A Theology Of Reading: The Hermeneutics Of Love

A THEOLOGY O F READING

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T h e Hermeneutics of Love

e*

A M e m b e r o f rhe Perseus Books G r o u p

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The one thing thnt is m e is love. To bnse n doc~r-heoflunpuge on this ~tntemeatis to move toa*ardru thrologicnl theory of lan;If'1d!wge. -Ge~~b@~*d EbeZipzg

Theolog ror~si,rtsprecisely h? saying $hiltfir which only arrother Other above g$, the Cb~-i.stwho hlimseydoe~. ?rot spegk in bk own napBe, but in the lrame of.'his FgfrlJel:Indeed, theologiml dkcolrrse oflkrs its strir~~ge jubilation only to the strict extent that it pemitr a ~ ddnngcrous!~, , ddemnndr of its workman thut he spegk beyond his means, precisely brccrrse he does not speuk ?f himself: Hence the dg~2geri f n speech thut, in u smse, speuks ngginst the o ~ who e lends himself to it. ONE~ltllstobtni~? fo~xiuenessfor eve? essq in tbeorlo~. c m arz~mer--the

O stand, stdrzd at the wigdoz* Ar the tegr:~ssgld arzd S T ~ T ; Err shall love y o 6-moked ~ neighhnccr WitbynDr crooked b e t t ~ ~ .

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CONTENTS Acknowted'en

ts

Prelude Contexts and Obstacles

I N T E R L U D!I,: E T H E ILLUMINATI Love and Knowledge

IX

1

9

37 43

I N T E R L U D13: E TRANSFER OF C H A R I S M A

69

Love and the Suspicious Spirit

77

91 101

I N T E R L U D1E Two C H A R I T A BRLEEA D E R S

113

Justice

125

Postlude

145

Notes Works Cited Index

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M

y heartiest and most sincere thanks to:

my son Wesley, for joy my parents-in-law Lynn and Margaret Collins, for unceasing support, especially in prayer Wheaton College, for a sabbatical during which much of this book got writtell the Pew Charitable Trusts, for funding a seminar on christology and scholarship at eaton, directed by Mark Noll, which got me started thinking theologically about reading * Roger Lundin, Mark Noll, and the late (and greatly lamented) Tim Phillips, for being my unofficial teachers in theology Paul Ciriffiths, Stanley Hauemas, and Joel Weinsheimer, for honest and useful responses Gail Kienitz, David Jeffrey, Donald Marshall, and Ashley Woodiwiss, for reading portions of the manuscript, for providing acute commellts and stimulating conversation, and, above all, for the sustenance of friendship * Kelly Rae and (especially!) Laura h d e r s e n , for outstanding assistance in research and preparation of the manuscript Two expressions of thanks must be set apart from the rest. First, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Charles and Karen Marsh, and to Theological I-Iorizons, the organization they created and oversee. T h e support (of various kinds) and encouragement they have given me have been invaluable. Their confidence in the project, when it was still incipient, gave me the determination to pursue it when I c ~ u l dfind plenty of reasons to set it aside or abandon it altogether. .And Charles's efforts as my unofficial (yet extraordinarily competent) a F n t quite literally made publication of this hook possible. h d to Teri, my wife of twenty years, let one simple public act stand for a world of meaning (of gratitude, of love) that neither can nor should speak in a public voice: I dedicate this book to you, without %?ham.. . .

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T

o read with intelligent charity. ("The only method," says T. S. Eliot, "is to be very intelligent." A sobering verdict, if true.) Once a p i n to speak of works rather than texts, of personal acts-nnmerrgble acts, we will hear them called-rather than a proliferation of signs or verbal instantiations of ideological forces. To becolne confused, sometimes, about the differeilce between reading works and reading their authors. Iris Murdoch: "Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain confused" (Mewphysics 147). h d Murdoch again: "Art and morals are one. . . . Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real" (Existe~ztiglimxiv). To read lovingly because of and in the name of Jesus Christ, who is the author and gxarantor of love. These are some of the purposes of this book. The key questions of charitable interpretation-what it is, how to achieve it-%rill he treated here according to the canons of what h i s totelialls call practical ratioilality rather than speculative philosophy. Though it will of course be necessary to consider many epistemological and theoretical questions along the way, I have focused much of my attention on works of literature that, in my view, provide richer, more nuanced, and more expansive accounts of what it might mean to read charitably than I have been able to discover elsewhere: I echa Martha Nussbaum's a r p m e n t that literature, carefully read, is an irreplaceable tool in the development of discernment or practical wisdom. I also hope that my use of literary examples and models exhibits, in

however imperfect a way, the charity that I am recolnmending to all interpreters of written works. There are other ways to explain the character of my pursuit: I might say that I am interested in pnkrivcbe~zVe~.nunfirather than reinen Ernt~nft,or that I am "Against Theory" in the sense made familiar to literary scholars by the essay of that name by Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels. For Knapp and Michaels, theory-defined as "the attempt to govern interpretations of parti~vlartexts by appealing to an account of interpretation in generalm-is impossible insofar as it claims to be above, or separate from, or not implicated in, the practices it seeks to "gc~vern."Theory is one of the forms of practice and doesn't rise above anything, as Stanley Fish argues in almost every essay in Doing Whnt Comes ~VntargIb.My reservations about theory, then, arc a h o s t identical to Rernard JVilliartts's resewations &out philosophy, and this is apt, given that Williams takes "philosophy" to mean detached reflection, or itbeoraib: Haw tmthklness to an existi~lgself or society is to be cotnhined with reflection, self-underscandiw, and criticism is a question thgt philosuphy, itsclf; cannot answer. It is thc kind of qucstion that has to be answered through rcficcrjve living. The answer has to be discovered, or established, as the result of a process, personal and social, which essentially cannot fcrrmulate the answer in advance, except in an unspecific way. Philosophy for thconb-)can piay a part in the prt~ces,as it plays a part in identiking the question, but it cannot be a sUt)stit~~te h r it. (Ethics 200)

This may help to explain my reliance on literary examples throughout this book (especially in the "Interludes"), a reliance curiously uncommon in books about literary hermeneutics. I might also say-and this follows from my reservadons about theorz'~~-that I share the conviction of &rl Barth. and Jolrn ~Miibank&at theology should be essentially kerypatic rather than dialectical, governed by C;hrist$ commandment to proclaim the C;ospel rather than by the natural impulse to argue and jusdfy. But that means that the great challenge for me in writing this book has been to discover whether I can be "practical" (or Aristotelian, or dialectical) in my questions and yet fully theological (or kerygmatic) in my claims. After all, as Masdair M a c I n v e has rightly said, "Aristotle would certainly

not have admired Jesus Christ and he wt~uldhave been horrified by St. Paul" (After 184).l But I am encouraged in my endeavor by thinking often of a great predecessor in this enterprise: Jane h s t e n . And it is MacI~ltyrewho has called attention to the importance of her example: VVhen Jane A ~ ~ s t espeaks n of "happiness," she does s s as m Aristotelian. Gilbert Kyle believed that her Aristotclianisnl-which he saw as the clue to the nzoral temper of her novels-rnay have deri~redhorn a readix~gof Shakeshuv C. S. Lewis with eyud justice saw in her an essentially ehristian writer. It is her uniting of Chrisdan and Aristotelian themes in a determinate social context that makes Jane Ausm the Last great effective imaginative m i t e of the tradition of thought about, and practice of? the l~irtueswhich I have tried to idcntib She thus turns away from. the ct~n~peting catalopes of the virtues of the eighteenth century and rcstr1rc.s a tcleolo@caL perspective. (Afic"~" 249)

For aXI the kistotelian acuteness with which Austen delineates the virtues and vices distinctive to the tiny polis about which she writes"three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on," as she famously wrote in a letter-the telos of which MacIntyre speaks, and which informs all her work, is Christian charity.

Shakespeare, hfz~ch Arto About Norhi~~g, act 1,scene 1. T h e plot of Dan John the Bastard has come to fruition, and CIlaudio has repudiated Hero before the crowd gathered for their wedding, shouting for all to hear that, while her blushes wt~uldseeln to be lnaidenly they are in fact tokens of guilt: "She knows the heat of a luxurious bed" (1.40). He thinks he has-to borrow a term from Orhello, a play that shares this theme-"ocular proof' for his charge;z we know he does not, and that he and his patron Don Pedro have been deceivd. h o n g the characters, only Hen, and Don John (the innocent victim and the villain) actually k~guwthat the charge of fornication is false. Or do they alone know? That depends on what counts as knowledge. The first to speak on Hero's behalf-after even her own father, Leonato, has accepted the charges against her ("Would the two princes lie, and Claudio lie?" [l. 1531)-is the Friar who was to officiate at the ceremony:

Heaf-lfzen little: Fo'r I h~gveo~z&beep2 sile~ztso lo~zg, And give~zwiry tknto this cozrg-sr of'foltu~ge, By noting of this lady. I bazfernig-k'cl A thotlsand blzshirzg nppnl-itio22s To stgrt irzto herfrcr, (I ~ ~ U I I S L J~P~ZZ~~ Z ( I shames C~IZ~ In ~cng-rlwhitefzessbent r t w q those blashes, And ill her eye thelee bath ~ppern-3 N f i e To bzn~zthe eF.1.ol-sthat these pl-i~zceshoM Agclinst her ~fz&iclen @litb. Call me a fool; F Z I~zot S ~my recrcling izor 119o b ~ e m ~ t i ~ l ~ . ~ ~ Which with eevp.xper-N7re~z tnl s-etzl doth wirkyrznt Thr tr~zor.+'my book; put not my age, My recper.ence,calhzg, nor dicilfity, this sweet l n 4 lie not gtbiltless her-g Under sM?te biting elm?: (U I 55-1 69)

If

It should register with us that the Friar lays no claim to some intuited gnosis or supernatural revelation divorced from the realm of the senses. Like Claudio and Don Pedro, he derives his judgment from what he sees, and he sees what they do: Claudio, as noted, has spoken of Hero's blushes, but has interpreted2 them differently. And what the Friar calls attention to here is precisely the importance of interpreting the sensory phenomena correctly and, moreover, the need for the interpreter to possess certain virtues in order to "read" Hero's blushes as they should be read-which is to say, in accordance with the truth of the sin~ationand of her character. Claudio and Don Pedro possess what they think of as "ocular proof' of Hero5 infidelity, and that alone serves to determine their reading of Hero's blushes. N o other factors shape their interpretation, nor, indeed, could they; for Claudio and Don Pedro have no other knowledge relevant to the interpretive task with which they are fiaced.3 C:laudio's own account, given to Don Pedro, of how he came to love Hero is instructive: 0 my lord, Whe~z yoa welzt o~zmilr-don this r~zdedgnctio~z, I look 'd zdpo~zher with a soldier 3-eye, Thnt likii, brrt bud n mtlg-ller task in hand Thirn to dr-ivr liking to the nccme oflour:

But ~zowI m F-etrrr-11'4and that war-thozights Htlve left iheip-plnces L~LJCNFZT?in iheil- roo~zls Come thl-oaging sofi a d delicate desire$> All prompting mr how fnir yotrng Hm-o ir, say in^ I lik 'd her ere I welzt t o wtm. (I.i.2 77-28F) From this speech we learn two important things: first, that C;laudio5 knowledge about Hero is almost totally z?z"s~knl, the product of his repeated "looking upon her"; and second, that the growth of "liking" into what Claudio calls love results not from some positive development of attention and appreciation but rather from the lnere abse~zceof martial thoughts, from the vacuum created in Claudio's mind by the conclusion of the recent battle. Therefore, when presented with putative visual evidence of WeroWdithlessness, Claudio cannot make recourse to any other knowledge that might incline him to quesdon the trustworthiness of the spectacle Don John offers for his contemplation, .Ancl Don Peilro, who is not in love with Hero, has even less reason to dorrht that "evidence." The Friar, conversely, claims an authority that allows him to connect the visual phenomena-which, again, he perceives precisely as Claudio and Don. Pedro d ore responsibly and in a way faithful to the true character of Hero. This authority has, he explains, multiple sources: his age and consequent seasoning in the world (including, we may presume, the social world, the world of men-and-women-together, which Claudin and Don Pedro as soldiers have mostly avt~ided);his calling by God to the cure of souls, a calling that to be properly hlfilled requires constant attentiveness to the niceties of human character; his reading in wise authors and Scripture. Moreover, he claims that the judgments to which his age, vocation, and learning lead him have been tested ("warranted") by experience ("experiment"), and that such judgments therefore deserve more credence than those of Claudio and Don Pedro. But the Friar is not the only person present, other than Hero, who is confident of Hero5 innacence: There is Bea~ice,whose trust in her cousin and friend is implicit and unwavering. h some respects Beatrice? certainty differs from the Friar's confidence, and not just in that it is certainty rather than confidence (the Friar acknowledges the bare possibility of his being wrong, Beatrice never does): Beatrice claims neither age, religiou~calling,nor erudition. Her certainry stems rather from her intimate personal knowledge of EIero. At this point

the English language, as it does so rarely, fails us: Whereas it enables, as French does not, Claudio's distinction between liking and loving, it catltlot offer us what we need here, which is the Ifistinction bemeen co~znnirvrand srrz*oitlroughly,"knowledge of' rather than "knowledge about." One of the most important and productive elements of the work of Martha Nussbaum has been her insistence, deriving from -kistotle, that love-especially phijilt, the kind of love that Beatrice and Hero feel for each other-is productive of this intimate knowledge, this conntlissa?zce. T h e Al-istotelian view stresses that bonds of close friendship or luvc (such as those that connect members of a farnil5 or cluse personal Friends) are extremely important in the whole business of being a good perceivel: Trusting the pidance of a &iend and allotwhg one's feelings tcr be engaged with that other person"sifci and choices, one learns to see aspectwof the world that one had previously missed. 0ne"sdesire to share a Form of life with the Friend ~norivacesthis pmcess, (Love? K~2o-d.ledge 44)

Beatrice then claims an authoritative experie~lceof Hero's character that gives the lie to the princes' accusation-and, one might add, to Leonatok shockingly immediate acquiescence in his daughter's condemnation. Beatrice's claim comes not in the form of an argument but, instead, as a series of wounded and desperate cries that her beloved cousin has been wronged. The Friar indicates that he is confident rather than certain precisely by forming an argument, making a case. To doubt that Hero is pure is not possible for Beatrice; therefore, making a case for it is not possible." Of course, the kind of claim Beatrice implicitly makes for Her though again it's not really a "claim9'---carries weight only if those who hear it approve the character of the one making it. There would be no reason to take such an avowal seriously if it came from the mouth of a habitually dishonest and morally slovenly person. This observation leads us to consider the one character on stage in this complex scene who is not sure about Hero, who is puzzled and confused: Benedick. He has been the companion, friend, and confidant of Claudio and Don Pedro, and yet, when they stride self-righteously offstage, he remains. But this does not in itself indicate his allegiance: Almost his first words after the denunciation of Hero are "For my part I am so atdr'd in wonder, / I know not what to say" (W.1.144-145)---he

who has never lacked for something to say! On the one hand, he knows that Claudio and Don Pedro "have the very bent of honour," and that they would not destroy an innocent woman unless they were "tleceived" (11. 186-189). On the other hand, he knows that a pracdced villain, Don John, accompanied Claudio and Don Pedro as they stalked away and, moreover, that those who are deceived are not always free from culpability for their state of misinformation (as he demonstrates in his stern treatment of both CIlarxdio anti Don Pectro later on). But the deciding factor for Benedick derives from his love of Beatrice, which in turn depends largely upon his assessment of her character= Unlike ETero and Clarrdio, Reatrice and Benedick have hewn each other for many years. It appears that, before the "merry war" of wit (I.i.56) in which they have been for some time engaged, they had some sort of romantic relationship (Il.i.26 1-264)-a relationship that, of course, this play sees them resume and nurture to fulfillment. Benedick5 knowledge of Beatrice, therefore, is far from being merely W~ visual: It is not the savoir of "ocular proof' but the C Q P ~ T Z Rof~ love. It is Beatrice who relninds Benedick that, even if the princes were deceived, they failed to seek confirmation for their belief from sources other than their own eyesight and, moreover, made a point of condemning Hero in the most humiliatingly public way imaginable: before a crowd of family and friends waiting to celebrate her marriage (Ni.300-306). They have therefore behaved cruelly even if they were deceived. I t seems to be this incontrovertible point that drives Benedick to ask the question the answer to which settles for him his responsibility: Bcncbick: Think you in p u r soul the Count CIaudio harh wronged F-ferot Beatrice: Uea, as sure as I have a thought, or a soui, Benedick Enough! I arrr engaged, I will challenge him, (11.127-33 5)

A few moment,$ earlier, when Beaf-ricehad asked hiln to ""(kJiIlClaudio," Benedick had replied, "Not for the wide world'' (11. 28S-290). But now her exposure of Claudio's cruelty and her absolute conviction that Hero has been wronged win him over. H e can deny neither the justice of her arhwment nor the authority of her testimony to Hero's character. A discrimination. rnust be made here: Benedick need not know anything of Beatrice in order to acknowledge that, $Claudio

and Don Pedro are wrong in what they charge, they have behavecl abominably. But it is only his love for her, based upon his knowledge of her character-her honesty, perceptiveness, and faithfulness-that resolves br him that mornelltous ""r that must be resohed if he is to act rightly in this agonizing situadon. It is love's knowledge that puts into play the chain of arguments that determine that he challenge he soon does. Lacking the age, vocation, and learnC:laudio-which ing of the Friar, lacking Beatrice's intimate personal connilz'ss~~ncr of Hero, Benedick nevertheless comes to share their conviction by acknowledging their claims to interpretive and moral discernment. For even before Beatrice convicts him of his responsibility with regard to Claudio, he encourages the grieving Leonato to be guided by the Friar's advice (l. 244). This scelle from Mt~chAdo Aboz~tNothing provides, even in its brevity, a remarkably comprehensive outline of a hermeneutics of love,

W e crap-e whrher iove is or is not a i t w t b e r fi&idcn!e~"zro u.r, whether we F F I ~ J nitugether be incdpable ofic oJJndmitfi~zg it iizto OM- worldd We ~ ~ R U ~ Lwhethn* " I ~ we ?nay akuny go mead hemerE the eq~gcxlefofls a d tenPona~ ot2ce of rdec~i~zg a~zd$Mc e p t i q love.

