Religion, Literature and the Imagination: Sacred Worlds (Continuum Literary Studies)

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Religion, Literature and the Imagination

Continuum Literary Studies Related titles in the series: Contemporary Fiction and Christianity, Andrew Tate Ecstasy and Understanding, edited by Adrian Grafe

Religion, Literature and the Imagination Sacred Worlds

Edited by Mark Knight and Louise Lee

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Mark Knight, Louise Lee and contributors 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-8470-6417-2 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors 1. Introduction Mark Knight and Louise Lee 2. Notes toward a Supreme Addiction: The Theology Fiction of William Blake and Philip K. Dick Geoffrey Hartman 3. God’s Little Mountains: Young Geoffrey Hill and the Problem of Religious Poetry Kevin Hart 4. Religion, Truth and the ‘New Aestheticism’ Robert Eaglestone

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5. The Deconstruction of Christianity: From the Hand of God to the Hand of Man Arthur Bradley

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6. Deity in Dispatches: The Crimean Beginnings of Muscular Christianity Louise Lee

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7. Israel Zangwill, Jewish Identity and Visceral Religion Jo Carruthers

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8. I Am Not Walter Benjamin John Schad

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9. ‘The Oldest Dream of All’: Heaven in Contemporary Fiction Andrew Tate

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Contents

10. De Quincey’s Uses of the Bible: Biblical Time and Psychological Time Jonathan Roberts

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11. Re-imagining Biblical Exegesis Christopher Rowland

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12. Saving Literary Criticism Mark Knight and Emma Mason

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Notes Index

162 187

Acknowledgements

This volume emerged from a conference on religion and literature at Roehampton University in October 2007 and we would like to thank everyone who participated in that event and made it such an enjoyable occasion. Thanks also go to John, Georgie, Jo and Sam for their patience and forbearance as we worked on this collection. ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’, from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. ‘God’s little Mountain’ (16 lines) and 11 lines from ‘Genesis’ originally published in For the Unfallen taken from Selected Poems by Geoffrey Hill (Penguin books, 2006). Copyright © Geoffrey Hill, 1959, 2006. Excerpts from ‘God’s Little Mountain’ and ‘Genesis’ from New & Collected Poems, 1952–1992 by Geoffrey Hill. Copyright © 1994 by Geoffrey Hill. Reprinted by permissions of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Notes on Contributors

Arthur Bradley is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He is the author of Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy (2004), Derrida’s Of Grammatology: A Philosophical Guide (2008) and (with Andrew Tate), The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11 (forthcoming, 2010), as well as numerous essays on continental philosophy, cultural theory and literature. He is currently working on a book entitled Originary Technicity: Continental Philosophy of Technology from Marx to Derrida. Jo Carruthers holds a joint position in the Department of English and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Bristol, where she is a Research Councils UK Academic Fellow. Her research interests include reception theory, the Book of Esther and the festival of Purim, and the nexus of religious and national identity and literature. She has published various articles on these subjects and is the author of Esther Through the Centuries (2007). Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published on a range of issues and writers in contemporary philosophy and literature, and on literary theory, historiography and the Holocaust. He is the Series Editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers. Kevin Hart holds the Edwin B. Kyle Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where he also holds courtesy professorships in the Departments of English and French. His most recent books are The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago University Press) and Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion (Notre Dame University Press). He is the author of several volumes of poetry, the most recent being Flame Tree: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) and Young Rain (Bloodaxe). Geoffrey Hartman is Sterling Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Among his many books are The Unmediated Vision (1954), Wordsworth’s Poetry (1964),


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Beyond Formalism (1970), Saving the Text (1981), The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996), Scars of the Spirit (2002) and The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (2004), winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism. His most recent book is A Scholar’s Tale (2007), an intellectual memoir. Mark Knight is Reader in English Literature at Roehampton University. He is the author of Chesterton and Evil (2004), Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (co-written with Emma Mason, 2006), Biblical Religion and the Novel: 1700–2000 (co-edited with Thomas Woodman, 2006) and An Introduction to Religion and Literature (2009). His next book is provisionally entitled Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Development of the NineteenthCentury Novel. With Emma Mason, he is joint series editor of New Directions in Religion and Literature (Continuum). Louise Lee recently completed a PhD at Roehampton University on Charles Kingsley and the politics of authorship. She is now a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at King’s College London, researching late Victorian fiction and nineteenth-century scientific accounts of laughter. Emma Mason is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (2006) and The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (2010); and a co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (2009) and The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (2010). She has previously collaborated with Mark Knight on NineteenthCentury Religion and Literature: An Introduction (2006). Jonathan Roberts is a lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of William Blake’s Poetry (2007), The Bible for Sinners (with Christopher Rowland, 2008), and the forthcoming Blake. Wordsworth. Religion (2010). He is also co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (2009) and The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (2010). Christopher Rowland is Dean Ireland Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford. He has pioneered attempts to encourage reception history by setting up the Centre for the Reception History of the Bible in Oxford and writing on the history of interpretation of the Book of Revelation and the effects of Ezekiel’s merkabah vision in Christianity. He is at present completing books on early Jewish mysticism and the interpretation of the New Testament and William Blake’s biblical hermeneutics.

