Baptism in Fifth Business - Essay Example

Baptism in Fifth Business Robertson Davies novel Fifth Business concerns personal transformation. It follows the growth of its main character and narrator Dunstan Ramsey throughout his life. Two other men from Ramseys village of Deptford also go through tremendous life changing events: Percy Boyd Stauton and Paul Dempster. Much of the symbolism associated with these transformation is drawn form the ritual of baptism. Davies use of baptism as a symbol is naturally based on a clear understanding of its history in religion (Kittel et al. 92-94). Bathing in water washes away dirt from the body. It follows, therefore, that the act of washing can be used as a metaphor to describe other types of washing, namely washing that makes a human clean in ways other than the physical. This idea did not take hold in the religions of the Graeco-Roman world, but firmly established itself in Judaism. It is from there that baptism became an important part of the Western tradition. According to the Hebrew Bible a person can become unclean for the purposes of performing various rituals by contact with certain substances vile in the opinion of ancient Hebrew priests, for example semen (Lev 15:13-17) or menstrual blood (Lev 15:19-30). In some way this must have begun as a practical consideration, but it soon took on a more symbolic use as the practical action became a ritual, and the logic of the ritual became more extensive. The high priest was able, through analogy, to be baptized for the entire community and wash away their sins which rendered them unclean for ritual purposes and thus unfit for worshiping Yahweh (Lev 16:24). Although this ritual action of baptism has a metaphorical basis, it remained part of the nuts and bolts of religious action. Christianity moved it to a different sphere. Although the program of John the Baptist is far from clear, he seems to have carried out the traditional baptism for cleaning away the sins of the nation, but believed that the nation as a whole, rather than merely the high priest, had to be baptized (Matt 3; Lk 3; Jn 1:19-36). At some point between Johns baptizing and the writing of the Gospels, baptism took on a spiritual dimension so that it would not only wash away uncleanness and sin, preparing one for ritual action, but was meant to transform the inner quality of the person, from an identity stained with sin to one free of it. Baptism thus became a new birth (Jn 3:3-5). This takes another physical reality and treats it as a metaphor: the outrush of amniotic fluid that precedes birth becomes associated with baptism. In any case, it leaves the mechanistic world of ritual and moves in the direction of myth, which is Robertson Davies conception of true religion. In the religious life of Dunstable Ramseys childhood in Deptford in rural Ontario, baptism had reverted, as it were, to it merely ritual level. Thus, when his son Paul is born badly premature and more likely to die soon than live, the Baptist minister Amasa Dempster is extraordinarily anxious to baptize him (16). For him it is the act or ritual that is important, not the understanding of the procedure in its mythic dimension. He is driven to the lengths of baptizing him as an infant, a violation of his own religious beliefs as a Baptist. In fact he engages in part of the Papist superstition that he hates. There are no other proper baptisms (if Pauls may be considered proper) narrated in Fifth Business, but Davies frees the ritual of baptism to become a metaphor central to the entire narrative. The story of Dunstable Ramsey is one of constant transformation and growth. After his preparation during his first life in Deptford, Ramsey enters the army to fight in the First World War. It is a cliché to call a soldiers first experience of combat a baptism of fire because it is a life-changing experience. The idiom no doubt derives from Johns promise that, though he baptizes with water, the Christ would baptize with fire (e.g. Lk 3:16). Although Davies does not use such a tired expression so plainly, the chapter describing the war years is entitled, "I am Born Again." At the climax of its dramatic action Dunstable is indeed burned badly when a signal flare lands on and burns him after he is partially immobilized by a shrapnel hit in his leg. While he is recovering from his wounds in the hospital he has a romantic relationship with his nurse who not only initiates him into the adult world of sex (94), but gives him his new name of Dunstan, after St. Dunstan (Walsh 148-49). This not only plays on the ritual of giving a new baptismal name (after a saint), but she went so far that she "got some of her fathers port and poured it on my head and renamed me" (103). Though, at the time, he dismissed it as harmless blasphemy, this enactment preserved, if not the religious character of baptism, its mystical character, carrying all the symbolic force of the act as far as Dunstan was concerned. In this way it prefigures the magic show that dominates the end of the novel which does not present itself as true religious ritual, but nevertheless evokes the language of myth. Dunstan becomes what Davies terms "twice-born" (260). He means someone who abandons his earlier life and enters onto an entirely new level of existence. It often involves a name change. This device too is derived from baptism. Dunstan is born again form a small town know-it-all to a respected teacher and scholar. Many other characters are twice-born, of whom the most important also come from Dempster. One is Percy Boyd Staunton, the overbearing rich bully of Deptford who becomes Boy Staunton, an influential multi-millionaire and politician. The other is Paul Dempster who undergoes the most amazing transformation, becoming the magician Magnus Eisengrim. But the most startling baptism is Stauntons. Seemingly at the height of his power and influence, about to become Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario, Staunton confides to his boyhood friend Dunstan that, now that there is nothing left to achieve, he feels dissatisfied with his life: "I wish I could get into a car and drive away from the whole dammed thing." Dunstan responds: "A truly mythological wish…you want to pass into oblivion with your armor on, like King Arthur, but modern medical science is too clever to allow it" (278). He is referring to the myth of the dead Arthur being carried over the sea to the Isle of Avalon form where he would someday be reborn (Bruce 50-51). In the dénouement of the novel, the three twice-born men are reunited (303), and Staunton is forced, for the first time, to considerable accountability for his bullying, over-bearing rise in the world. Eisingrim puts "Boy in touch with his own shadow, with that unrecognized dimension of life which, as Liesel warns Ramsay, if unlived will take revenge on man and make a fool of him" (Brown and Bennett 295). Boy indeed drives away in his car with Eisengrim and, once he is finally alone, proceeds to drive off a pier into Lake Ontario, drowning himself (290). Unable to grow into a new life as Dunstan does repeatedly, unable to begin a totally new existence as Eisengrim did, he ends his life in a horrible reversal of the traditional ritual, baptizing himself to death in Toronto Harbor (though the fact it was a suicide rather than a murder was is revealed until the third book in the Deptford Trilogy, World of Wonders). References Brown, Russel M., and Donna A. Bennett. "Magnus Eisengrim: The Shadow of the Trickster in the Novels of Robertson Davies.," Jungian Literary Criticism. Richard P. Sugg, ed. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992, 285-301. Bruce, Christopher W. The Arthurian Name Dictionary. New York: Garland, 1999. Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business. New York: Viking, 1970. Kittel, Gerhard, Gerhard Friedrich, and Geoffrey William Bromiley, eds. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament Abridged in One Volume. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985. New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: Revised Standard Version. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Walsh, Michael, ed. Butlers Lives of the Saints: Concise Edition Revised & Updated. San Francisco: Harper, 1991. Read More