7he Law of Love and Interpretation n asked by a scribe to name the greatest of the commandments, complies by citing two injuncdons, one from Deuteronomy (6:s) and one from Leviticus (19:18): "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all ynur soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself' (Mt. 22:3740, RSV). But he then goes on to make the greater, and more startling, claim that upon these commandments "depend all the law and the prophets." That the one identified by the Chrisdall Church as incarnate Love speaks these words compels our closest attention to them.' To say that " prophea" "depend" upon these two commandmen commandment-is to say that the multitude of ordinances and exhortations in the Old 7'estament presuppose the love that Jesus enjoins. No one can meet the dernancts of the Law who does not achieve such love; conversely, those who achieve such love will, like the psalmist, "delight in [God'.;] stamtes" and find themselves "consumed with longing for [God's] ordinai~cesat all times" (PS. 119:16,20).

Moreover, since the ordinances of the law cover the whole range of human interactions with one another and with God, it follow that there can be no realm of distinctively humail activity in which Jesus' great twofold commandment is not operative. As Kierkegaard says, "There are only a few acts which human lanpage specifically and narrowly calls works of love, but heaven is such that no act can be pleasing there unless it is an act of love" 20). h d those Christians who regularly pray that aredtcr admit that, while Food and sex are good in themselves, an unccmtroiled pul-suit of either i s not, hut it is difficult For us to believe that inteliiectual c u r i o s i ~is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical, ' l b apply a categol-ical imperative m knowing, so that, instead of asking, " I a a t can I know?he ask, " m a t , at this tnomcnt, am I tncant to know'r'Lto entertain tlze possibility that the only

knowledge which can be tnte for us is the knowledge that we can five up to--that seems to all of us craz,y and almost immoral. (D~ler"s272)"~

Or, one might say, the sovereignty of the "right to know" is incompati ble with an insistence on our "transcendent contingency." Blumenberg fully realizes this, which is why he insists that we simultaneously choose the former and reject the latter. But do Augustine's excessive rigc~rand Blumenberg's bold autonomy exhaust the options for a theology of reading! We must begin by practicing attentiveness to the te~zdenqof a given work, the spiritual direction t w a r d which it inclines, to which it directs us. If Auden's formulation is a t all useful, then we must think of pleasure and curiosity alike as desires that can be healthy if properly bounded. And this, after all, is an Aupstinian notion, the notion of the ordo rrmul-is: There is an order or hierarchy of loves such that all things that deserve our love deserve it in proportion to their excelIertce: '"ace, as it seetrls to me, a brief and true definition ofvirme is G91637 1 x 3 2 1 ) . 'rightly ordered love"' (A~~gustine, Nou; there are some written works that by this criterion should not give us any pleasure at all, just as there are some forms of ordinary human speech that should not give us pleasure. For instance, in Dante's Inf;.mg-no,as the pilgrim and his p i d e Virgil-a choice of guide Augustine would doubtless disapprove of-visit the eighth circle of Hell, the tenth bolgia ("ditch" or "pouch") of that circle, they meet the Falsifiers. Amc~ngthese sinners are a counterfeiter named Master Adam and a falsifier oI: words, the infamous Greek &m, who tricked the Trojans into allowing the fatal wooden horse into their city. Dante watches as Master Adam and Sinon fall into a bitter exchange of vimperative insult. For thirty lines of verse they snarl at one another, Dante (and we the readers) attending all the time. Then Virgil, the personificadon of human Reason, mrns to Dante and says, "hTowkeep on looking a little longer and I quarrel with you." Why is he troubled? Because, as he later explains, "Chi uoirr ci6 ndg~ir-e2 ~ L G S uogiia": ~L~ The very desire to listen to such bickering is itself base (Canto 148). Note the words volrr and vogkirll, both of which derive from the Latin zfolgd~ztas,will: Dante$ interests themselves lnark the depravity of his will, the necessary redirecting of which begins with his visit to Hell. There are certain events and actic>ns,Virgil seems to say, to which the only proper response is to avert one's eyes and shut one's ears. There is nothing that such speech can teach us that we do not al-

ready knou; and to take pleasure in such recriminations is always degrading. On the other hand, it is not clear that we should take no pleasure in this passage from the iz@trzo. For -rgil's explailation shows us that we have been duped: We, like the pilgrim, have been listening with rapt attention to these two damned souls mrse each other, and our interest, we suddenly realize, has not been wholly healthy. Dante the poet has wriaen the exchange in as vigc~rousa way as possible, so as to attract and keep our attention; but then he has Virgil offer an interpretation of the scene that enahles us t~.> do what Au~,wstine'sme.lszo;r-irj. enabled him to do, which is to reconfigure a readini experience in order to profit, spiritually a i d morally, from it. Thus Dante begins hy exploiting our tendencies toward wrong-headed, sinful reading, but quicMy provictes a hermeneutical correcdv to those tendencies.14 We may now see the argument between Master Adam and Sinon in it5 proper context: To use yet anc~therAugustinian contrast, our unhealthy can'osiv (in a scene that bears some resemblance to the contemplation of a "mangled corpse") has been replaced by a healthy and useful studiousness." When we revise our readings in this way, we achieve what Aug~stineachieved through nzrmof-in,as he looked back over the events of his life and reinterpreted them according to his hard-won understanding of God's purpose for his life. A healthy studiousness i s of course not pleasure. But might it he said that a certain kind of pleasure is the fruit of such studiousness? .After all, it is only by adopting the appropriate hermeneutical stance that we are able truly to appreciate Dante's verbal skill, first in fashioning the curse-fest of Sinon and Master Adam and then in providing a context in which that curse-fest is transformed. In other words, the literary mastery that effects our "conversion" from curiosity to smdiousness then offers itself for our pleasurable contemplation. Surely this is neither unhealthy nor un-Christian, since it is only the Christian's desire to read in what one might call (following St. Paul) a spiritual rather than a carnal way that makes the pleasure available in the first place. Note, however, that if we had to do the work of ""coxlwersiort"%ourselves-as Augustine felt he had to do in his determined transformation of his first reading of the Ac~zcidinto his mature one-the situation would be very different. We might, for instance, read a work that offered to us characters like Sinon and Master Adam, e n g a ~ cin l their kind of mutual vituperation, that did not provide an ironizing or distancing context allowing us to escape from their hateful world.

Perhaps we could wring from such a work some profitable lesson, hut there should be no pleasure in it, at least not from the work itself: only satisfaction, perhaps, at successhlly performing a necessary task. But these are after all rather extreme cases. at remains to be considered, and justified, is the common pleasure we gain from reading a well-wrought lyric poem, or a well-told story, or a suspenseful play, since-for persons less rigorous than Augustine-these cannot be said to produce sin unless we pay so much attention to them that they disrupt our lives with respect to the ordo nmol-is.16 It is tempting to settle for a snictly negative defense: A good poem does no harm. But it is important, I believe, to say more: The kind of pleasure we take in a wellcrafted work of literary art is very like the pleasure we take in a wellcooked meal, in that it is something given to us by another person. It is a gift that we honor, and whose giver we honor, by receiving it with gratitude. It is not always appropriate, it is not always charitable, to take that which is offered to us in a spirit of pleasure and recreation and use it according to a rigid criterion of studious application. I do not mean to suggest that all literary gift., lnust be accepted in the spirit in which they are given, according to criteria established by the giver. Charitable reading does not require the reader to abdicate personal responsibility in fiavor of authorial dictadon. There are times when we are right to look a gift poem in the mouth; some gifts, as we all h o w , have a coercive aspect. For instance, hTietzsche claims that with Thas Spoke Z~~~-ilthrm-ir he "gave mankind the greatest gift that has ever been given it" (Ecce H m ~ o5). But it would not be wise simply to accept this gift on its giver%terms: At the very least the claim must he interrogated. Ho~wever,this is not to say-though many have said precisely thisthat nll gifts have such a dubious and coercive character. Some works of art are presented to us as opportunities for refreshment, recreation, and pleasure. Discernment is required to know what kind of gift one is being presented with, and in what spirit to accept it (if at all), hut a universal suspicion of gifts and givers, like an indiscriminate acceptance of all gift\, constimtes an abdication of discernment in favor of a simplistic /c pl-iop-inn that smother.; the spirit. C:oethe once wrote in a letter that "there are three kinds of reader: one, who enjoys without judgment; a third, who judges without enjoyment; and one between them who judges as he enjoys and enjoys as he judges. This latter kind really reproduces the work of art anew" (quoted in Jauss, 36). Like all good theology, then, a t h e o l o ~of reading will require an emphasis

on discerning judgment: But it will also find its place as part of a theology of gift and recreation. Development of these ideas will occupy much of Chapter 3.

Agape and the Other Loves A third potedal objectim-and the last that I M.Il treat: here-is that I have begun my argument in a state of confusion about the namre of love. I announced tkat this study is to be conducted in the name of'&sus Christ, which is to say, according to a specifically Christian understanding of love; but then I immediately chose as my exrmplrlm a scene from Shakespeare that g i v s but minimal attention to &gape.M e r all, what Bmedick feels far Beanice is erotic lwe; what Beatrice kels f'czr Hero is a combination of familial affection and friendship. Only the Friar could be said to be exercising charity in a specifically C;hristian sense. -And it is not clear, or at any rate has not been clear to many commentators, that tcgipe is closely related to these other forms of love, or even commensurable with them. This is an issue famtjusly contestecl in the Lutheran tradition, as demonstrated mtjst fully in h d e r s Nygren's Agnpe and Eros.17 T h e Lutheran nadition is of course deeply implicated in the Augustinian tradition, and we have already seen AupstineS concern that even the most trivial attention to worldly things-"a lizard catching flies or a spider entangling them in his webE-threatens to distract us from a proper devotion to God: How much more dangerous than such can'r,sitirs, then, are the powerful attractions of errs. -hacute illusnation of this problem may be fc~undin C;eorge Eliot$ Adn~zBede, near the end of which the Methodist lay preacher Dinah Morris mistrusts her love for the carpenter Adam Bede precisely because she cannot reconcile it with her almost lifelong sellse of calling as a preacher: Since my affections have been set above measxlre on you, I have had less peace and jay in God; I have felt as it were a division in n ~ y heart. And think how it is with me, AcJaiin:-that life I: have led is like a land I: have trodden in blessedness since ~ n y childhood; and if 1 long for a rrzornent to foIi0~7the voice which calls me to another land that f know not, 1 cannot but fear that ~ n sot..) y nzight hereaker yearn for that early blessedness which I had forsaken; and where d o d t eaters, &ere is not perfect low. . . . We are s o n ~ e t i ~ required n~s to lay our namral, lawful affections on the altar, (554)

Note that Dinah does not believe her love for Adam, even if strong "above measure," to be intrinsically sinful: It is a "natural, lawhl affecdon." And yet she feels that she may be called upon to forego that low for the sake of a specific calling from God, for the sake, then, of a higher love-and this not only the love of God, but the love of her neighbors, who might also be displaced by the avariciousness of ems: "I fear I should forget to rejoice and weep with others; nay, I fear I should forget the Divine presence, and seek no love but yours" (5 52). Adam'.; reply to these concerns is eloquent (and will prove to be important for this study in other ways): 1 don? believe your loving me could sl~utup your heart; i t h n l y adding to what you\~cbeen befcjrc, not tahng away &om it; for it sccms to me it's the sasxle with love and hapiliness as with sorrow-the more we h o w of it the better we can feel what other pecr$e"slives are trr might be, and so we shall o d y be more tender to "em, and wishhl to help "em. 't'hc rnore howiedge a Tnan has the better heY do S' work; and feeling& sort o%knowledge. (5 5 3)

In &er words, 1Dinahk love of Adam and her love of God need not compete with one another, but can be complementary forces in the expansion of Dinah's character, the strengthening of the affections that bind our lives and our neighbors' in mutual help and regard. C:onversely, were Dinah to "shut up her heart" to the love of Adam, she would be sealing off one envance for knowledge-that is, wisdom-and this could scarcely be pleasing to God.18 There i s no question that Adam here speaks for tic,n of God, bas a strictly instrumental function and can safely he ahandonecl when it is no longer needed as a stimulus to the love of one's fellow humans. It seems to me that Mam's account is preferable to his creator's. I am in full agreement with (among others) Kierkegaard and Karl Barth that we must a t all costs avoid the ilotion that there can be any genuine love that is not of and from God. Since God is love, that which is not of and from God cannot be love; conversely, real love always derives from the one divine Source of love. This position is easily and often misunderstood: Kierkegaard and Barth may be thought to say-like Dr. Cumming-that any ltwe that does not invoke the Christian God as its authorizing &marantoris i p f n c t o idolatrous, a demonic counterfeit of genuine love. And of course it would be sirnply obtuse not to recognize what Marian Evans negleca in her article but George Eliot often depicts in her fiction, that some erotic attachments are indeed idolatrous, or ersatz: They embody (for instance) possessive desire rather than loving regard for the other. But many erotic attachments-like the attachments of family or friendshipare indeecl healthy and full of regard for the other, and insofar as they embody these traits they draw upon the originary and sustaining love of God, even when the people involved do not know that they draw upon that primal Love. Any genuine love, no matter what we call it, is in fact a form of agnpe and thus comes from God, not from us. (Kierkegaard, like many before him, incl~~ding Jeremy Taylor and Samuel Johnson, wants to contend that Lggtfpr is fundamentally different from any of the other loves in that it is universal whereas they are preferential; but this distinction creates serious problems, as Barth demonstrates.z@) In the prison writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer we find the mtjst profound, if not the clearest and most fully developed, indication that Dr. Cumming and Marian Evans provide us with false contrasts. Indeed,