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John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Lancaster. His most recent book, Someone Called Derrida: An Oxford Mystery (2007), is a real-life detective narrative centred on Jacques Derrida’s secret Oxford life and involves murder, trauma, and an English public school in the middle of the Second World War. The opening chapter was dramatized for BBC Radio 3 in October 2009. The text that appears in the present collection is from a novel called Nowhere Near London. Or, I Am Not Walter Benjamin. The opening scenes were read on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb in January 2009. Andrew Tate is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He is the author of Douglas Coupland (2007) and Christianity and Contemporary Fiction (2008), as well as several articles on contemporary fiction, literature and theology, and Victorian literature.

Chapter 1

Introduction Mark Knight and Louise Lee

We would like to begin by listening to some unaccountable sounds in Sigmund Freud’s head: When I was a young man living alone in a foreign city, I often enough heard my name suddenly called by a beloved and unmistakable voice, and made a note of the exact moment in time when this aural hallucination occurred, thereafter asking my family anxiously what had been happening at home just then? The answer was nothing.1 A beloved and unmistakable voice. It is a seductive ideal. A voice that has, at some level, perhaps not consciously been heard before; yet it is ‘unmistakable’. It is also perfectly safe and perfectly realized—or, as Freud put it, ‘beloved’. But what are we to make of this soothing yet troubling visitation? Could the unbidden but caressing aural intrusion, this ‘hallucination’, be some sort of psychic splitting, or else, perhaps, a figure for the creative mind? Or could it be, to borrow the title of one of the works under discussion in this collection, a ‘divine invasion’? Whatever it is, or was, the great doctor thought that the only respectable intellectual response was scepticism. Freud is not the only thinker to register suspicion about the relationship between (potential) religious experience and the imagination. Others have argued, for instance, that religion knows nothing of the imaginary realm; or else, conversely, that it knows nothing apart from make-believe’s dominion. The weakness with the religious sensibility is, according to this way of thinking, its disinterest in the material world. Religion is little more than an ‘elsewhere’ to the here and now; a ‘nowhere’ for tomorrow. Karl Marx famously described religion as a mass opiate, one that dulled the senses and blinded its followers to empirical and historical realities. But then such

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criticisms of the religious mindset must surely be extended to all uses of the imagination, and it is notable that while Marx might have attempted to dispossess himself of religion, this exorcism came, ironically, in a form of a repossession. Marx draws copiously on spiritual tropes to animate his argument in The Communist Manifesto (1848), which begins with the proclamation that a ‘spectre is haunting Europe’. John Schad has pointed to the surprisingly close relationship of the writings of Marx and Engels to the heavenly realm, tempting us to think that these two arch-secularists— these caped crusaders of modernity—may well have been of the angels’ party without knowing it.2 Perhaps what these divinations reveal is the complex, imbricated relation of the ideal and the material—or what George Levine has called the ‘lust of the spirit to impose itself on the world’.3 It may well be a laudable aim to depict a world that aspires to realism and the concrete, or what Levine calls ‘direct representation’, but then, as Levine’s comment implies, revenants have a tendency to return noisily, demanding their rights and our full attention. Some of the writers discussed here, while not conventionally religious, inhabit a distinctively alternate realm to that of rational materialists. Like Freud, they hear voices; unlike Freud, they talk back. In the cases of William Blake, Philip K. Dick and Thomas De Quincey, to take just three examples, godlike conversations are not just intoxicating phantasms but a feature of quotidian life. For Blake, these celestial colloquies are fixating interruptions that challenge and inspire. But divine invasions can also be enervating, which might explain why Dick felt the need to date the day the voices arrived and the day that they left. The mundane and the grandiose haunt these seers of the modern labyrinth while the words of Scripture form a divine feedback loop, playing incessantly in the background. De Quincey’s drug-fuelled experiences use the physical and metaphysical presence of the Bible as an amanuensis to commune and converse with the spirits of his dead sisters. Absent voices, both human and divine, echo through many of these texts; the world of Dick’s later fictions, particularly, bespeaks a realm where God has been and gone, and the questions that this leaves behind haunt the work of our first contributor, Geoffrey Hartman, who asks whether this is an age that can still receive a visionary. What might such a visionary tell us— what might he/she/it say to a world that has gone through so much? In a critical lifetime spent confronting the difficulties presented by traumatic and catastrophic experiences, from personal abuse to acts of genocide, Hartman has turned his attention to the problem of how such experiences are to be remembered. Aware that the imagination is neither a medicinal

