temple dedicated to the Hindu god Surya is at the center of the collection’s title story. In “Sexy,” a young woman must come to terms with the morality of her affair with a married man.
I think that the most difficult thing for me to do is teach students how literary analysis differs from, say, a religious studies paper. Some students read “Sexy” and want to write a paper about Miranda’s adultery is wrong. In doing so, they subordinate analysis of a story to a theological point, and as a result they rarely consider if the narrator or Lahiri herself agrees or disagrees with Miranda’s actions.
The most Christian story in the entire collection, it seems to me, is the final one: “The Third and Final Continent.” Yet this is the one with no overt spiritual, much less Christian, references. It is simply a story that affirms the miraculous aspects of ordinary life:
Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
From “The Third and Final Continent”
Gallagher and Lundin tell us that in order “[t]o evaluate what we read, we need to ask, ‘How well does this work resonate with my Christianity?'” The spiritual insight in those final sentences from Lahiri’s story resonate with an attitude of humility and thankfulness that are at the heart of the Christian life. I pray for the wisdom to communicate that to my students.