Bonhoeffer's pursuit of a "this-worldly" Christianity reads like a theologcal exposition of Atlaln Bede5 plea to Dinah Morris: Gob wants us to love him etcrnalfy with our whoie heam----notin such a way as to illjure or weaken our earthly love, but to l>rt~vidc a kind of clin~I~s~~;"~"MI'us to which the trther nlelodies trf fife provide the ct~untcr!>oint. One of these c o n t ~ u n t athemes l (wiuch have their trwn complete in&pendence hut me yet refatcd to the c @ ~ m J . i ~is~earthly ~ u r > affection. Even in the Bible we have the Song of Son@; and really one can inza@e no more ardent, passionate, sensual love than is portrayed there (see 7 6 ) . I r h good thing that the book is in the Bible, in thc fgcc of all those who believe that the restraint of ps""icn is C:hristian (where is there such restraint in the Oid %stament?). t n e r e the c ~ n t u s $ m ~is~clear ~ s and piain, the counterpoint can be developed to its lirnits. 'l'he two are "undkdetf and yet distinct," in the words of the Chalcedonian Definition, like Christ in his divine and Ktl~nannames. May not the attraction and inzportmcmof polphony in nus sic consist in its being a nlrrtsical reflection of this Christolo@calfact and therefore of our vitg ~b~-I.~innd (LetLWS 303)21 This is an astoullding passage; it could take many pages to unpack. But let us simply note here that it marks a kind of inversion of Marian Evans5 argument in her cridque of Dr. Cumming: For her, the love of God has a purely insmmental function, and is to be measured by it3 usefulness in prompting the lnve of other people (love of whatever kind), whereas for Bonhoeffer, our love of God, and our recognition of God's love for us, is the one essential form of love: Only it liberates us to love others ever more fully and passionately. Agnpe thus justifies and enables all other lowes, rather than competing with them. After all-a point so simple and obvious that it hears repeating-Jesus' commandment is ofo old and implies a close connection bemeen love of God and low of neighbor, which is what Adam emphasizes in his wt~oingof Dinah and what Bonhoeffer elaborates on in his letter. In Bonhoefferk this-worldly spirituality, any of our various human loves may be conducted under the tutelage, so to speak, of tggGpr-my wife or friend or mother becomes in Kierkegaard's sense, which is the Ciospel sense, also my neighbor-in which case those loves will be healthy and properly oriented. Conversely, those lo~vesmay be selfgoverned, in which case they will inevitably descend into some destrucdv counterfeit of love. Thus, when we read, we may treat a hook

as means for the gratification of our passions, or we may genuinely wish the hest for that htxk (or its authors, or its characters-this is a point on which I counsel a Murdochian wise confusion). But what makes the difference bemeen a reading that is manipulative and selfish and one that is charitable? Though again at the risk of anticipadng later arguments, it is unavoidable here to give a general or schematic answer (dry bones onto which flesh will be attached in subsequent chapters). Fundamentally, it is the reader's will that determines the 113oral fc~rmthe reading takes: If the will i s directecl toward God and neighbor, it will in A~~gustinian terms exemplify cttritas; if the will is directed toward the self, it will exemplify clipiclitns. This terminology is of course Augustine3 version of the Pauline distinctioll heween living spiritually and living carnally. That one can read charitably only if one5 will is guided by charity is a pretty obvious point, yet it is neglected in hemeneutical theory even more than the charitable imperaeve itself This is perhaps the time to consider the description of "charitable interpretation" offered by the philosopher Donald Davidson. But what Davidson means by charitable interpretation is very different from what Augxstine means, and the distinction is, for the purposes of this study, and especially for understa~ldingthe sig~lificallceof a will oriented toward chariry, instrucdv. Davidson believes that we come to a collversatio~l(reading being one form of conversation) with the assumption that our interlc~cutorspeaks sensibly and intelligibly. Sometilnes we end by abandoning that assumpdon-perhaps the person with whom we are talking turns out to be mad-but we do so with the greatest reluctance and only after striving to find some way to reconcile our interlocutor's words with what we take to be intelligible utterance. Only when our hermeneutical resourcefulness is exhausteci do we, regretfully, accept unintelligibility. hTotethat for Davidson this "principle of charity," as he calls it, is not something we choose, or pursue, or cultivate. It's just what we do. We choose charitable interpretation only insofar as we choose to converse with people; but once we do choose to converse with people, this "charity" is immediately consequent. It is perhaps not even correct to call it something we ""d," an action: It is 113ore an envirmxmt in which we dwell. (It is, barely, possible to imagine someone who always conversecl with the assumption that her interlocutors made no sense, but this would require a titanic act of will that no one could sustain over tirne.) In this matter DavidsonS point resembles that made by Gadamer, who W

expresses his interest not in "what we do or what we ought to do, hut [in] what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing" But this is precisely what distinguishes Davitlsonian charity from Christian charity. Various Chrisdan thinkers might characterize ngirpe as the fruit of spiritual discipline, the achievement of moral labor, or the unearned gift of the Holy Spirit, but no one would say that the kind of love, of God or neighbor, that Jesus commands and Aupstine endorses simply "happens to us." Rather, it is a matter of the will, and thus in the etym(3logical sense voluntary, rather than given. How, and by what force, the will may be redirected is a matter of theological dispute, but that it requires redirecdon in order that we might meet Jesus' commandment is axiomatic for Christian theology. It is clear, then, that Davidsoll and the Chrisdall tradition are talking about two wholly different spheres of action. That Christian charity (as opposed to Davidsonian charity) is not a category for phik~sophicalhermeneutics is obvious; and it is not difficult to explain why this is so. In the first place, love has no part in any scientific conception of knowledge, and there are many forms of philosophical hermeneutics that think of themselves in scientific or quasi-scientific terms. (The notion of science I have in mind here is not necessarily the relatively narrow one represented by the Eng-lish ~151t1rd: MThat Brlrvrs calls ""C=artesianhermeneutics" could as ~151el1 be called "scientific hermeneutics." The point remains the same even if one has in mind the broader meanings of the vicoffers a compelling answer to this question:

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Cmcial here is the distinction that Bakhtin draws between il-rcarnation and embodiment. 't'he farmer is the fitllest Bowcring of thc act in all of its ranliftcations whereas the latter repraents a partial realization of thc act. m e n we incarnate rather than tnerely e~nbodythe act in our Lives we put trur G~matcrreon it @ou"pisarlriapod nbnz),which is tu say that it in a cclrain sense has the staznp trf aur individuality trn it. . . . Emhodi~lzent (zrqdshchmie) refers only to the change that an indkidual undergoes when he or she becorrzes cmsciously aware of the fact that all human lives are different; the actual deed of ethically integrating with others bl:lws after this wareness, and is described by Bakhtin as both a partaking. . . and an incarnation. (68-69)

And it is not only "all humall lives" that are different: Every momnt: of each life is diRerent: fro111 atl others, a d makes a lfistinctive demand upon me. Bakhtin laments the "unfortunate misunderstanding" that leads people to think that "the truth of a situation is precisely that which is repeatable and constant in it" ( T m t ~ ~ d 3 7T)h.e truly answerable deed, in his view, is one that fomses all its attention on the "unique context," the "unique moment" with its utterly particular demands. Some people live in generality, and their lives are "fortuit(~us and incapable of being rooted" (56); to recognize the fact of uniqueness is embodiment, and is a ilecessary but not sufficieilt step toward answerability; but true answerability is achieved only when I recognize that this "fact of uniqueness" imposes a responsibility upon me that I cannot avert. W e n I acknowledge my responsibility and act upon it-whether in a conversation with a friend or in reading a novel-I realize the authentic "I-for-myself' and "I-for-another." 'f'his is true ltwe; this is the incarnated deed, Let it not he thought that the uniqueness of the moment and of the person deprives the ethical life of coherence and continuity. To the conwary, one of the reasons this moment is unique is that it succeeds previozds moments in which I was also called to incarnational "self-activity"; and if I responded appropriately the22 by "undersigning" my deed I cc~mmitmyself still mclre to a similar acknowledgment ~zo-w: It is not the content of an obligation that obligates rrze, but my signature below it-the faet: that f at one time aekno~rledgedor undersigned the gic~cnachowledgment. h d what coml~6iledtne to sign at the molnent of the undersigning was nut the content of the &vcn perfornled act or deed. . . . And in this pcrhrmed act the content-aspect was also but a

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constituent rnolrlent, and what decided the matter was the acknuwledgrncnt or affirmation-the answerable deed-that had aetuaiiy been perFormed a.r a prcIPJous tin~e,etc. What WC shall find e\rery~rhcrcis a constant unity of answerdbiiiq . . . .(TrdtzrrlJ8-39)

Here we see one of the first appearances of that characteristic Bakhtinian notion of an "open unity," of that which coheres without being fixed, schematized, or finalized. And the term that Bakhtin uses to describe this open yet "constant unity of answerability'' is simple, familiar, and quite beautiful: He calls itfaithfillncrs (38). We began this survey of Bakhtin's thought by noting the necessity of attentiveness: This faithfulness is merely attentivness that is both loving and constant. T h e Russian word translated as "faithfulness" means literally "being-true-to"; when one attends to the life or work of another lovingly and with constancy, one is being true to her; that is, one is doing justice to who she is. h d in the context of the Orthodox CIhristianity that, as we have seen, shapes Bakhdng thinking on these issues, "who she is" is a being lnade in the image of God, an image defaced by sin but (one hopes) in the process of being restored. In the Orthodox view, one of the best descriptions of salvation is as the process by which the image of God in us is restored: Perhaps the most characteristic idea of Orthodoxy is its conviction that salvadon is theosic (see Pclikan, Chfeistirr@ 10-1 2). Moreover-and this is a still mcjre important point for our purposes here-the God in whose image we were made and are being remade is a Trinity, that is, an intrinsically rellitionul being. Here again we must invoke a doctrine that, although not unique to Orthodoxy, is characteristic of it: pcricho~-esis,the eternal loving dance in which the persons of the Trinity are intertwined. To become deifiecl--or, to put it in a less exalted language more fiamiliar to Western Christians, to imitate Christ-is to learn to practice with our neighbors the perichoretic movments that are so awkward for fallen human beings. This practice does proper honor not only to our neighbors but also to us: We may offer loving and constant attention to them, but in return we receive from them the gift of their otherness, the "outsidedness" that makes it possible for us to understand and to achieve "self-activity," "answerability," the "incarnated deed." This gracious exchange of gifts, this dance of faithfulness, is of course something that achieves its hllest flowering only within the

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life of the Church, but it can (indeed must) be practiced anywhere and with anyone. (We owe love to all our neighbc~rs,not just to fellow mlnbers of what St. Fml calls "the household of C;od."")t is a kind of low that is always productive of some degree of knowledge. tIere is where Bahtirrk accoullc parts c o 1 -m a -v most forcehlly with the h i s totelian picture, in which love can be productive of knowledge only within a certain political context, and only if one is lucky enough to find art &er receptive et> one's own virmes and in possession of virtues that one lacks (or possesses in lesser measure). The Christian love that Bakhtin counseis is both an always compelling obligation and an always available opportunity. It is this commit~nerrtto fiaithhlness that we must brine to our lives as readers if we would govern our reading by the law of love. This is a debt that we owe to all the hooks we read, because those hooks become, for the duration of our reading and perhaps long afterward, our neighbors-as do, in subtly differing ways, the hooks' characters and au&ors. Babt-in5 account of fai&hf attent-iveness dernnnstrrates that Wayne Booth's wise and nc~bletreatment of ""books as friends," in his wonderful book The Conzp&nyWe KEep, is not quite adequate to its suhject, because the very notion of friendship that Booth employs is tainted by the exclusionary and agonistic character of the virme of friendship as he has inherited it. To some degree Booth recognizes this problem. t I e tries to address it early in his treatment of the subject by insisting that fistc~tle's philin encompasses not only "what we would call close friends but [also] all bonds of afkcdon or reliance between parents and children, kings and subjects, neighbors and citizens, husbands and wives, and so on" (Cump&~zy 173). This definition of philicl goes even k~rtherthan Martha Nussbaum's, and in my view stretches Aristotle's terln beyond recognition and coherence; but even if we grallt a great deal of what Booth says, there remains an element of choice and hence exclusion in phililr with which Booth is not altogether comfortable. In a faornote on the same page he writes: CI

In what fc>llowsI do not lnean to suggest that I find Aristorle's rational account of friendship the only or the best account of hurrzan affection. 'I'he chief ""rcj\7aV9is ol~~riously the Chrislian cornrnand to love our enemies-love them in a mystelious, gratuitous way that takes no account of what they might offer us, Applied to our relations to itnpIied authors, thc command would yield a "gcdIdcn d e " &at I hope informs this wholc

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book: ""Read as y r wo~.ld have others read you; listen as you would have others listen."

How odd that Booth would write a large and copious hook based largely on an account of human relations that he cannot or will not endorse! How odd also that Booth fails to note that C:hristianity, in "rivaling" the Aristc~telianemphasis on friends, teaches us to love not just our enemies but all of our neighbors (many of whom are neither friends nor enemies). Also worth considering-though we will not explore this issue right now-is Bc~oth'sassumption that the love of enemies is necessarily "gratuitous." Booth3 uneasiness r m r n s rnuch later ifl the book, d e n he outlines "two strong ethical traditions" that give us seemingly contradictory advice about how to respond to inirnical or deceptive books (and chara c t e r s t t h a t is, about how we are to put into practice our "golden rue." One of them is ""re eradif-ion of exchsion or denial," which "advises a purifying caution and resuaint, a defensive drawing of lines and boundaries" (485). Booth seems to associate this way of thinking primarily with modern American (including, or perhaps especially, American Christian) attitudes toward censorship, immigration, the control of schools and neighborhoods, and so on; but he also recognizes that it is deeply imbedded in the Aristotelian adi it ion: [l]nthe classical way of tatking about hiendship . . . some friends are useful mcf some are harxnhl; some pleasant friends are likely to corrupt us; rrzosr: tyould-be Friends will prove to he inferior or d a n ~ r a u influs ences, In fact in that cradition we can hope at best For a very srnall nuxrzber of true Friends, perhaps Finally? as ivrzntaigne W O L I I ~ have it, only one. All ""otl~ers"'arc at least partially suspect. e86)

The "opposing tradition," as Booth describes it, derives primarily from the practices of Jesus, even if it is not often found among Christians: It "urges an openness t~ the world, including even that part of it that looks like vice or corruption. . . . T h e tradition is perhaps best represented by Christ's seeming willingness, nay, eagerness, to consort with sinners and by the 'imitations' of his all-embracing practice by sain~clike Francis of hsisi'"487). Having described these m o traditions, Booth a d m i ~that "at any one moment, facing any particular piece of othemess, one cannot follow bath a t once: I cannot-bath ostracrize dubious ii-iends and cul~vate

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them for the good they lnight do me as challenges, or the good I might do them" (488). But he nevertheless wants to insist that "in ethical criticism of narratives" we need not "make a hard and fhst choice bemeen the excluding and embracing modes. . . . T h e only fully general advice inherent in all this is that by taking thought about who and whew we are, and about when it is, we may irnprowe our chmces of finding and dwelling with those others who-are in fact our true friends" (488189).This is a limp cc~nclusionindeed, but the limpness is inevitable given the choices that Booth has evolved for himself. He wants neither to abdicate judgment nor to enact it: Having conceived of an ethical practice of reading in strictly Aristotelian terms, he flinches from the agonistic and exclusionary character of the al.etr that enables ~hz'lia. If, however, we think of books as our neighbors rather than as our friends, and iggtgpr rather than philiic as the model for our affectus, the impasse dissolves. Not that we must reject the notion that our relationships with books can be friendly: A s I pointed out in the previous chapter, theologians of friendship have often noted the references in the Gospel of John to "the disciple whom Jesus loved," one who was his particular friend, and this can be read as testimony that friendship, though inherently preferential, need not be sinful because it need not be strictly exclusionary. As C. S. Lewis says, in a passage inflected by kistode and yet fully Christian, rl'lrue &endship is the least jealous of ltwes. ' h o friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a Forrrth, if only the newcorner is yuitlified to become it real friend, 'l'hey can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ""here cclnzes one who will augnent our lows," For in this love "to divide is not to take away.'Wf course the scarciq of lrindred souls . . . sets limits to the enlargetncnr of the circle; but within thosc limits we possess eacl-r kiend not less but tnorr: as the a m b e r of thosc with whom we share hlm increases. In this, hiendship exfiibi~a glorious ''nnearness by rescmblance'bto t Ieaven itself where the very multitude t ~ fthe blessed (which no man can nuinher) increases the fruidon which each has of Cud, (Four 59)

One could say that this passage recopizes the difference between finitude and fallenness: Our finitude-the limited scope of our acquaintance, of our intellectual and moral resources-ensures that our capability for friendship is likewise finite; but this is simply the conse-

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quence of being created beings, not the consequence of a sinful desire to exclude (though most of us possess that too). Similarly, we will not read all books with full sympathy, with a sells@ of kinship, with an awareness of expanded understanding, with the convic~onthat this book teaches me what 3: need to know and could not have Iearned &om another book, In short, not all the books we read will become our friends, But if we ct~nsiderthat we owe a debt of loving and constant attentiveness (of faithfulness) to all the books we read-whether they be friends, foes, or neighbors-we prc~videfor ourselves what Bonhoeffer calls the cgntusfi~#mr~-r, the ground over which variations can be elaboratecl and developed. Those "variations" are the products of discernment, and Chapter 3 will consider that topic-first distinguishing the Christian virme of loving discernmellt from its ever-present shadow: suspicion.