Introduction

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substitute nor a religious panacea for the world’s problems, Hartman refuses to follow Freud and identify himself as a ‘clinician’. Instead, he prefers to ‘fall back on literary examples’.4 This idea of a fall suggests lost heavens, but also, perhaps, the hopes of an earthbound redemption which may well arrive in the form of the literary imagination. It is literary examples that inform Hartman’s well-known description of the imagination as ‘a power that can restore a kind of presence to absent things’.5 The description invites us to dwell upon the capacity of the imagination to embody and also to see how an embodied imagination might make its way into commentary as well as literature. But then, as Hartman suggests, there is always the problem of representation: of transcription, of translation and of transmission. In the chapter by Hartman that opens this collection, the theo-poetic workings of the literary imagination are profuse and manifest, although it is a decidedly strange collection of voices that he assembles, from the ‘soupy’ strains of Dick’s Warhol-shaped Yah to the indignant tones of William Blake berating boastful angels at his dining table. While the language Hartman uses to describe the imagination speaks first of all to a presence enabled by all imaginative thought, it also conveys a sense of generosity (‘kind’; ‘presence/presents’), a vocabulary of beneficence and gift that directs us to think imaginatively in terms of our ethical relation to the ‘other’. The fictional U.S. Poet Laureate who appears in the third series of Aaron Sorkin’s show The West Wing describes her creative vocation as the means by which she ‘enters the world’.6 As she is well aware, her own point of entry opens points of entry for others, enabling them to see the world in new ways. The show’s political orientation reminds us that imaginative embodiment, whatever form it might take, looks outward, and the reference to sacred wor(l)ds in the subtitle of this volume recognizes the power of words to shape the world in which we live. Despite the temptation to think of the imagination as an individual fancy, the collection of scholars assembled here insist on the value of a more communal approach, with contributors speaking to one another and exchanging ideas, directly and indirectly. Another kind of divine voice—an oracular call—is discussed by Kevin Hart in his account of the early poetry of Geoffrey Hill. For Hill, the proximity of a divine voice gives rise to several unanswered questions: what the voice is, where it is from and how it is to be discussed. Transposing the God’s Little Mountain of Mary Webb’s earthy Shropshire to the religious heights of Mount Sinai, Hart addresses these questions via Hill’s early poetry. The young Hill has such matters to settle as his vertiginous concerns about his own self-placing and his suitability for a bardic vocation.

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These are questions that can perhaps only be answered by the mature poet. And yet, as Hart goes on to reveal, the voice that Hill hears cannot be resolved so easily: the echoes of the divine voice sound throughout his poetry in a multitude of ways, far exceeding the seven types of ambiguity delineated by that fierce critic of religion, William Empson. But the idea of a divine voice that transcends or exhausts the comprehension of religious and secular critics is central to the next chapter in our collection. Robert Eaglestone explores the recent critical turn known as New Aestheticism and considers its relation to religious criticism, especially criticism done in the name of Christianity. Although the New Aestheticism associated with a critic like Theodor Adorno is often seen as secular, its opposition to a more narrowly conceived positivistic notion of truth bears more than a passing resemblance to the reading of metaphor that Rowan Williams offers in Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction. The theoretical emphasis of Eaglestone’s chapter finds a thoughtful echo and response in Arthur Bradley’s contribution, even though the two critics explore quite different positions. Noting the similar ways in which Adorno and Williams conceive of art as something that ‘releases’ knowledge rather than simply corresponding to a pre-existing concept of truth, Eaglestone imagines their counter to the insistence of Bernard Stiegler that language is instrumental.7 In contrast, Stiegler’s resistance to the singularity of art and his philosophical interest in techné (art, craft-like) is welcomed in Bradley’s chapter, which handles the Deconstruction of Christianity through the use of Jacques Derrida’s ideas on touch.8 Picking up on one of the central tropes in Derrida’s discussion—the hand—Bradley’s offers a compelling account of how the hand is a crucial part of the Christian tradition yet also provides a tool for its undoing. As Bradley puts it, ‘the philosophy of technology turns that hand inside out, like the fingers of a glove, exposing the exteriority, mediation, technicity from which it is stitched’. In particular, Bradley wonders what place there might be for Christianity in our modern, post-secular world. Although the questions that science fiction asks of the religious visionary or the questions that cyberspace asks of the religious imagination might seem new, they are not so different from the questions asked by earlier generations. How might religious thought be imagined in the modern world? How might it make itself heard? In her chapter on Charles Kingsley, Louise Lee traces how the technological mediation of the newspaper dispatch in the Crimean War produced new structures of emotional affect. While the secularization of the public sphere is often a topic for discussion among nineteenth-century scholars, Lee explores the communal new mood of popular religiosity in the 1850s and