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n the previous interlude I relied rather heavily on George Steiner's distinction between critic and reader. That this distinction is not wholly adequate may be demtjnstrated by a look at Nabokov7sPale Fire. Charles Kinbote, the narrator of this story, fits neither of Steiner's categories. He is certainly n o critic of John Shade'.; work, since he deems ""distance" bemeen reader a d author, a t teast in this case, problematic and hence infertile: H e does not disguise his disappoinment that Shade's poem "Pale Fire" turned out to be something other than what he had expected. Indeed, he makes haste to save and then hide the manuscript, rather than attend to the bleeding, dying Shade, only because he is convinced that the poem is about him, Kinhote, and his native country, Zemhla: Had he known that it had nothing to do with him he would scarcely have bothered. Having saved the poem, he then determines to construct a theory that will account for its l ~ c kof reference to Ki~lboteand Zexnhla, and to discover that G n bate and Zembla consdmte the hidden subtext of the poem-a subtext partially hut imperfectly covered by Shade in his attempts to placate his wife Sybilk irradonal hostility toward Kinbote. Therefore Kinbote could scarcely be called a reader, either, since he hves not Shad& wnrk itself but, rather; t k mirr(>r of himself into which he has (as far as he can) transformed the poem.' Indeed, Kinhote7sonly real mistake is to provide us with the poem about which he writes his cc>mmentary: Even if the commentary is ten times the length of the poem, the poem remains as a witness to Kinbate's meta-

morph(3sis of it. N o matter how fervently Kinhote insists upon his reverence for John Shade, no lnatter how passionately he declares that he and he alone is the fit custodian and guardian of Shadek literary reputation, the only genuine love here is Kinbotek narcissism. Kinbote unctmstancls hints& to be the still point of the turnirtg wor-ld: Thus he is convinced, even when he can n o longer sustain the belief that "Pale Fire" is about him and his counuy, that Shade's killer was nonetheless a Zemblan assassin seeking his, Kinbotek, life. This is Nabokov7s picture of the critic: not an epistemoloh' ~ 1 s%,l t much as a textbook passive-aggressive, proclaiming himself (like Dickens's Uriah Heep) a hulnble servant but in fact seeking the constant expansion of his own ego. Gerald Bruns, in a passage I cited in Chapter 1, summarizes Steiner's view of the critic in his description of "Cartesian hermeneutics," the impulse of which "is to preserve aliemtion as a canttition of freedom fi.m the text" (149). But Nabokov's Knbcjtean critic seek?;not freectom from t-he text but mastery over it, and absorbs it into his own being. ("Freedom from" and "mastery of' are related but not identical concepts.) What is vital to note here is the elimination, in each case, of an ongoing dialogical encounter with the text, in which the reader and the text subject each other to scrutiny: Steiner's critic builds a wall benveen him- or herself and trhe text, hTabokov's critic eats the text. In neithm case is there anything like real reverence, love, or friendship-in Bakhtink term, fi~ithfiblnrssis lacking-and thus, in neither case is the readerly/critical experience productive of genuine kncjwledge (of the self or the other). "Friendship7?is one of the themes of a book that paints a subtler picture of the relationship between a reader and a writer, Nicholson Baker's account of his ongoing fascinau'on with John Updike in U nnd I. Baker refers to hTabokovrepeatedly in his book, since hTabokovis his other chief influence besides Updike: "I had said that he and Nabokov were heroes in several intemiews" (175). At times Baker suggests a kind of trinity: "hhh!-another link bet~reenNabokov and Updike and Updike and me: insomnia!" (144). And yet there is only one reference to Pl~leFir-g, not actually by Baker, but by Updike as quoted by Baker in an erz passtrnt phrase: Reviewing De.fp&irUpdike had imagined, or hoped (fruitlessly) for, "the delighdul, devilish, and unimaginable successor to I%le Fif:i'9(1 18). The only reason Baker might be expected to say something about Pgie Fire is that at one point he gives a list of books that are relevant

when an essay5 "subject is a writer thinking about an older writer," a list that includes (amtjng other things) Jarnes7s "The Figure in the Carpetw-a doubly inappropriate example, since, as I have noted, the story really isn't about reading and wridng a t all, and the narrator isn't a writer, just an occasional reviewer. It is rather odd, then, that Baker never considers whether his obsession with Updike might resemble Kinhate5 with J o b Shade. One might immediately protest here-Baker, especially, might protes+that Baker hears no reselnbtance to ICinbote, who i s no more g writer than Jarnes5 narrator (hut what he is, i s difficult to say), and who uses or tries to use Shade in a way that Baker couldn't and wouldn't use Updike. But this point requires more reflection, and a further consideratioll of P@IeFire, Enbote isn't a writer, but he becomes one by making himself the official editor of and commentator on John Shade5 poem. Of course, Shade's reputation and the public interest in his work is what makes it possible for Kinbote to come before the public with his commentary. But this secondary, derivative, or parasitical role i s intolerable to Kinhote, who proceeds in his commentary to make the Socratic/Platonic argument that his spoken tales of Zemhlan culture and history inspire the written (and hence secondaq, derivative) "Pale Fire": By the end of iVa)i t could make out the t~utlinesof some of my images in the shape his genius might give them: by mid-June I felt sure at last that he w ~ u l drecreate in a poem the dazzling Ze111bl3 burning in my brain, f mesmerized hirn with it, f saturated him with my vision, I prmw"dpon him, with a dnlnkard's wild generasi3 all that l was helpless myself to put into verse, . . . At length I knew he was ripe with my Zernbla, brrrsting with stritaMc rllp~es,ready to spurt at rhe brush of an eyelash. (80)

Shade is a "genius" and Kinbote "helpless," but only in technique: Shade has the know-how of a poetic engineer, but Kinbote the "vision" of an architect. The poem ultimately produced would be a skillful imitation, but only an imitation, a "recreadon," of the "dazzling Zembla burning in [Kinbote's] brain." Of course, upon first reading the poem Kinhote suffered "horrible disappointment" (296) that it was not the gurgeous romance of Zembla that he had been expecdng; but later, when he "reread" the poem "more carefully," he was pleased by his discoveries:

Here and there I discovered in it and especially especially in the invaluable jrariants [i.e., Shade's discarded draksf, echoes and spangles of my mind, a long ripplewakc of my $ 0 ~ .. . . My commentary to &is poem, aoul ia the hands of my readers, represents an attempt to sort out those echoes and wavelets of tire, and pale r,hosphorescent hints, alld all the many subliminal debts tsr me. (297)

By positioning himself and his story both prior to the poem as inspiration, and sr~ccecdingthe poem as commentary, Kinbote hopes to redescribe the pc~emSpower as his emanation. Thus the statement at the end of his "Foreward" to the poem (the poem that is imlnediately succeeded by Knbote's lengthy "Commentary"): Although these notes, in confi~rmiywith custom, conle after the poem, the reader is aitvised [note the divine passive] to consult them first and then study the poem with their help, rereading them t ~ course f as he goes through its text, and perhvs, after having done with the poem, consulting them a third tinze so as tm conzplete the picture. . . . l e t rrze state that without rny notes Shade5 text simply has no hurnan reality at all. . . . ' l b this statement my dear poet would proh"tob ant have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is thc commentator who has the last word. (28)

Kinbote gives, or tries to give, himself the first and last wordswt~rdsthat deserve rapt attention and repeated engagement%-and to reduce Shade's poem to a wan reflection of his own mind. (As Brian Boyd points out 14431, in Jonathan Swift's Bnnle ofthe Books we hear that "a malignant deity, call'd Critici~~?~ . . . dwelt on the top of a s n o y mountxain in Nova Zernhla."') Kinhote cannot find in Shakespeare the reference that provides Shade's poem its title, though as he writes his commentary the only Shakespearean play he has access to is a Zemblan translation of the very play from which the title is drawn: TFmon ofAthefzs. "It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded as an equivalent of 'pale fire' (if it had, my luck would have been a statisdcal monster)" (285). Indeed his luck was great, though not matched by his discernment. Earlier in the book Kinhote unwittingly quotes the relevant passage, translating it from Zemblan back into English: "The moon is a thief:/he steals his silvery light from the sun" (80). Shakespeare has it thus: "The moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches

from the sun." So Timon says in his discourse on the ubiquity of thievery (IV.iii.420445). This i s of course a perfect image of IGnbate's relation to Shade, Shade being (in a punning paradox) the sun, and Kinbote the moon-though the whole of finbotek commentary is a passiollate and desperate claim to the contrav.2 h short, what Gnbote warns from J o h Shade is a trander of charisma: to be not the recipient of energy but the source of energy, not the reflector of light but the generator of light. Kinbote recalls the moment of Shadehrntxrder by Jack Cirey: ""felr--l still feel-John5 hand Fu~nblingat mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a suhlime relay race, the baton of life" (204). Shade, dead, can generate no more light or force: But finbate still breathes. Baker$ relation to Updike is difkrent-he certainly doesn't want Updike dead-but not wholly different, and the lineaments of this likeness need to be discerned. T h e book starts by being about an almclst obsessive admiration: His early notes for the project, he says, were along these lines: "'I should,' I typed that morning, 'write some appreciation of Updike.' 'Make a whole hook about my obsession with Updike,' I typed" (1 3). And occasionally throughout the book that llote returns: Rereading Of'thrFarm, he says near the end, "More than once I yelled 'He's a hcking maestro! "' (17 1). But in general terms there's a shift in emphasis: More and more what Baker wants is what he calls "friendship" with Updike, by which he means a particular kind of reciprocity. Let's remember in this context that for -kistode reciprocity or mutuality is what distinguishes genuine friendship from good will or benevolence or, for that matter, admiration. And friendship is what Baker wants from-or, to be precise, with-Updike. For many years as a reader he had been receiving g i f ~ f i mUpdike; now he wants to be able to give something in return. That's why he toys with what he calls his "halfnuts" theory that he (who had met Updike briefly, mice, before he wrote U cmd I) was the physical and vocal model for the character of Dale in Updikek Roger's Ve~~si~~sru72 (178). Baker%expc~sitiongets rather delicate on this point. H e begins with his reaction when the nrjvelist Tim (2%rien revealed that he soI3letimes played golf with Updike: 1was of course very hurt &at our of ail the p u a g i s h writers jiving in rhc Boston area Updike has chosen Tirn O'Brien and not me as his goifing

parcnet; It didn'c rrzatter that I hadn't written a book that had wan a. National Book Award, hadn't written a book of any kind, and didn't know how to goif; still, I felt strmgiy that Updike should have asked me ancl not 't"in~O%rien. (50)

But the mclre Baker reflects on the potential pleasures of golfing with Updike, the more he fears that their conversation would be disrupted by a mutual fear-Baker hopes it would be mutual-of revealing some tidhit of wit or eloquence that the other would steal (54-57). This concern for unhealthy competitiveness makes Baker conclude that "literary friendship is impossible, it seems; at least, it is impossible for me" (57). And yet, almost immediately Baker senses the impovrishment of such a stance: "And yet I wallt to be Updike's hiend now! Forget the guardedness!" (58). Moreovr, he continues, "I gm friends with Updike-that5 what I really feel-I have, as I never had when I was a child, this imaginary friend I have constructed out of sodden crisscrossing strips of rivalry and gratefulness over an armature of remembered misquotation7' (59). That's a valuable discriminating phrase: "crisscrossing strips of rivalry and gratefulness"-much richer than Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" (which Baker made a point of not reading about until he had finished his book). But this notion of friendship is still wing to do without reciprocity: Baker may have said "Forget the guardedness," but he has clearly discarded fantasies of gc~lfingwith Updike in favc~r of settling for a purely imaginary friendship. Eventually, though, he realizes that this imaginary friend isn't really a friend at all: Thus his manifest pleasure-in the scene that concludes U a~zdl-in discovering (he thinks it's a discovery anyway) that he has "communicated with [Updike] in a permanent way" (178). Baker believes that a brief passage in Updike'., 1984 novel The Witches of'Ea.rustayick echoes a passage in a story Baker published in 1981, a story that in their second meeting Updike told Baker he had read and liked. Thus the last words of U itnd I: "Because I exist in print, Updike's book is, I think, ever so slightly different. For a minute or two, sometime in 1983, the directic~nof intfehcedness w s reversed. I have inArzenced him.And that's all the imaginary friendship I need" (179). It seems clear from this conclusion that, however wonderful it Inay he to admire Updike, friendship requires something mtjre. If Kinbote-who relentlessly invokes the l~ngclizgeof friendship-really sought a ~ i z ~ z roff ; charisma, ~ Baker wants an exchnnge of charisma.

The exchange is not and need not be an equal one: Baker makes it manifest throughout the book that he knows Updike "has it" (126)"genius" he even calls it-whereas he, Baker, still needs confirmation of some kind. But if there can he even an unequal exchange of charisma, this mwt confirm that Baker has something to offer-sme gift, however meager, to return to one who has given him so much. Are there rivalry and competitiveness in this "imaginary friendship"? Of course. But that is not the whole story. In Aristotelian tert?ls, the friendship is flaiwed because it is based on instrumental rather than intrinsic goods. But I think that, in the literary and hermeneutical terms of this smdy, what Baker desires and imagines is a genuine friendship-as opposed to the trivial, unfmitfill gnosticism of the narrator of "The Figure in the Carpet" or the cannibalistic annotatiol~sof NabokovS Kinbote. Baker is willing to receive gifts of style and insight, and eager to give them-from motives that are by his own admission impure, but what of that? As someone (Rebecca West, I believe) once said, there is no such thing as an unmixed motive. There is health in Baker's admiration of Updike, especially in this admission, one that comes after a period in his life when he was eager to have his girlfrienci tell him he was a better writer than Updike or, fiailing that, a more intelligent person: "Updike is a better writer than I am and he is smarter than I am" (l 349). T h e sig~~ificance of this admissiol~can readily be seen by anyone who tries to remember the last time he or she read a critical essay, or review, or book, in which a critic said such a thing. Baker puts us on the road to understanding the role that humiliv-r, to be more specific, an honest recognition of another's gifts-can play in reading. Surely such honesty and humility are necessary in a reader who would love God and her neighbor thn~ughthe act of reading. But sdll richer rnodels are available.

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L O V EA N D

THE

"A~ttf kidn-z~har! Euen ~ r pe7;Tfi~~nfcd r our of love is s ~ p posed tn he " ~ I P Z - Bgt ' you blodberirdr-!

E a r l i e r , in Cilaper I, I spirhe of reading as tl,e reception of a gik, and promised fuller explorations later on. Such explorations are necessary because the notion of gift is one of the most contested in contemporary thought. I have already indicated my position in this contest: "Discernment is required to b o w what kind of gift one is being presented with, and in what spirit to accept it (if at all), but a universal suspicion of gifts and givers, like an indiscriminate acceptance of all gifts, constitutes an abdication of discernment in favor of a simplistic n priur-z".~~~ that smothers the spirit." I have also noted that we can and often do li~uea particular book in a way that is very like-almost indistinbwishahle from-the love we give to persons, and yet that love is not precisely to be equated with love for the author or any particular character. This topic has great significance for how we read hooks, and yet has scarcely been considered. One possible way to approach it is by considering a historical development noted by Marcel Mauss in his classic work The Gzft and developed by Lewis Hyde in his book of the same title: the distinction that arose in Roman law between, as Hyde puts it, "real'bnb ""personal" law-bcmecn, that is, a law of thin@ and a law of persons, . . . In anrjquity rhc Roman &PE~'I~Awas not s i ~ x p ypeople but

the entire ""household," including the objects in the horne down to the food and the means of Livclihuud. Latcr Ronlan law9 Xzowcver, incrcasin& Jistinpished eeononlic and ritual interest; it divided the fimika"n into r-rs and pemJ*onae.(86)

Hyde is interested in this legal development because it goes a b n g way toward transforming many forms of human creativity-including, especially, work of art-from gzfts that bind people together to c m rnodz"t;it;.sthat divide them. In other words, the legal distinction between persons and things marks the transformation from a "gift economy" to a "market economy." If Hyde is right, then any attempt to think of a work of art as a @&-and I conteild that it is only as a gift that the work of art can become available for serious theological reflection a d use-requires as a first step the interrogatioi~of the distinction bet~reenthings and persons. In other wt~rds,to think of a book as a thing is to commc~difyit in ways that deny it human significance: Conversely, to think of it as a gift, as a human nctivig, may crecould we think of a ate confusion-How can a book he a person? HOW fictional character in the same way that we think of that character's author!-but it is a productive and enabling confusion. This is why in my Prelude I quoted Iris Murdoch: "Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain conhsed" (n/letnphysz'cs147). But how can we think of a book as a gift? The gift assumed its status as a topic of controversy with the publication, in 1925, of Mauss's "Essai sur le don," later published in book form and translated into English as The Gzfr.1 Mauss's brief essay has spawned an enormous literature of respclnse and counter-response chiefly because of one claim: that the gift as such, a free offering of something valuable to another, does not exist. Every gift, argues Mauss, ~ ~only o texpects but demands some return: Exchai~geand reciprocity are at the heart of every gift-giving practice. (The prominence of the terms rschrrnge and nrgutilgtion in the vocabulary of the New Historicism, especially in Stephen CTreenblattg wt~rk,is an inheritance from Mauss-as mediated by CIlaude Levi-Strauss and Clifford meat all. "The reader is a visitor and, as such, must observe the necessary courtesies. She must avoicf unwrarranted inrt-usions-she must be careful not to impose herself on the other woman" (Schweickart 48). Rich, then, recognizes her outsider's status and does not wholly regret it: She does not beco~neDickinson-"The methods, the exclusions, of Emily Dickinson's existence could not have been my ownE-but she comes to "understand her necessities." She does not take Dickinson's place in the defendant's chair-"viewed by her bemused contemporary Thcjmas Higginson as 'partially cracked,' by the twentieth century as fey or pathological" (Rich 160)-but offers herself to Dickinson as a friendly "witness in her defense."

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linterlude C: Q~uixotirReading

Moreover, there is humility here. It is implicit in Rich's colnparison of herself to an insect, an unimportant creature, like the visitor often bothersome; hut it is evident elsewhere in the essay too. At the end she disavows any complete or decisive reading of Dickinson: "There are many more Emily Dickinsons than I have tried to call up here. Wherever ynu take hold of her, she proliferates" (183). Like Bakhtin, though her pronouns differ in gender, she rehses to "finalize" the object of her attention: "The truth about a man in the mc~uthsof others, not directed to him dialogically and therefore a secondhand truth, becomes a lie degrading and deadening him, if it touches upon his 'holy of holies,' that is, 'the man in man"' (Problem 59). Likewise, Rich concludes her reading of "My life had stood-a Loaded Gun" by insisting that the poem, too, evades finalization: "I do not pretend to have-I don't even wish to have-explained this poem, accoullted for its every image; it will reverberate with new tones long after my words &out it have ceased to mal:ter'"lT4), T h e woman in the house-though she may have said that she heard a fly buzz when she died-will long outlive the insect beating at her door'., screen, and so will her poems.] All this is important, but what Rich is up to in "Vesuvius a t Home" cannot properly be understood unless it is situated in a far larger project than Rich's attempt to connect with Dickinson. In a prefatory note to the essay, Rich describes a criticism that will ask of a 6' qven ~ r t ~ m awriter n "how she came to be for-herself and how she identified with and was able to use women5 culmre, a w o r n 5 tradi~on;and what the presence of other women meant in her life. . . . h n d this process will make women artists of the past-and present-available in ways we cannot yet predict or imagine" (158). In short, "Vesuvius at Home" participates in an undertaking first described by Virginia Woolf in her decisive hook A Room i-of' O E3-~Own. In describing both the obstacles to and the possibilities of women's writing, Woolf makes a vital (and now famous) historical point: 'Tc~wardsthe end of the eighteentk centrrv a change came a b w t which, i f 1 were rewriting history, I should describe Tnare hilly and think of greater irnportaace than the Crusades o r the IVars of the Roses, 'l'he middle-class wornan began to write. . . . Brithour these foremnners, Jane Austen and the BrontEs and Ckorge Eliot couid nu more have wl-ittcn rbm Shakespeare eouid have w r i t ~ nwithout i4vZariowc, o r Mat-lowe without C ~ ~ U C oGr IChauccr ; without those brgotten poets who paved

the ways and earned the natural savagey of the t a n p e , For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are tbc olttconle of many years of thinkin$.in eomtnon, of thinking by the body of h e people, so that rhc eqeriencc of tbc tnass is behind thc single voice. (65)

Woolf contends that it is necessary for women writers to discover and immerse themselves in this traditit~n."It is useless to go to the great men writers for help" on this matter, "however much one may go to them for pleasure. . . . The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully" (76). And Woolfi references to weight, pace, and stride are not wholly metaphorical: A little later she argues that "the book has somehow to be adapted to the body" (781, women's books to women$ bodies. If women cultivate the tradirion of women's writing that first emerged in the eighteenth century, and emplace themselves in its discursive wt~rld-a world owing its whole character to distinctively female bodies, minds, and experiencesthen, in "another hundred years" perhaps (941, the tradition will be long and powerful enough to produce true greatness. Wolnen writers will he able to possess "the unconscious bearing of long descent which makes the least mm of the pen of a Thackeray or a Lamb delighdul to the ear" (92); more important still, "the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the fives of the u n h o w n who were ller forerunners, as her I-tmtl-tef did before her, she wilt be born" (l 14). It is this enterprise, this building or disct~veryof a tradition, in which Rich seeks to participate through her essay "Vesuvius at Home." The enterprise itself dictates the key features of Rich'.; approach that we have noted: The humility, the desire to connect, the refraining from imposition, the acknowledgment of outsidedness, all deriv naturally from the task of tradition-building. And this point is vital to an understanding of the Quixotic tradition, because, unlike many of the counterfeits of charitable reading that we have seen, the beneficent form of Quixotic reading seeks not only to connect with an author but also to build a community of like-minded readers. Indeed, Schweickart says just this about Rich's essay: "To read a text and then to write ahout it i s to seek to connect not only with the author of the original text, hut also with a community of readers" (56).2 At its best, then, Quixotic reading invites the author and other readers to participate in a common vnture. This invitation is hopeful: It

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linterlude C: Q~uixotirReading

anticipates an expanding circle of participants. Schweickart calls such hopefulness a "utopian" vision, but it might better be termed eschatological. (Moltmann and Pieper are both properly concerned to distinguish utopian dreaming from eschatological hope.) Thus the relevallce of this passage from BakhtinS last notebook: 'There is neither a Grst nor a last wt~rdand there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundiess hmre). Kven past ~neanings,that is, those born in the diaiope of past centuries, can never he stable (finalized, ended once and For all)-they will always change (be renewed) in tbe process of subsequent, Rltrtre development of the dialopc. At any moment in the develop~xeamofthe dialogue there are immense, boundless Exasses of forgotten contextual meanings, But at cel.tain tnoments trf the dialogue8 subseqtlent devcloyment along the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed forrn (in a new context). Nothing is absoluteb dead: evcv meaning will have its homecoming kscjval, ( S p e d 170)

Such hopefulness distinguishes both a distinctively Christian charitable interpretatic>n and the feminist model of reading shared by Wortlf.; Rich, and Scilweickar~from the kirld oF ""converszttional" model of interpretation associated, in various ways, with Richard Rorty, Stallley Fish, and (far less accurately) Gadamer. T h e loras cl~ssicrks for this "conversationalism'?-and still its most elegant expression-may he found in Kenneth Burke5 vital book The Philosophy of IVhere does the drarna (of history] get its nzaterials? Frarn the "mending conversation" &at is going on at the point in &story when we are born. imagine tl-ritt p u enter a parlor. Vrtu come late. m e n p u arrive, others havc long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated distussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and teSl yclu exactly what i t is absut. tn bct, the discrtssion had already begrun b n g BeCore any trf them p t there, s s that ntr one present is qualified to retrace far yru all the steps that had p n e before. You listen For a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the arprnent; then you put in your oar. Sorneone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the emharasment or g a t ification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your allyhassistance. I-lowe.rrcr9&e discussion is interninable. 't'l-ie hour grows late,

you tnust depart-, And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorousb in progress. It is from this ""rtncnding eonvcrsation'? . . that the tnate~alsof your drama arise. (I 10- 111)

Bakhtin adds to Burke5 appealingly humane but incomplete conversational model the necessary eschatcjlc~gicalcontext: For Bakhtin, God is the Father who waits patiently but hopefully for the world's prodigal meanings to return to him and receive his blessing. Bakhtin implicitly invites us as readers to wait in patient hope for that consummation, and to participate, at first pn~lepticallyand then fully, in the "homecoming fesdval." But-and here our argument must pivot to a new direcdon-it must be said that Rich is never as expansive as this in her invitation. Though, as we have seen, her approach to Dickinson acknowledges her sums as a ""visitor," an meider; it neverheless assumes that her threefold status as woman, lesbian, and poet enables her to understand Dickinson in ways that others cannot. It is significant that when Rich gets to the heart of her argument-which is a reading of some Dickinson poems that refer to an unnamed "he" who has some vital role to play in the poet's life-she simply claims privileged knowledge: Much enerk"y has been invested in t+ng t ~ identie ) a c~ncrete,fleshand-blood male lwer whom Uicknson is supposed to have renounced, and to the loss of who111 can be traced the secret of her seclusicln and the vein of much of her poetry But the real question, given that the art of poetry i s the art of transfor~nation,i s how this wornan5 ~rzindand itnagination rrzay have used the rrzasculine elernent in the world at: large, or those elements persclnified as tnasculinc-including thc men s l ~ cknew; how lzer relationship to this reveals itself in her images and language, (I6+165)

Having posited this view of poetry as transfomation, Rich suggests a sequence of changes. First, the images of the masculine human lover must be translated into religious language: In the "patriarchal . . . Judeo-Christian, quasi-Puritan culture of nineteenth-century New England in which Dickinson grew up, . . . the equation of divinity with maleness was so fundamental that it is hardly surprising to find Dickinson . . . blurring erotic with religious experiellce and imagery" (165).

08

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linterlude C: Q~uixotirReading

But to spiritualize and internalize the erotic imagery is not, for Rich, enough. Are the erotic and spiritual terms "metaphors for each other, or for something more intrinsic to Dickinson?" (165). Rich's answer is that both sets of metaphors refer to "something more intrinsic," that something being Dickinson's "own interior power" as a poet: The poems that Rich has been discussing "are about the poet's relationship to her own power, which is exteriorized in masculine form" (165). Curiously enough, the transformadons Rich suggests are precisely analogous to the historical development of the epic: from the physical and material epic (Homer) to the religious epic (~Milton)to the interior epic of the poet's lnind (Wardsworth). In other words, Rich puts Dickinson's poems through these transformations in order to make the p o e q more accessible to the historical interpretive world Rich inhabits, to reduce if not eliminate sig~lificantdifference-in short, to make Dickinson thoroughly and unproblematically a late en Rich says that "a woman's poetry about her remodern figure. lationship o her daemon-her own active, creative power-has in patriarchal culture used the language of heterosexual love or patriarchal theology" (l70), she denies to heten~semallove and patriarchal theology any real and significant place in DickinsonS experience. They are merely ready-to-hand and uncontroversial sources of images and metaphors-they are melee@metaphorical, odd though it is to hear a poet suggest such a thing. One does not have to endorse the theories about Dickinson's supposed lovers that have been promulgated by people whom Rich rightly calls "legend-mongers" to recognize the problem with what Rich is doing here. It seelns not to occur to Rich that Dickinson's views on certain important subjects lnight be different from Rich's own. For instance, Rich writes that "the terms she had been banded by society---Calvinist Protestantism, Romanticism, the nineteenthcentury corseting of women's bodies, choice, and sexuality-could spell insanity to a woman genius" (161). Yet the available evidence s u g g e s ~that Dickinson5 atdtudes toward at least some of these things (namely, Protestantism and Romanticism) might have been more complex and ambivalent than Rich'.; own easy rejection.4 Similarly, Rich notes that Dickinson called Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale "holy," only to comment that "one suspects she merely meant, 'great."' But why should one suspect that? Surely Dickinson knew and cared about the difference b e ~ e e nholiness and greatness; it is not as though she of all people was careless in her use of language. J

Here is a case in which the embrace of a com~nunityof readerswomen who are poets, and more particularly, lesbian poets-seems to require the exclusion of other readers (a topic we will have to explore more fully in Chapter 5). Having b e p n by rightly marking her differences from Dickinson, Rich comes in the end to a presumption of identity that disables her from certain productive forms of encounter with Dickinson's poetry. hnd this presumption of identity is achieved by relegating alternative interpretadons to sclme more distant and utterly external sphere, where they need not be rehted or even encountered. (Rich doesn't nlgzdc with any of the interpreters of Dickinson whose work she thinks wrong-headed: She merely nsscrts what "the real question" is.') But is this exclusion a contingent requirement of a particular historical situation-which is certainly the case with Woolf's claim that "kilt is useless to go to the great men writers for help": T h e anticipated "hundred years" of the develc~pmentof a wt~men'stradition will open that door-or does it signify an ineradicable difference between the genders? Much contemporary feminist criticism has faced and considered these alternatives. But how does the situation change if we take seriously Bakhtin's view that outsidedness-which, let me spin stress, is not the Cartesian alienation against which much feminist criticism has rightly protested-is a key hermeneutical imperative? If we do take that view seriously, then the task for Rich becomes .not just to acknowledge her differences from Dickinson but to consider how those differences can be productive of understanding. Moreover, readers (including male heterosexual readers) who offer to the reading of Dickinson different k h d s of outsidedness could then be seen to 113ake a valuable contributicIn to the understanding of her work. (This of course is not to say that all interpretations of Dickinsong poems are equally correct-that those who see "My life had stood-a Loaded Gun" as a poem ahout God, those who see it as a poem ahout a male lover, and those who see it as a poem about Dickinsonk own poetic power are somehow ctll right-hut, rather, that all these interpretations, when carefully and responsibly done, illuminate something in Dickinson's work and further the conversation toward its goal of everfuller understanding. It is in that sense that "every meaning will have its homecoming festival.") In short, what I am invoking here, as a lneans of escaping the dilemma of choosing bemeen an all-embracing universality of experience and an exclusionary enforcement of difference, is Milbank's

overtly eschatolugical vision of Christianity as "something like 'the peaceful transmission of tlifference,' or 'differences in a continuous harmony"' (Theoloyy 417). But, as I said back in Chapter 1, without the preservation of difference there can he neither transmission nor harmony. T h e key-and this i s a central theme and problem of Milbankk theology--is to find difference that is purified of the violence of exclusion, This is one of the central tasks of lviroslav VolPs book EXCIZLS~L~TZ /cad Embrtfcc (the language of whose title I have employed from time to time in this chapter and elsewhere): A judgn~entthat n m e s exclrrsion as an evil and diffcrenrjntion as a positive good, then, is itself nut an act of exclusion. 'to the contrary, such judgment is the beginning of the struggle against exclusion. . . . U'1l-r~ rcrnedy for exclusionsly juctgnlents [is] certainly not ""ironic stances.'" Instead, we need more adequate juctgnents based on a distinction bemeen fegitimstc ""Jfferentiatic~n"and illegitimate ""cxclusim" and rnadc with hrniliv (68)

Volf goes on to say that it is the "self-giving love" of "Jesus Christ that provides the center from which "judgments about exclusion must be made and battles against exclusion fought" (71). But of course, on my account this is a chimerically utopian, rather than an eschatologically hopeful, task outside the Christian Church. h d Volf would, I think, agee: It is the Gospel as preached by the Church that alone can give him, a Croat, the strength to embrace his people'., Serbian enemies. (Indeed, it is out of the collapse of Yugoslavia that this particular theological testimony came.) It is within the Church and only within the Church that Quixotic reading can become Fully charitable reading. And in any case, what could a form of reading prompted and gcjvemed by "self-giving love" possibly look like?