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also Kingsley’s profound sense of guilt over his non-engagement in the war. This self-reproach, she argues, was highly influential in the movement, very much associated with Kingsley, that later became known as muscular Christianity. The prevalence of techné, or mediation, in the modern world also helps explain Jo Carruthers’s interest in what she terms ‘visceral religion’. Carruthers approaches this subject through the work of Israel Zangwill, a writer who explored the relation between religious identity and other expressions of identity through, among other things, the metaphor of a melting pot. The trope is one that encourages us to locate belief within the traditions, customs and rituals that comprise it, recognizing that religious orientation is more deeply rooted than a preoccupation with cognitive, rational choice might lead us to think. In challenging the assumption that religion is something that an individual chooses, Carruthers takes issue with a modern view of belief that is itself constructed and which can be traced back to the Enlightenment. If religious identity really is as visceral as Carruthers suggests, then the different senses energized by the imagination help us perceive the religious realm in a way so often denied by more technical perspectives. Unlike the future anticipated by Zangwill, the eschatological element of Christianity is sometimes associated with a heavenly (or hellish) place that bears no relation to the world that we know, despite the fact that the New Testament writers speak frequently of a New Heaven and Earth that recreates (rather than abandons) the world that we currently inhabit. Environment is a crucial concern within the Jewish and Christian narratives, perhaps inevitably given the importance of setting within any story of the world, and geography forms an important part of the religious imagination. Introducing his study of touch, Derrida writes: ‘For, with this history of touch, we grope alone no longer knowing how to set out or what to set forth, and above all no longer able to see through any of it clearly . . . For, to admit the inadmissible, I shall have to content myself with storytelling . . .’9 His appeal to one of the oldest creative forms finds an enthusiastic response in the work of John Schad, whose contribution to this collection involves an inventive tale of a post-war council estate, a strange prophetic figure called Mr O. E. Tal, and the words of Walter Benjamin. In Schad’s novel opening, the prophetic figure of Mr O. E. Tal struggles to be understood. This is not a surprising predicament given what Jonathan Sterne has described as the ‘problem of how to hear the word of God in the modern age’, and when Dick’s novel locates its action on another planet, Yah joins the list of those who have to grapple with modern technology.10 Yet technology does not always work to the detriment of religious experience

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and/or other, more human conversations. Writing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Ian McEwan offered the following response to the messages left behind by the victims: ‘The mobile phone has inserted itself into every crevice of our daily lives. Now, in catastrophe, if there is time enough, it is there in our dying moments. All through Thursday we heard from the bereaved how they took those last calls.’11 While the human hope, the loving goodbyes, described by McEwan cannot necessarily be claimed as a religious experience, it is nonetheless technology that provided an intimate and intercessory presence at the hour of death. The perhaps surprising tendency of the modern technological world to keep speaking about religion leads Andrew Tate to reflect on the treatment of heaven in contemporary writing by Julian Barnes, Alice Sebold and Douglas Coupland. Central to Tate’s discussion is the difficulty that these writers have in imagining heaven as a place that might be worth visiting, although Tate’s reading of their accounts is far from negative. In different ways each of these novelists glimpse something of heaven, but such ‘paradise talk’, to use a term discussed by John Schad, comes with its own anthropocentric shortfalls. Perhaps we should not expect anything more, at least not if the imagination is to avoid collapsing into programmatic systems of utopian conformity. The three writers discussed by Tate, like the other writers referred to in this collection, are particularly aware of the dangers to which the religious imagination is prone yet they are equally aware of its capacity to amplify the world. Taking the case of Dick, Lawrence Sutin writes: There are many minds that possess the ability to think up interesting ‘alternate worlds’. But there can be few indeed that can immerse themselves into those ‘alternate worlds’ and proceed to inhabit them with a range of believably flawed and desperate and soulful characters who turn out so closely to resemble all of us who live in our real world that we begin to wonder whether anything is ‘real’ in quite the way we thought it was.12 According to Sutin’s description, poets and writers are not the legislators of the world but its de-regulators and de-stabilizers. Drawing on the hidden recesses of the imagination, they find a voice that is both prophetic and difficult to translate clearly. Like Schad’s mysterious Mr O. E. Tel, the prophets of the imagination sometimes seem insane. Brian Horne tells us that ‘[e]very word, every picture, every conversation, every song, provides us with clues to the shape and meaning of the world we inhabit and our own place in it’, but some voices are much stranger than others, and it is with

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this in mind that Jonathan Roberts turns his attention to Thomas De Quincey.13 Like Dick, De Quincey’s willingness to consume mind-altering substances provides him with a route to an unknown hinterland. But also like Dick, De Quincey finds in words another, more potent, gateway to visions of the divine. The particular collection of words that most inspires De Quincey is the Bible, a collection of texts whose content is far more unsettling than its canonicity might lead us to think. In his chapter Roberts shows how the material presence of Bible frames and helps rethink De Quincey’s memories of certain difficult and traumatic events. A similar awareness of the personal and emotional uses to which we might put the Bible also informs Christopher Rowland’s chapter, which argues for a shift away from classical biblical exegesis to a more holistic style of scriptural interpretation that brings together reader and text and finds room for tradition, innovation and emotion. In focusing attention on the role of the biblical critic, Rowland shows that the imagination is not solely the preserve of the writer—it also has something vital to offer the commentator who seeks to interpret texts, biblical and otherwise. Rowland’s attempts to find a new way of reading for biblical critics is mirrored by the efforts of Mark Knight and Emma Mason to map out a new direction for literary criticism in the post-secular age. Taking inspiration from the title of Geoffrey Hartman’s book Saving the Text, Knight and Mason explore what they describe as theo-philosophical literary criticism. Their account is exploratory rather than definitive and in asking a number of provocative questions about recent trends in literary criticism, they seek to submit their own voice to the sounds that emerge from other writers within the rich thought-worlds of religion, literature and the imagination.