T

he phenomenon of revering a text-bowing humbly before its wisdom and authority-is familiar to us chiefly through reli,'WOUS traditions. Its origins, perhaps, may be found in Jewish reverence for the x)rah. In light of the previous discussion of love and knowledge, it may be worthwhile to consider this passage from the Zohar, that great text OF Jewish mysticism: 'Ibrah may be cornpared to a beautihll and stately tnaidea who is sceluded in an isolated chamber of a palace, and has a lover of whose existence she arcme know, For love trf her he passes by her gate unceasingly alld trtm his eyes in all directions to discover her. She is aware that he is forever hovering abaut the palace and what does she d o s h e thrusts open ~asrlzalldoor in her secret chanzber, for a rnanzent reveals her face to her lover, then quickly withdraws it. f le alone, none else notices it; but he is aurare it is from love of him that she has revealed herself to him For that moment, and his hcart and soul and e\,lzr).rhing within lzim arc drawn to her.

So it is with 'Ibrah, which discloses her innerlrzost secrets only to them who love her. . . . Hence, people sbortld pursue the 'lbrah with all their n~ight,so that they might come to bc her Lovers, (Holrz 29)

Perhaps it is in light of such an allegc~rythat one should understand the striking words that the 79lmud atmibutes to ickens9s attimdc is at bononl not eIrm rJtisrmctiw, There is nr) clear- sign that he wants the eisting order to he overthrown, or that he bciieves it would m& very mueh difference if it were overthrown. Far in reality his target is not so much society as "hun~rannature," . . . t Iis whole ""messap"' is one that at Grst glance boh like an enmmous yslatitltdc: If men wcsulcl behave decently the world w~suldbe decent. (5 1-52)"

One would expect a committecl socialist like Onvell to eviscerate this moralism, and he can be sharply critical of it. But only a few pages later in the essay )well quite seriously reconsiders his distinction beween moral criticism and collsnuctive suggestion: I said earlier that Dickens is not ;B the ~cceptedset2se a revolutionary wriite1: But i t is not at all certain that a merely moral critic.ism tsf society Inay not Be just as %revolutionary'-ad revolution, after all, Ineans turning things upside down----as the politico-econorrzic cri ticisrn which is Fashionable at the rnomnt, . . . ""lmen would behave decently the -crrurld wa111d be decent" is not such a platinrde as it sounds. (64-65)

Of the morality that underlay these exhortations, Orwell makes this important statement: "Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code wkch was and on the whole still iS believed in, even by people who violate it. It is difficult otherwise to explain why he could be both read by working people (a thing that has happened to no other novelist of his stature) and buried in U'estminster Abbey" (103). The question we must face now i s whether the various intellectual movements typically grouped under the heading "postmodernism" have ensured that fewer people respond, and even then respond less strongly, to "the idea of human brotherhood." If so then there is all the more reason to insist that only a specifically and substantively C:hristian notion of charity can redeem what is best in Dickensk moral vision. After all, once one has said "If men would behave decently the world would he decent," and acknowledged the truth of the saying, what remains is to account for the very large problem that people often do nor behave decently. mat then! Christianity above all answers the "what then" question. Its purpose is not merely to critique: It has a propht.de witness that, to be sure, sometimes takes the form of denun-

ciation, but, as Oliver O'Donovan writes, "the prophet i s not allowed the luxury of perpetual subversion'' (12). Nor is it the business of Christianity to define or promulgate virtues, and sdll less to concern itself with "values"; rather, it is to build up a community that embodies and proclaims the Kingdom of God. Thus John Milbank's assertion: "It is true that Aquinas, like Augustine, does not recounize any ri" real justice that is not informed by charity, and that he has, in consequence, moved not very far down the road that allows a sphere of secular autonomy; nevertheless, he has moved a little, and he has mtjved too far" (Theoloff,407). On this account, merely to speak of justice as independent of charity is to invite the specter of secular autonomy, of a portion of the world independent of God's dominion. By speaking simply of justice, the Church cedes territory to the impel.ium: It renders unto Caesar what is manifestly not Caesar's. It may not be perfectly clear, in light of the dismissals and av(3wals of the previous paragraph, what place this history of certain ideas about justice has in a book that claims to he a theology of reading. However, this whole culnxral history deeply shapes and informs current acadex~ticdebates about how to achieve or at least contribute to justice through the teaching and criticism of literature: For instance, ClmelI is altnost the inventor of "cult"ura.l smdies"; he is the most often invoked model for a wide-ranging cultural criticism that serves political ends. But he is more honest than most current practitioners about the diffidties, and more c o m ~ t t e t than l most to a heiief thatreal political change is possible; therefore, he really provides not so much a model for as an alternadve to contemporary cultural critique." Moreover, he does not believe that one can move toward social justice by being unjust to the writers one interprets: Many socialists would never drealn of granting Dickens's ideas as much respect as Owell does, but Orwell is extremely wary of the idea that the personal practice of injustice can serve the achievement of social justice. Indeed, his critical but charitable reading of Dickens, seen as exemplary, can enable a critique of a contemporary academic political discourse that has exchanged Dickensian "sentimentality" for something of (paradoxically) far less political value. Thus the story I have been telling bears not only a historical but a kind of allegorical relationship to contemporary literary and culmral studies: I understand much current political criticism to be fundamentally Pardigglean-the academy is full of "inexorable moral Policemen" whose big itleas about justice prevent them from receiving the

kind of loving attention that would enable them to be truly just in their reading-whereas my position, shameful though it may be to say in the current context, is hilly Summersonian. EstherS reply to Mrs. Pardiggle, properly considered and expanded, colltributes to a theolopy of reading by showing how a concern for justice should be governed by the Christian commitment to charity. Having sketched out the historically available alternatives, and having noted that not only Audexlg little story but also Uinahg ditemtna in Adcm Bede indicate the salne sort of p;oblem, I wt~uldsuggest that a hermeneutics of love reveals these as false alternatives: We need not choose bemeen a selfabsorbed hedc~nismand a diligently politicized interpretatic>n that gradgrindingly forces every text and every author into a fixed place in the political grid. A hermeneutics of love-as I hope we have seen, especially in Jane Tompkinsk reading of Buffalo Bill-will he both flexible and responsible: It will have zinizfers~~l obligcrtio~zsbut highly plrrticuIgrfii-ms ofnttergtioz. This is the road to justice, or as the Bible would have it, to shaIm~. T h e problem is to find a conceptual vocabulary adequate to this goal-since, in the current envin~nment,the Dickensian vocabulary is manifestly inadequate, and not only because it is insufficiently Christian. Vital to this search is Kathy Eden's book Hmmrnrrrtics and rhc Rhetwicirl Trtrclition. Eden begins by pointing to a concept that histotle develops in the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics: equity (rpiekei~~). Equity for -kistotle bears a curious relationship to justice: T h e two "are neither absolutely identical nor generically different" (Aristotle 1137a). Equity is different from and inferior to "absolute justice," which we don't in fact possess; but it i s different from and superior to "legal justice," which we do possess. It more closely approximates absolute justice than legal justice ever can, because of the inevitable generality of legal justice: "All law is universal, and there are some things about which it is not possible to pronounce rightly in general terms; therefore in cases where it is necessary to make a general pronouncement, hut impossible to do so rightly, the law takes account of the majority of cases, though not unaware that in this way errors are made" (1 137b). It is because in a minority of cases errors are made that equity must be invoked as "a rectification of law in so far as law is defective on account of its generality" (1 137c)lQ--precisely the way in which Mrs. Pardiggle is defective. Eden demoilsrrates how, over a period of cenmries, this legal principle of equity was adapted to the needs of interpretation: "Ancient

rhetoricians . . . routinely elaborated the principles of interpretation alongside the arLmments for an equitable judgment. . . . Designed, in contrast to legal starute, as a flexible measure, equity could take into account the infinite particularity of human events hy investigating the agents' intentionsv--very broadly conceived as the form or shape of an agent5 whole life-"and thus could accommodate each individual case" (2). One cannot achieve interpretive justice by means of an inflexible application of rules and laws, any more than one can achieve political justice by the same means: In law and interpretation alike, the major thinkers of the ancient world recognized that even the best rules and laws cannot obviate the need for discerning judgment. Thus Gadamer-without referring to the ancient tradidon that Eden delineates-sees immediately that kistotle's ethical scherne offers "a kind of model of the problems of hermeneudcs": 'The interpreter dealing with a traditionaly text tries tcr apply i t tcr himself, But this does not tnean that the text is @ven For him as something universal, that he first understands it per se, and then afteward uses it For particular appiications, Rarcfier, the interpreter seeks no Inore than to understand this univcrsaj, the text-i.e., to understand what it says, what eonsrjtutts the t e x t h e a n i n g and signifieaace. In order to understand that, he must not try to disreprd hirnself and his particular hermcneutical situa~on.Tle ~ n u s relate t the text to this situation if he wants to understanc! at all, (324)

Thus the discerning judgment required by a commitment to equity involves, as a necessary part of understanding "the case," some understanding of oneself. (This seems to me precisely the point that Tompkins makes when she writes, "C;enocide matters, and it begins at hame.?') Thus, too, colltemporary political criticism is Pardiggleail by virme of its refusal to consider the obligations of equiv-~15rhich is to say, by virtue of its snict legalism; by virtue of its disregard of the need for the interpreter to be personally just, as well as to have accurate notions of what social justice is; by virtue of its lack of self-knowledge. It seems to me that one of the most important assumptions, and disabling illusions, of contemporary political criticism is the belief that one can seek political justice through one3 literary criticism without seeking to be a just person. Critics simply asrHmr that justice is conferred upon them by the justice of their cause, or that being just is

something easily achieved-for instance, as Fred Inglis (a notable English proponent of the cultural studies model) argues, simply by doing cultural studies: As he puts it, with tongue only partially in cheek, "Cultural Studies will make you good" (229). Let's unpack this claim. First of all, Inglis is quite straig-hdorward about what is good, because he believes that we all know. That's why he's free to cite as his authority on the subject the "moral admc~niThe Meuni~zgofLife (and tions" that conclude the film Mo~ztyPj~tho~z's that answer the question implicit in the title): "Nothing very special. Try to be nice to people. Avoid eating fat. Read a good book every now and again. Get some walking in. And try to live in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations. And finally here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises to offend the censors" (Inglis 229). Inglis calls these "banal and welcome profundities," and gives his slightly edited version (minus the penises) later in his book: "Find a value; give it a history; see what may he done with it in human purposes. Be careful, bring all your sympathies to bear; hate what is hateful; be good" (240). For Inglis, "this is the wny the bcrt a12d bl-ighte~t ofpr-e~-e~zt-dny stzbilents in the human sciences want t0*1en)72to thi~zkand feel. And having learned to think and feel thus, this is how they want to act and live" (220; original emphasis). Well, if we grant that these are admirable imperatives, how m q we fulfil1 them? Far from showing that "Cultural Studies makes you good," Inglis has Cultural Stltdies tell you to be good. Surely the difference is significant. Even granted the assumpdon that "the best and brightest" students truly want to be so utterly liberal and tolerant-an assumption that no thoughthi person would readily make"--i t is hard to see how a particular set of subjects for study will automatically and of themselves confer virtue upon their stltdents. Inglis seems to have learned nothing from the collapse, in the Great War, of kuroldian kumanisrrx. Inglis is an unusually charming and h n y proponent of these itleas, but in other respects a typical one. The untenability of the assumptions he shares with other cultural critics, coupled with the blithe confidence with which those assumptions are held, ensures that although the "moral Policemen" of current literary ancl cultural criticisin are certainly inexorable, they are ineffectual as well. When Aristotle says that equity is not simply a desideratum but also a virtue that persons must practice, he is speaking a language that modern cultural criticism cannot understand,

So, once again we have seen the usefulness of Aristotelian ethical thc~ughtfor hermeneutics. But of course we have also noted, elsewhere in this study, the limitations of Aristotelian schemes for a hermeneutics of Christian love: T h e virmes that Aristotle h e w and celebrated may have contributed to jusdce in the political context of aristocratic Athens, but they are largely irrelevant to the quest for shulum. These conceptual limitations of Aristc~telianthought make it all the more important that, as Eden explains, the ancient distincdon between equity and "legal justice" passes easily into Christian thought and indeed has its greatest purchase upon us in its Christian form. Eden sees this particularly clearly in the work of Basil the mn~unit)itrf interest," "fX.800)

Here we circle back to a problem invoked repeatedly in this hook, and indeed in this chapter: In Augustine's politics and Basil's her~neneutics alike, such comprehensive and just charity can be achieved only in the life of the Church. The Church is the school for virtue-for charity as the architectonic virme-and it is within the communal practice of

the Church that equitable, "economic" reading lnakes sense. Though rejecting scrupulosity in interpretation, Basil insis6 that the local congregation be scrupulous (he uses just that word) in its obedience to Scripture and to the dictates of the Catholic Church. As Eden points out, it is no accident that the argument for equitable interpretation flourished in the age of the p e a t ecumenical councils, which had the function of prescribing the boundaries beyond which orthodox believefs may not go, For Basil, it is this kamewok of f2it)lfizl ohedierlce to the (;c;spel witness that liberates the reader to read more genen~usly, acccjrdin~to the s ~ i r irather t than the letter, Absent such faithhi ohedience, such reading would exemplify license rather than liberty, antinomiallism rather than the freedom of Christian charity. T h e lessons are, I believe, clear, though daunting: no justice without the precedence and governance of charity; no charity without the guidance of the faithful and obedient church; no church without the Gospel that consdtutes and inspires it." CIharitable readers, equitable and just readers, will always be found here and there--one hopes-but a potent and fully articulatecl hermeneutics of love will arise only from a healthy community of believers. "Our kindness to ten persons" can be made righteous only in that context; only that context can teach us how to make our "circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself." In the life of the Church these become the common and quotidiail elements of justice. Such fully charitable reading, in a just association of persons, will be an ecclesial, not a personal, achievement; and certainly not the achievement of this book. W

"lt theernth to plytheat run tbhfgtb to n pertbon, don't it, I7%1q&ire.iv 1 2 . I ~ C5"teicv,rntdxi~gMS he looked down &m the dcpthr $*bb brandy irnd writer: "~ge,that ith a love if?the u,o~-ld~not d Tbeg-itltel~etbtnJi-ernll; but tbo~~ethpll?g U C Pdf~ fire~r;Pothe? thgr it h ~ t ba wlliy ( f i ~ awn h a f c ~ k t l k ~ t i ~Wz not g c@lcf~Iazil?g> which tbomeholtr or nnot.lser-irh at Ientht nzh bar-d to give u same to, ntb the wqth of tbe dogtb ith!" ,WK C ~ * g d ~ iInoked n d nut @*?lril.?d~~, irnd ~ ~ l n d?to @t-eph. -Dicke~~s,HafedTimm

B

ut this is all too solemn. In my first chapter I wrote these words: "Like all good theology, then, a theology of reading will require an emphasis on discerning judgment: But it will also find its place as part of a theoloby of gift and recreation." And though I haw indeed had something to say about g i f ~ there has been a great deal more about , obligations and precious little about recreation. This imbalance was perhaps necessary, but nevertheless somewhat unfortunate: For the hest Christian theology has always understood love to he the fullest liberation, and has found love best exemplified in play. It is worth noting that pcrichorcsiF--the doctrine of the loving interrelations of the persons of the Trinity, which I disct~ssedin Chapter 2-takes its name from Greek words meaning "to dance around." Dance i s one of the most elemental and universal forms of play.

Thus it is particularly appropriate that the words I have cited as the epigraph to this concluding section are spoken, in Hgrd Tinzes, by the owner of a circus. Sleary has acrually hit upon three, not just two, key ideas that quite forcibly present themselves to a person: first, that %?hereasself-incerest is pemsive it is not ubiqtxitclus, so there can he genuine love b e ~ e e nand among people; second, that that love is not uttefi chacatic, hut bas at- least someGmes its own pewliar strucmre, its own habimal manner of working, its own "way of calculating or not calcula ting7?-though, to be sure; a way inaccessible to arative analysis of Aristotle's ethical writing challenges the key point made by Maca ssomething prior to reaLnqre, which is that AttpsrineS notion of v o l ~ ~ t as son or passim is unprecedented in ancient thought. For instance, near the beginning a f his book Kenny focuses on the key categories in Aristotle that help us to understaad the difference between voluntary aad involuntary action: '1"hey are '"some affective state, . . . some cognitive statc.," and a third state that is " " a d i n a t i o n of both cognition and desire" (53). 'l'kus reason and passion remain &e basic categol-ies. Perhaps the k y interyretive issue here is what we are to make of the central histotelian term ukrasitl, often translated as "weakness ofwritl" ((see Ilahl, especially eh.9). What rrzakes oneS will weak? Kenny does not show that the cause lies elsewhere than in malfortnatitrn of the reason and the passims. 2. Nussbau~rzexplains why she translates pkilia sirnply as ""love": AAstotleS use of it ""includes many relationships &at would not be classified as ;Friendships. 'l'he Love of rlzother and child is a paradipatic case ofphz'tta;all close fmily relations, including the relation of husband and wife, are so characterized. Furtl~ern~ore, our Yriendshipkan suggest a relationship that is weak in affect relative to some other relationship, as in the exi~rcssion'just friends.' Aristotle deals with relationships of varying d e ~ e e of s intinlay and depth; a

few of them may be weak in affect. But pkiISn includes the very stronpst a& fcctiwe relationships tl-rat human beings fom; it includes, hrthemore, relationships that have a p a s k ~ n a t u e m acomponent" l (F"rr;lgilz"nsas persons rather than as ""cognized things": '""'l'he genuine life of the personaliv is rrzade available only through a dialogic penetration of that personal it^ dudng whiiclz it li-ceiy and reciprocally reveals itself" (59). '1''hs is precisely what Alyt~shadoes. Therefcjre, deslite the dangem "that f3akhtin properk iden~fies,the anala@caf understanding of persons rooted in Christian doctrines of creation and sin rarz he a powerfitl toof in the grcrwh of lcnre for one's neightoor. 12. Bakhtin is so insistent that this abstracting and ol>jectiij;ingofthe ""I'iis ""absolutely alien to the ethical event of being" b h ~ c s cof his belie6 noted briefly above but repeatedb expressed throughmt BaMntin5 early work, that ethics is properly understood only in relation t-o the "answerable act'"@$tupok), and that the truly answerable act is alkvays histo~tallyconcrete and pmticular (in this ~ g a r dsee , es]i>e&ally7i"magd 30). This is the sense in which Rakhtin's early work is rnost thoroughly anti-Kantian: f t understands the abstracting and univcrsalizing of ethical dccisionrnalcing inherent in Kantkategtxical imgera~veas utterly inix~~ical to true ethical-that is, answerableaction. On this point see iZiIihailo1ric (65ff).

Interlude B: Transfer 0% Ch;ar.tsma, I. As Bi-ian Uayd has witten in a recent essay on the novel, ""Kjabtrte think hirnself devoted to Shade and Shade5 poerrz ('Such hearts, such brains, wouf d be unable to comprehend &at one's attachment to a masteqicce may be utterly w e w h e l ~ n g " )yet , he caflnot make the eff;,rt to unclerstand the particuiars of ShadeGmaginative world (words, things, custotrzs, allusions, intentions), so that his perfom~anceas editor becomes an exact itllage of all moral ~nycrpia,all failure to rnake the effort to respect the sheer difference of another individual" (""Shade'"). Kinbote5 ""atachraent" requires none of the attentiveness that L hwe identified as the first reqrrirenlent of charitable reading. 2. Btryd points out in his great biogralhy of N a b o h that, although Kinhote does not l i ~ ~ othe w ""pale fire" passage, he echoes it mrice, once in a way that would make hinlself the rnoon and Shade the sun: ""T~avcreread, not without pleas~~re, 1ny coxI1II1ents to his lines, and in many cases have caught tnyseIf borromring a kind of opalescent light- from my poet's fiery orb, and unconsciously aping the prose style of his own critical essays" (81). h d once the other way aronnct, in the passage l cited eadier in which Knbote sees in the poerrz ""a Iong ripplewake of ibis] glory" (297). 1 am indebted here to BoyclhhoIe chapter on PczIe Fire (425456).

Chapter 3 I. "Essai sur Le don" originally appeared in the I025 vulumc ofA~rn&Sodoiogiqrrq a journal devoted to socioloky in the Drrrlcheilllian mode (iMaur;s was Ilurfieim's nephew). 2. There are, of course, different kinds of stmggles, and cvcn if tilinkrs agree upon the ene~z~ies that require ~sistance,they tnay counsel ctifferent Fornzs of resisrance. As Lester H, IIunt points out, Nictzsche's enzphasis on the need b r "wcrcoming" can sound Kantian, but the kind of ovcrcolning Nietzsche has in t n i d is very different than KantS (80). I , In f i e preEace to his stimulating collection A 1Vietzsche fiegnlrr*, R. J. Hollingdale assembles a set of Nietlsche's reflections on how hc shouid be read, hcrw he actually is read, and why he is read so badly, A profound tensicrn between the desire to be understood and tbe desire to rexrzain impewious to understanding is evident in almost every passage. 4. Some scholars have questioned whether histotle really endorses the portrait of ~rlagnanimitythat he sketches in the Ethics, in part because it seems to clash with his emphasis on &c need for friendship: The magnanitnolrs man can seem to be quite self-s~zfficientin a way that Aristotle, as we have seen, criticizes. But this need not be the case. For the magnanin~ous man there are few potenrial fi-icnds, because lze has few equals, fellow cirizens with whom he can have a genuinely mutual and sjq~~metrical relationship. lIut this is not to say that he can or would wish ta live without kiends altogether, It map s h p l y "u that his posses"ion of many vitzues--"Magnanitnity seelns to be a sort of crown of the virtues, because it enhances then1 and is nemr found apart kotn then. 'i'his makes it hard to be truly magnanimous, because it is impossible without all-mud excellence" (E~bir?it f 2 jb3 5)--enables hi113 better to srzmive what xtissbaun~ wr~uldcalf the bad luck of not cczlrzing into contact with rrzany equals. What is ct~riousabout this form of bad luck, of course, is that one is put in danger of it precisely by bcing exceptionalfv vimous: Ctn the other handt the virnrr,us person is better able to withstand the blours of misfort-me than tbe less virmous, [l'he peculiarigl: of this situation perhaps helps to explain Arisrodcb conh~sit~g and apparently incornistent comments on the ma~manimousperson"tseqx~meto 1~0ththe hestoural and the denial of external rewards.) Sa Aristotle is not, on this matter, as Platonic as he tnq sound: The magnanimous person is not really self-sufficient. But it is the inppcrlientb Platonic character of kistotle's picture of magnanirniq that appeals to Nietzsche, 5 . Lmmcnsely relcirant lzerc are W. H. Auben's reflections on the difference bewcen classical conredy (Aristophanes, Ylautcrs, rlerence) and CKristi2n . . . is not only possible within a Christian carzedy (Shakespeare): ""(me* socictq: but capable of 2 much greater breadtlz an3 depth &an classical corne d ~C:reater . in i~readthbecause classical come* is based upan a Jivisim trf

znankind into two classes, those who have at.ete and those who do not, and only the second class, bols, shameless rascals, slaves, are fit suhects for corne d ~But . Chistiaa comedy is based upon the belief that all men are sinners; no one, h e r e fore, vlrhatever his rank or talents, can claim irnrrzunity from the cotnic exposure and, indeed, the more t.irmorts, in the Greek sense, a tnan is, the more he realizes that he descmes to be exposed. (;reater in depth because, while classical cornedy believes that rascals should get the drubl~ing they deserve, Chrisdnn comedy believes that we are brbidden to judge others and that it is our duty to t'or@ve each other. In classical comedy the characters are exposed and punished: when the curtain falls, the audience is laughing and those on stwe are in tears. Ln Clxristiaa comedy the characters arc exl;r>osecland hrgiven: when the curtain fallsl the audience and the cbaracters are laughing togetfier" (l2jfer-k 177). 'Xb receivc: a gift is, in UietmcheS scheme, m achowiedge oneself to be without nretr; it renders con~icaiany claims one might make to virtue, at least the great tirtues. 6..The most brilliant portrap1 X know of the gresu~nptionthat wo~.ldannul the need for hope is found in W H. R d c n Q o e r n ""Under Sirius." Auden entisions a late-Rtman poet and rhetorician named Fortrrnattrs who fails t-o percei~rehis forrunate scate and instead mopes about listlessly-"Lgng in bed till noon, . . . [hid much advertised epic not yet bepnD-wishing that "%me earthquake would astonish / O r the wind of the Comforter's wing / Unlock the prisons and translate I 'l'he slipshod gathering,'? But Auden warns I'orrrmatus of the dangers accompanying such trinxnphaiist presumption: "It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe / 'f%latall in &c end shall he urelf,I Rut first of all, rerrzertzber, I Sa the Sacred 23ooks foretell, / "I'ke rotten fruit shall bc shaken. . . . / How will you answer when From their qualming spring / The immcrrtal n ~ n l h fly s shr.ieljng, / And out of the open sky / "i'he pantocraric riddle breaks:--- / "\4%o are you and why?" (CoIIerted hems 545-546).

Interlude C : Quixotic Reading I. One recalls here Xicholson Uak@r"sconfession that 'VpJike is a better writer Ehan f arn nrzd he is srtzarter than I am" (1 34). It is a hunlbling conkssion; on the other hand, it justifies &c loving attention he lzas gi.r.en to Updike. '1"he sarne can be said for Rich5 attitude tc~wardIlickinson. So~neof this lanpage will seem merely Fonrzal, a nod in the direction of hrrrrzilir); rather &an &c thing itself; perl~lapseven h-wocriticat. But gestures of this kind are impofimt as reminders of our limitations-reininders to ourselves and to our readers, It is exrremely ixnpomnt that the littie constellation of rhetorical gestures made by K& has almost completely disappeared from criz-icai discourse, s s that we 110 longer wen pretend to humilit?;: Ilpocz.isy may well be the tribtree that vice pays to virtue, but when vice ceases to pay ~ i l r u eany tri btrtes

at all, we have a proble~n,Auden is useful here: ""X p o d literary crirics are rarer than good poets or novelists, one reason is &c nawrc of human egoism. A p e t t ~ ar novelist has to learn t t be ~ htlmkle in the face of h s sxlbject lnatter which is life in general, But rhe subject Tnaeter of a critic, before which he has to l e m to be humble, is made up of authors, h a t is to say, of human individuals?and this kind of humiliq is n~uchmore difficult to acquire. It is far easier t.o say-Tdife is rrzore intportant than anphing 1 can say about it'-than sayMr.& !, work is more in~portantthan anfihing t can say &out it"Dye7-5. X). 2. For a historical erryloration of this theme, see the first chapter t ~ Elaine f ~ "The ~ Fernale 2 ~ "Itadition" "-36). Showalter's A Liter-asuk-e of 1;5eir 0 Sorneone could perhrm a great service Eor scholarship by dlowing lzaw this comtnzction of a female tradidon resembles and differs &trm earlier pojects in the text-centered building of coxnmunifies----for instance, the ~nedieval the Ext, especiaily his sevprc~jectsdcscrihcd by Brian Stock in Li~~enil/?gfirr enth chal>ter,on ""TexmalCorn~nunities." 3, At one point Kich urrites, ""Iknow that for me, reading her poems as a child and then as a y o w g girl already seriously writing poetry, she was a problematic fipre" (167). But Kich attril~utesthe "pdt>lematic" natrrre of the encounter to the ""ha-\.ily edited" and bo'urdlerized editions in which the poetry was tlzen available, ant to any distance--fertile or otherwise--befcsieen herself and Dickinson. 4, "i'his comldexiq of response is sensitively traced throughout Roger Lrfndints ertcellent biographfr of l)ickinson, 5 . In al? imporrant essal;, Uonald Marshall shuws how a modcl of knowledge gained through 'kconceptruaf rationafity" ean cone to dispt ace, even obviate the need for, intetyretation: ""ltruth is to con~cto us &rough inteqretation, conceptual rationaliv cannot be what we are seeking, In the turn to reflection here, we are no Ionger listening to Ehe text hut rnaking it the rrzere occasion to reiterate what we have legitimated on other grc~unds.m e r e the text resists this imposition, it will be conde~~med or i p o ~ dbut , that collaptie of it~terpreta.cioncalls into quesc-jon not the text but the attempt to control it in this wayt' (75-X). M'hat Kich appm"1 m is nut ""concepmairatimality'%ut ayerience, feeling, alld inmition; t~owever;her al>pcalhas precixly the same effect of causing her, at tixnes, to stop ""listening to the text" and to ~nake Z>ickinson"sompica ted poems "the mere occasion to reitera ten what she lzas that eqerience, keling, and inwition. learned

Chapter 4 I. See Susan If andeirnanhmasrcrfirl discussion of this topic in The kYhyers ofMoses (171-1 78). She is commenting both s n Levinasg ""Loving the More than GodP"IJtfic~klr- 142-145) and on Derrida's "Criolence and Metapl~ysics:An Essay on the 'IBc)&t of f5mmanuel I,evinas'"weitZ~zg 79-2 53).