Chapter 2

Notes toward a Supreme Addiction: The Theology Fiction of William Blake and Philip K. Dick Geoffrey Hartman

Whence did all that fury come? From empty tomb or Virgin Womb? (W. B. Yeats) What, these days, should we do with latter-day writers who imitate an epoch when vision had not ceased, who still hear or speak with God or—next best thing—who have dined, as William Blake claims, with Isaiah and Ezekiel? Blake calls his ‘Table Talk’ a ‘Memorable Fancy’, but his visionary riffs are not always circumscribed that way; nor is such a qualification made by Joseph Smith concerning the visits to him of the Angel Moroni.1 Blake, in fact, reporting on his conversation with the prophets, immediately cuts to the quick: ‘I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition’.2 One could hardly come closer to the heart of the matter. Blake certainly tries to avoid misunderstanding and imposition, yet exactly how? Not, if you know him, by moments of doubt or by softening his usual confrontational stance. ‘If the Sun & Moon should doubt, / They’d immediately Go out’.3 Instead, in his Prophetic Books, as they are often called, he ups the ante by inflating visionary clichés, even as Andy Warhol did in our time with very different materials. Warhol created pop icons by a ‘blow up’ technique. He proclaimed through his pictures of soup cans, and other adverts, including multicolour silkscreen prints of Marilyn Monroe photos—‘These are your Gods, O America!’ Blake’s giant forms with their mixture of British and wildly

Notes toward a Supreme Addiction

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exotic names (Albion, Enitharmon, Orc, Urizen, Golgonooza) are meant to recall the ‘enlarged & numerous senses’ of the ancient poets rather than clogging with recycled dictions and images the arteries of a repressed imagination.4 Blake leaves us no choice but to mount the ‘Fiery Chariot’ of contemplative thought inspired by his poetry and paintings, and ‘meet the Lord in the air’.5 The problem (in his epics, not in his songs and satiric epigrams) is how to descend again, from skies that are the equivalent of alternate worlds—to descend to an earthly scheme of reference that will determine what all the visionary fuss is about. To value his poetry’s god making, its Star Wars atmosphere and psycho-gigantomachia, we must bring to it some kind of belief (Coleridge calls it ‘poetic faith’), give it a chance to persuade us— even if, as Isaiah informs the poet, ‘many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing’.6 Isaiah answers Blake’s challenge, of how the ancient prophets could claim to hear and speak with God, by asserting: ‘The voice of honest indignation is the voice of God’.7 In that way satire, the literary genre associated with indignation, receives a quasi-divine sanction. Satiric hyperbole, Blake’s rhetorical method, rather than being the lowest stylistic mode, is made into a sublime option. It creates a new form of sacred parody that serves both to parody and purify, to make us aware of the corrupted original energy of major mystical and Scripture motifs.8 One such recurrent motif is what I like to call the ‘gony’. This is a revisionary account of the Creation, accompanied by deceptive theogonies, descriptions of the birth and battles of godlike figures. The main story Blake tells over and over again is Gnostic in its imaginative swerve. Gnostic in that the world we think we perceive is not the true world and its god is not the true God. Sin, disunity and a catastrophic split—it all begins with what Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen denounces as ‘the primeval Priest’s assumed Power’.9 In Blake’s Bible of Hell, the ‘Eternals’ (Blake’s translation of Elohim) segregate an ‘Unknown, unprolific, / Self-closed, all-repelling’ demon named Urizen.10 Despite being one of the Eternals he is ejected in horror from their company as a ‘self-contemplating shadow’, an egomaniac who represses his passions and forms an ‘abominable [=ab-homine, nonhuman] void’.11 Out of that para-biblical void he creates a world in his image. Blake wants us to view that world as what we call Nature; and he gives it a disastrous genealogy. It is overshadowed from birth by the character flaws of its maker, his self-absorption, secrecy, monolithic legalism and restrictiveness. Urizen as the primaeval Priest, terrified at his own, that is humanity’s, passions and imaginative powers, denies them through the strictures of

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established religion, shrinking the psyche and sensory perception itself to ‘a solid without fluctuation’.12 How to unshrink Creation? That is the driving force behind the visionary action of Blake’s amazing and lengthy narratives. The gonies in these poems, with their free-flowing creative energy, are obstructed by spectral agonies, reflecting a conflict in the psyche that superimposes the mayhem of Revelations (the last and apocalyptic book of Christian Scripture) on Genesis (its first book). A proliferating host of seemingly supernatural spirits—yet endowed with human, all-too-human speeches expressing astonishment, lament and desire—face off in dramatic confrontations, metamorphic spectacles, liberating labours and fiery rituals of purification. The action aspires to nothing less than a vision of Creation Regained, a redemptive process through which the Urizenic priest’s moral blindness as well as the established Church’s ‘false tongue’, its subverted poetry, is overcome. Blake revises the biblical story by writing-in its omitted human powersource, identified in his early pamphlet-like pronouncements as the ‘Poetic Genius . . . the true Man’.13 From that genius both Old and New Testaments are original derivations. So, presumptively, are the giants and gods of his mock-sublime machinery, pseudo-divinities that revert to their human identity once their revels are ended, once they have brought about an Awakening of ‘the Universal Humanity’.14 Till then, like figures in a dream, they are shape-shifters, now nightmare, now soft delusion. At the end of Jerusalem, the Giant Albion, its comatose epic hero, is finally roused from a stony sleep of ages, and enters, with emanations that constitute the reunified poetic life of England and Jerusalem, a revivifying immortal cycle of moral and sensuous renewal. *** Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is already under the sway of this revisionary account. In Plate 14, the poet affirms what he says is a tradition, though he locates it by an antinomian gesture: The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell. For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.15 The tradition is called true, yet attributed to Hell—a Hell identified with Blake’s print workshop, its ‘infernal method’ of ‘corrosives, which in


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Hell are salutary and medicinal’.16 ‘Hell’, then, is more than a Bad Boy gesture, a ‘Give them hell, William’. Hell is the fiery imagination from which a priestly religion recoils, and in so doing creates a dark void full of repressed demonic energies. The corrosives mentioned are akin to the fires that often rage in Blake’s Prophetic Books; they suggest not only satire’s savage humour but also its purgative and renovating function. In Blake’s emancipation narrative the ‘flaming sword’ that previously guarded the Tree of Life and abetted the conspiracy of established religion and mystery, now makes a Heaven of Hell. It liberates by burning up mystification, undoing repressive theological views of sexuality, creativity and the world itself. The poet’s allusion, moreover, to his method of illuminated printing (to the corrosives used by the engraver) introduces into a prophecy of sensory and spiritual change a material reference describing the means of production: the artisan appears together with the artist. The point is not a minor one. For if there are tools and materials of production, the Creation did not occur ex nihilo; and to represent it as if it had been called instantly from nothing elides or occults the image of labour, including what fashions the distinctively human work of art. Religion as such, then, is not attacked; Blake’s target is a false and ingrained religious imaginaire, leading to a narrow, brainwashed picture of existence. The very concept of Creation is tainted by a falsifying perspective, so that the true image must be recovered. This recovery implies great artistic labour. Blake performs it by waging through a poetry that is both epigrammatic and lyrically epic, a sustained fight against ‘mind-forged manacles’. His manually lettered, illuminated text means to open the doors of perception, to recreate the image of Creation. Nature, as he calls the world supposedly drawn from the void, remains nightmare engendering in the absence of human agency. ‘Where Man is not, Nature is barren’, he declares. The concept of an ex nihilo creation leaves us ‘the habitation of Unbelieving Demons’—fearful of, instead of engaging, the imaginative element in religious belief.17 *** The imaginative Image returns by the Seed of Contemplative Thought. William Blake

Why do I yoke together writers as disparate as Blake and Philip K. Dick, the author now to be discussed? Let me, initially, suspend questions of relative stature or value. Then acknowledge what is obvious, that the virtual

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space/time colonized or projected by their fictions is quite different. Yet both writers demand that we make, in the words of Blake, a ‘Friend & Companion . . . of Images of Wonder’.18 Both agree the imagination should not be used to make humanity fear the imaginative life. It would be foolish, however, to suggest that Dick is interested in gaining authority by a recasting of sacred or once sacred formulas. Though he is nothing less than obsessed with metaphysical and mystical conceptions, it is impossible to find stability of truth in a world as deceptive as his, even if he speculates on cosmological frameworks in his discursive essays. The science fiction (sci-fi) heavens do not declare the glory of God or any kind of certainty. They are far from silent, however. Strange, tricky, enigmatic signals and reports fill the airwaves. Dick is not a cosmic or agnostic, any more than Blake; there is a conviction in him, backed by massive amounts of reading, and chronic spiritual or psychedelic experiences, that a divine process is actively moving toward the revelation of an occulted reality. Today the hold of religion on the imagination remains firm. Whatever factors motivate belief, there is a suspension of disbelief when it comes to conceptions underwritten by a long and varied literary inheritance. Problems arise, however, when these are codified and subjected to censorious restriction; when we forget, as Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘that All deities reside in the human breast’.19 Poets may then feel compelled to forge their own liberation theology. Yet since this responsiveness—also responsibility—remains individual, it raises another and crucial issue not dealt with here: established religion’s formative and formidable social appeal, maintained by a discipline of repetition basic to communitarian customs like going to the church ‘in a goodly company’, marking the stages of life sacramentally and performing punctual liturgical prayers. *** Central to Dick, both early and late (by ‘late’ I mean after decisive mystical experiences of 1974, which somehow reverted him to the fall of Massada in AD 74), is the issue of reality perception, of making certain that we live, and live authentically, in a world that is deceptive, entrapping and inextricably illusory. As Mark Rose formulates it in a smart book on sci-fi, Dick merges issues of time-sense, cosmology and eschatology with epistemological ones.20 ‘What is real?’ he asks, and stays for an elusive answer by experimenting with theology fiction masked as novels. He certainly catches something of the sense, also memorably expressed by Yeats (a Blake fan and rediscoverer), of the persistent return of religious forms of belief, supported by both a canonized and a non-canonized (heterodox) imagination.