2 , d,ikewise, fczr Cardinal Neurrnan, the vital znove from ""notir>nal"to "real" aasscnt (a distinction L mentioned in Chapter 2) is enabled by the practice of meditation: ""'lb the devout and spiritual, the Divine L%'orci speaks of things, not znerefy of nodons. And, again, to the disconsolate, tbe terny~ted, the pcqlexed, the suffel-ing,therc cotnes, by tneans of their very trials, an enlargeinent of thought, which enables thein to see in it what they never saw before. Fiencefonh &ere is to therrz a reality in its teachings, which they recognize as an argument, and the best of argutnents, for its divine origin. Hence the practice of mediation on the Sacred 'Text; so highly thought of by Catholics, Reading, as we do, the Gospels Frorrz our youeh up, we are in danger of becoming so fian~iliarwith thcm as to be dead to their for-cc, and to view h e i n as a mere history. 'f'he purix~se,then, of meditation is to realize thern; to rnake the facts which they relate scand out belbre our rninds as ohjects, such as may be appropriated by a hith as Living as the imagination which apprehends thein" ((79). 3, O n the role of rrzemorization and reminiscence in the rnonascerywhich involve thc continual pronunciation of rhc wards, so that learning by heart is also ""learning by nr fn ~ ybook mt~r Bactlme of' Yystmr: Gnr2ge a ~ r dGonti;lluipliesto hern~eneuticsas well. I 1. As is so often the case, lnglis is blithely unaware of the boundaries of his tolerance. Ifc insisrs that his model of Cultural Studies "in no way instnlcts tlr commands a way of &ought: it is part of its genteel liberalism not t-o,'?f-e has not noticed, it appears, &at in the immediately pr~ecIirtgparagraph he said that "we had better accept as a straight truism that the study of c-ulmre, as of nature, teaches atheism" (2 (23 1). 12. An itlabiliv to recognize this chain of necessaly relations weakens the argument of Martha Nussbaum's provocative essay ""Equity and i4vZcrcy" Lacking a g ~ l m d i n gin Christian chariq the equitable Inercy Nusshaum rightly counsels as a legal pinciple also lacks persuasi~repower. Why rrzust we be merciful, especially to the unmercifitli How can the will m vcngeancc be repfaced by merciful impulses? Moret~vel;Xussbaum can offer only a negative definition of rrzercy; centering her arptnent on the Latin form (clemmtia), she cites as autlzoritativc Scneca"sdcfilaitlion: "the inclination of the mind tc~wardleniency in exacting l>:tnishnent.'"'I'his nzercy unlike the mercy that flows from Christian love, apparently can be characterized only by what. it rehains konl doing.

I . 'f'hese reflec~onsmight encourage us Further ta reconGder the usehlncss of I-izfizinga"s~cl-inition of play. Flis points seem to me generally sensible, and yet to contain sonrething of the purism of Dcmida5 definition of the gift. Play cannot simply be identified with leisure: It is one of the things we do with our leisure time, thou& not the only thing-think of ChestersonS; essay "In Praise of Idlcness,'Ydleness being leisure hut not play. Play certainly does require a rneasure of freedorrz from o'uliga.cion and responsihilicy, and therefore is strongly vuluntaristic---thus thc atusurdir):of 1Wiss I-lavisham, onterping Pip and ITstelfa to pfay so she can in Dickens's t;rwr Expectafioia~~ watch chent-and it does have its own d e s , But really, it never rerrzains hermetieally scaled off Eron1 the rest of life: 'f'he nlles of play bear close resemblance to ather kinds of rules, indeed are often derived from nanleiwrely practices, and what we do and learn when we play is alw;z)rsbeing cornpared

ety, ta link G b b e t t with Edmund Burke, vlrhorrz in some ways he closely resembles. 7 . Similarly, I have contended elsewhere that the nineteenth-centuv novel simply is the philosophical discourse of Liberalism, which is constitutionally unmenable to dialectical defense. See tny review of Exi~~en~itz2ists a~zdM~JTZCS, by Iris lUurdoch? in Fkrst Thitzgs Cfanuav 1'1510), 4044, R. OmellQpoint about Dickens5 failure to make positive recorrzrnendations is, interestingly9recapitulated in. tf i~nmelhrb'sjudgnent &out Garble: "IZis readers . . . lt~okectto him for a moral cl.itique of inseimtiom, p~licies, and doctrines which chey tbernselves subscribed to, for which they (and perhaps C:arlylc himself) had no pracrjcal alternatives, but whicl-r they suspected were ~nomllydubit-ztrs alld even dangerous" "Cl+). O m e l l h i e w of Dickens's politics is s h r e d by Rayx~zondWillia~ns:11ickens"s""oosives do not lie in social ix-nprovement, but rather in what he sees as the detncnts of human nature-pwf'scmd &kindness, syrm~pathy~ and forbearance. It is not the model facwry against the satanic ~rzili,nor is it the hrrrrzanitarian espmi~nentagainst selfish exploitation, It is, rather, individual persons against the System, In so f"ar as i t is social at all, it is the Circus apinst Ctzketown" (Cutt~~r-c "395). (""I'he Systenz" is of corrrse Cobbett's characteristic way of referring t-o the whole si>cioecmon~icorder against wl-rieh he protmw in the nanle of an older Inore "organic" arder-though sotnetimes he offers the still simpler designation ""Ir,"X will have rnore to say &out Coketo~rnand the Circus in the last pages of this book. C). Terry Eagletcm has made this point very nicely: '"here are some kincls of criticism-Orwefi wo~.lddo as an exaxrzple-vlrhich are a good deal ~rzal-e politically radical than their blufily cornmtsnsensieal style would suggest. For all his dyf2,epsia about shocl;headed lUarxists . . . OntiellH polities arc n~uch tnore Far-reaching than his conventianally-minded prose would srrggest. With much post-colonial wl-iting, the situation is just the reverse. Its Namb y n t t h e o ~ t i c a avant-gardism l conceals a rather modest political agenda. W e r e it venmres p l i t i c d proposals at ail, which is rare enough, they hardly have the revolutionary 6lan of its scandaious s p ~ u l a t i o n son desire or the death of Man tlr the end of Ilistory. 'Fhs is a feamre shared by Derrida, Fatlcaulit and others like them, who veer l~etweena cuIt of theoretical 5natdt1ess" or 'monsrmsilq..hnd a rnorc rcstraineb, rchrmist sort of politics, rctrcating from the one front to the tlther depending on the direction of the critical fire.99 10, It is a fgscinating if birrcr ircmy &at the Court of Chancery that Dickens satir.izes so powerfillly in flle~tkHogre is a key branch of what in England is called " q u i q law": Courts like Chancery were devised spe'ifimily for the purpose of rerne+ng the deficiencies, dlrc to generality, of the common law courts, "f'his task, needless to say, they did not invariably accomf,lish. It is

Notes with what we do and learn in the rest of our lives. Habits of mind and temperament formed in hours of play are not automatically suspended when play is suspended. In the end we may have no more success in separating play from “real life” than Derrida had in distinguishing the gift from reciprocal exchange.

AcEcroyd, Peter. Dickms. Xew 'r'ofk: f IarperCollins, 1 0 0 ,

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"ibmpkins, Jane. ""At the 13uEfa%oBill ;\rluseuxrz-June 1988." In The Bwt American Essgys IY9.I. Ed, Joyce C:arol Oates, New b r k : X c h o r cyi- Fields, 1991, . West @*Evqthi~zg: 7 % Inner~ L@ @Westenrs. New York: Oxford University Prcss, 1982. '1iollo-t)" h t h o n y . Pbi12ecksFitfn. 1869. E7c,rld9sC;lassics edition. &fc,rd: OxFord tiniversiv Press, 1982. \ianhouzcl; Kcvin, Is 'fbe~aen LWe~z~?i~zg in This ExtP The Bitile, tbe Rr.llcJr.4 and the M o ~ - f ~ $lite~-ary iiy K~uw/eclge.Cirand Rapids, illich.: %ondervan, 1908. ""'l'he Spirit a f Understanding: Special Revelation and Cieneral Iermeaeuties," In Disc4linilzg h e n e l r t i c s : licltl.rp~-etrafZon ilz Clji-istitznfir~pec~ive, ed. Roger Lrrndin (pp. 13 1-166). Grand Kag>ids,Mich.: Eerdmsns, 1997, Miroslav, Exdwion n~zdE;rhrr~ce:A Ibcolugitial Exphi-dztp'on ~f Identity, Olherfaess,rrcrd KeconciIii(k~ion. Xash.ville: Ai~ingdon,1WV. B k bb, Steph en 1-l The Gzpiiplg Cud: A Tsp"i'~zirn~-ian Etbic3- af*Evvcess.Oxford: OxFord University Prcss, t WOG. Weil, Simone. JVniti~~gfGr God. 'kans. Emma Craufurd. Xew Ytjrk: t Iarpet; 1951, IYesley, Charles. " " h dCan It Be 't'llar I Should Chin." In A B~~??hzg n3d Q LYht17i~rg Ligbr: EfzgEisbL$pil;;l;l~iicy ib2 &C Age of Wesie~ ed. Uavid Lyle Jeffrey (p. 262). Grand Rapids, Mich,: Eerdmans, 1957, Wii ken, Kobest L. Keme~~behng fhc (J'bri~*tig~ Past. Grand Rapids, Mich.: I76 on the ""etnotionat-volitional morncnts," "-90, 147, 154-155 eschatological \.ision of, 13 3-1 3 5 on Faitlzfulncss, "3, 98 an heten)gl:lossia, 86-87 on incarnation vs. ernbczdirnent, 89-90 on kenosis, 146-15 6 on tnonolo@caf and dialogical forms of knowledge, 74 an mtznolo@ealand dialogical reading, 52 on outsidcdncss, 86-87, 138, I48 on responsihilit): or answcrabilir~.; 78,89-92 on self-love, 8+8G, 145 unfinaiizabiliry, 83, I 30 Bamcs, Jt~lian,119-1 29, t 24, 15% Barth, KarI92,2Y, 33, 110 Banhes, RoXand, 1R Basil the (;reat, St., 141-144 Benninb"t:on?C:eoEErey, $4, I 62n Bcrraard of Claiwaux, St., 1,5713 Blake, Wilfial-r~,533 Bloarn, Harold, 74, X 03 Blumenberg, Ff ans, 19-22

Ranhoeffer, flietrieh, 29-30, 67, 106,122-123,150n Booth, Wayne, 32,6666 Iloyd, Brim, 163x1 Bmns, Gcrald, on ""Cartesian hen~~eneutics," 15-16, 32,70,811 Ruechner, Frederick, 5S34 Burkc, Kenneth, 96 Cgr-1:ta.rand clipickitns, 16, 1"f 3 1. . See also Augustine, St. Carlyle, 't'hornas, 135-1 3S, 170n Cavil!, Stanley, 9, 34, 87, 153n Ccrvan tcs, i212iqucl dc " " h e van of Glass," 34-3 5 Dtrn Quixste, 54,91-92 C:hurch, Christian, 48-50, 100, 111-2 12,143-144 Cicero, X43 C:lcment of Aexandria, 13 Cobbett, BTitlias~~, 13 5, 16% &'onnrrilr*e$as cslrrzpared ta sgvoir, 6--8,43 Crites, Stephen, 53 Cultural studies, I 4 0 4 1 19-2 3 Curiosity (ctlr1'0sP'tizs)~ I)ante, 22-23 Davidson, Donatd, 3 1-3 2 Derrida, Jacques, 34, 554, 79-8 1,9& 162n,168n, 171n Dickens, C:hades, 13 1-1 3 7 Bter;tk Holdse, 131-134, 138 Ha?-d Time-r, 145- 150 Greut Expe~~~tz'o~i7s~ 17 1n Dicldnson, Ernily, 93-94> 97-99, 11.3 Dillle, Mbrccht, 1GOn Dilthey, E%lbelm,14-2 5 X>ostoevsky, Fyodor, 56-5 7, 106105,167n

Eagletun, 'Itrry, 17011 Ebeling, Gcrhard, 11-1 2 Eden, !&thy, 13 8-1 4 4 Edwrards, Jonathan, 20 Eliot, C;corge Adcdm Bede, 25-30, 110, 128-1 30, 138 on Dr. Cumming, 2 6 L B Emerson, Car$, 52-53,168n Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1.10-1 1 1, 114,118,128 Engel, Monroe, 147 Error, 14-1 7 Fcuertnaeh, Ludwig, 27-2 8 Fish, Sranley, 1%n, 1 5 h , 1(,8n Foucault, ~Uiehel,168n, 170n Eendship, 32-3 1,4648,5&67, 81,8'1-88,112, 1.58~1 C;adamer, I lans-Georg, 1 6 1 17, 3 1-32> 45-46? 50-51, 1.39, 159~1,lG1n C 3bhc~n,Edward, 53 C2 fts, 24-2 5, Chaprer 3 pm-~im,5451 (;lidden, David, 15 5 n C;oethe, juhann EToIfgang w)n, 24 Cirace, 149-1 SO C;rondin, jean, 15 9 n

Itlithank, John, 14,49--SO, 8 1, Jaeger, Wemer, 147 99-100,112,115,137, 16ln James, Henry, 37-41,43, 159xa, 1 6 2 ~ wille er; J. T lillis, 147 Jauss, l Ians Rohert, l 5 7n Jeffrey, l)a\.id XJyfe, 12-1 3, 103 ICliXton, John Pargdise l i o 20-2 ~ ~ ~1, 15611, 15712 Jeronw, Sr., 12-1 3 ~Woltmanr.1, Jiirgen,89-90, 96 Jesus Christ, 1, 3,25, 52, 65, 89, Itlorrisctn, Kart F:, 104 100,XOLC915lSn Morson, Gary S a d , 52-53,56-5T in Bakhtin, 106 ~Wurdoch,Iris, 1, 78, 104, 118 and Xietzche, 83-84 on the purpose of parables, 4047 Xahokov?Wadirnir the mofold con~n~andment, 9-10, 12nle Fire, 54, 69-7 3, T 5 , 9 X 30,32 Newman, John Henry950, 16711 Johnson, Sarnuel, 29, X 58n Xiehuhr, Reinfiold, 88-89, 111-1 12, Kenn)r, Anthony, XdOn 125 Kenoxis, Chapter 4 pa;xsi~~ Nictzschc, Friebrich, 24, 35, 79-88, Kerx~~ode, Frank, 4-041 91-92, 105, IbiEn,165n Kierkegaard, Ssren, X 0, 11,29,10, Nussbauxn, Manha, 1,6,434'7, 32,55,86, 107-108, 118, 149-150,160n, 17111 120-124, 1.5411, 15811 Xuttalf, A.D., 156n Knapp, Stephen, 2 Nygr"n, Anders, 25 ~ o w l c sDgvid, , 13 LeC:lerq, Jean, 10.2 Idetinas, Krnznanuel, 102, 110 Lewis, C S . , 3,48,66 Lrmdin, Rc~gel;16612 iblacDonald, George, 48 MacTnqre, Afasdair, 2-3,45,4-7, 153n, 157n, 158n, 160n, 161n iblagnanitniql M-87 iblanpe1, Mberro, 102 iblarsl~all , I>unaId, 16Gn :Wartin, T lenri-Jean, 103 Mauss, l.tlarcel, 78-79, 84 iblcilaenbcr, Gilbert, 1.5811 :Wendelson, lli,d~rard,128 MichaeZs, IValter Benn, 2 iblilhailovic, Alexaasbcr, 52,5+5 5, 61, 109, 16211

Pagan literature Chnsrjan usc of, 12-14,141-143 Pascal, Blatse, 150 Paul, St., 3,23, 31,64, 104, 154n, 162~ I)e~7-icho~-esils, 63 , 145 Petrarch, 103 PhiIoKgIia, the, 109 Pieper, Jose&89-90,96 Plato, 44-45 Play, PostItrcli.pmximr Sec also "pleasures of reading"

Pleasures of reading, X 7-2 5. See also "play" Practical mtionality91, 32 Relational goods, 4649,80--8 X Re\rcrcncc before t e x ~ t,Q 1-1 03 Ech, Adrienne, 93-99,113 Ricoeur, Paul, 80, 82, 88-88 Roilc, &chard, 10 Korty, Echard, 96 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 60 r S g ~ ~ i ~" C>O B ~ T ~ ~ ~ I C " Schtvcickan, X%troci~-rio,93,96 Shakespeare, William M&&Ado Abogt Nothi~z~g, 3-8,2 5, "I,5 2 Othello, 3, 84, 15311 Tir~0l.l r-rfAzr5etz~*, 72 hc;halo~rz,X 3 8, 143 Soiovy~v~ Uadirnil; 110, t 6711 SC)izheIl_i~yn, Aiefisandr, 107 Spinoza, Baruch, 15 Steiner, George, 39,59,6") 102-103 Stock, Briian, 17, 15711 Suspicion, hennenelltics 06 Chaptcr

Updike, John, 70-71,73--75, 16511 Vsllejo, C@sar,19 Vanhoozer, Kcvin, 155n Mrgil as character in Dante, 22-23 read by Augustine) 18-20,2 3, 142 Volf9iViroslav, 100

Znhar, the, 102-1112