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Together these trump sceptical (i.e. subversive or downright antireligious) tendencies in the era of modernity. Indeed, reading Philip Dick often brings to mind Yeats’s rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem. The poet’s or the novelist’s art, not unlike prayer, ‘elaborates God’—if idiosyncratically so.21 A great part of Dick’s fictional cosmos, therefore, exists ‘out of nature’ from the start; and his realism, what there is of it, is always depicted as vulnerable to defamiliarizing disturbances from ‘the other side’. One sometimes wonders if the novelist has used William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience as his primer. Whether the setting of his stories is terrestrial or extraterrestrial, and communication with the divine traditional or trashy, Dick’s fictions reflect his quest for knowledge of an alternate reality.22 Whatever passes for real turns out to be illusion or artifice: not the opposite of enchantment, simply the latest in a surprising sequence of enchantments. *** I turn, then, to The Divine Invasion (1981). The one true divinity in it, or the consciousness nearest to omniscience, is actually no fictive character but the book’s author, and his relation to what in discursive speculations he sometimes calls ‘the artifact.’23 One of the oldest theological paradoxes is why God, being perfect, became the architect and creator of an imperfect creation. What role does the artefact play in the divine life or, for that matter, what role does its analogue play in the human artist’s life? Dick conjectures that the artefact has its own life and points to an element of opacity in its maker. The artefact is essential for the artist-creator to fully know himself. Indeed, Emmanuel, the god-figure in this novel, has memory trouble rather than total recall or prescience. Dick thinks of himself as a ‘fictionalizing philosopher’. His fertile if moody inventions depict the sporadic anamnesis of protagonists who wake to the fact that the world they live in may be a hallucination, or a simulacrum-projection like a televised image. Thus they wake to intimations of another, forgotten existence or coexistence. Various happenings, commonplace or mystical, coexist like puns or double exposures. No wonder the main characters are perpetual exiles, in the sense of being challenged to view another life as truer than the one inhabited. In Freud, dreams manifest the day’s residue; in Dick it is daytime life that reveals an oneiric residue, something not quite ordinary or natural. Anamnesis intervenes stimulated by dreamlike episodes of incongruous or frightening incidents; innocent beings show their sinister, even repulsive side, yet can also change again to emit a residual glow like that surrounding the

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Lucifer-Belial figure in this novel: ‘a great luminous kite . . . vast and lovely and destroyed’.24 With such rival impressions on the screen of the central characters’ mind, Dick’s Gnostic fantasies stage a quest for what is really real in the midst of illusions often attributed to the mind-control techniques of an adverse power— perhaps the ‘artifact’ that has turned against its maker, but is in turn quietly modified by what Dick describes as ‘a divine counterpart unfallen’.25 Yet the author, as if sceptical of the mystical experiences motivating him, mingles his sci-fi kind of visionary inventiveness (extended by a hodgepodge of didactic, often quite enjoyable, expositions of mystical notions) with bathetic descents into trivial conversation (‘I need a drink’, or ‘What do you take in your coffee?’) as well as absolutely commonplace feelings. The habit is like Woody Allen’s angst deflations: ‘If everything is illusion and nothing is real, I’ve definitely paid too much for my carpet.’26 These banal, annoying and occasionally jokey contrasts, anchor in a quotidian context what has affected and infected the author: other-worlds, unbelievable or no longer believable. Dick is a Don Quixote tilting with futuristic technological fantasies of the sci-fi variety and their supposed spiritual implications. I suspect, then, that his humorous or self-deflationary moments are a kind of nervous laughter. They help to shield him from being too credulous about a personally experienced ‘invasion’ and its post-traumatic effect. For during his lifetime he becomes increasingly concerned, even obsessed with, in his words, ‘solemn theological matters’.27 The question remains, however, whether his blend of technological and esoteric fantasy, of mixed orders of being that persist in fable, and now in Star Wars spectaculars, has more than entertainment value, more than a tenuous fictive truth. In one of his last essays, commenting on Valis, a novel that is part of the trilogy to which The Divine Invasion belongs, Dick reports having had a conversation with its main character, Horselover Fat (whom he calls his alter ego), about what could have been a revelation or possibly a hallucination. The vision in question concerns a saintly Indian who has taken on himself mankind’s sins against the ecosphere, so that ‘when the ecosphere is burned, God himself is burned, for the Christ has invaded the ecosphere and invisibly assimilated it to himself’.28 Perhaps we should be thankful that such invasive phantasms remain phantasms. For not only does the danger of literalism hover over them, as sci-fi approaches theology fiction and disorients normal parameters of time and place; but mystery, uncertainty and fear also enter whenever the artefact seems to turn against its maker, jeopardizing his omniscience and


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control. Yet it is precisely in this power vacuum (similar to the Kabbalistic zimzum) that fictions flourish. *** The author’s ingenious plotline imagines ‘Yah’ (that truncated syllable designating an exiled deity) being smuggled back to earth. Yah has been suppressed by the dominant political regimes that usurp his reign, thus creating the fraudulent pseudo-world we live in, though the latter is described by the novelist only in the most stylized fashion. In part this is because the sci-fi genre generally wants to abolish a too familiar, sensorily enslaved, world by a radical change of perspective. But also in part it is because of Dick’s never quite perfected technique of double exposure, a technique meant to portray the ‘divine invasion’ as an act of stealth rather than apocalypse. Dick, in any case, is a master of the in medias res, exercising his right to set the scene, to drop us immediately into an enigmatic world in the manner of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. But even if we accept his premise or plot, indeed take pleasure in it, an unanswered question keeps intruding: would Yah’s return be liberating and redemptive, would it not instead result in a Great Fear rather than a Great Awakening for dwellers on planet earth? Do we need a Second Coming? Why reverse the demise of the gods, including a goatish and ghoulish adversary, a dissembling Belial-Satan? Must fiction rescue these phantoms from their twilight; why not leave them in their spooky limbo, to ‘slumber and die in autumn umber’, as Wallace Stevens suggests in ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’?29 For the addicted author, however, to judge not only by his fictions but also by the voluminous pages of a diary he titled ‘Exegesis’, which seeks to explicate mystical usurpations experienced in February and March of 1974—for the author there is no choice.30 The spirit blows where it lists. It brings energy and information from ‘the other side’. In The Divine Invasion Dick inserts into a syncretistic mix of religious hopes and fears an ‘Emmanuel’ or ‘Manny’, a divine child that, like the historical Jesus, or Christ within Jesus, is not (or not yet) all there, not even to himself.31 That God to be God has to remember Himself, introduces a humanizing note, a genuine pathos. It recalls the plea of distressed individuals or communities for God to remember them. In this way the novelist links a sense for the divine to our habitual, if always frustrated, striving for selfpresence, and intimates that this can be achieved through the recovery of an alternate world whose very unreality gives it psychological reality. Even in Emmanuel’s case, though, Dick lessens the force of his invention by attributing the boy’s amnesia to an injury suffered in his mother’s womb

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and a collision in space. The novelist, it seems, cannot solve the artistic problem of ‘theolepsy’ (his word): of how to represent a divine reality emerging from the unreal real and transforming daily life not through its melt down or violent destruction but by a salvific reversal, a replacement (as in the vision of Christ already mentioned) ‘mimicking this counterfeit world with a stealthily growing real one’.32 He strives to glimpse theolepsy as a ‘great invading and alien being, inserting itself into the normal world’. If, however, Dick adds bitterly, the divine invader were actually spotted by one of us despite the invader’s stealth, the person spotting it would reap as his reward insanity and incarceration: ‘twice-daily injections of Thorazine [the antipsychotic drug] and being shut away’.33 Dick fails to resolve the issue of theolepsy’s camouflaged intrusion because the heterocosms he does invent, ingenious as they are, remain obviously dangerous, tricky and unsettled. They are peopled, moreover, by psychically vulnerable characters at least as problematic as those who in the familiar world claim to be in communication with the divine. *** What mundane reality does a reader glimpse in this, the dark mirror of theology fiction? History has indeed been radically troubled by various divine invasions, often named Great Awakenings; many of them unhappy returns, and all with disastrous side effects.34 Dick himself is hardly an optimist concerning these events. The elusive theophanies he depicts are, moreover, private rather than collective communications. They increase solitariness, in fact. His imaginative exercises do not reach a doctrinal level, and cannot even resolve Blake’s question in ‘The Tyger’: ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ On the side of the Tiger is Yah-Emmanuel’s dangerous rerun, in effect a renewed power-claim or coming-to-consciousness (this is the unlikely if best scenario) incorporating a Hegelian type of progressive and self-conscious world-spirit; and on the side of the Lamb there is Manny’s Christlike genealogy aiming to strengthen the invader’s common humanity.35 Manny, the divine child, returns by being born once more. He makes his stealthy comeback growing to viability in a supposedly dead woman’s ‘synthowomb’ (really the novel itself?). Yet this zwieback gestation, of having been (or still being) born once more, is not helped by the fact that the re-emerging deity must remember itself, recall its own history. Do we want ‘Manny’ to remember? Success in that direction, I have intimated, cannot be without trouble to mankind. It forebodes a vengeful and demanding rather than peaceful and liberating divine return. ‘My world is stubborn’, the maturing Emmanuel says at one point: ‘It will not yield.


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A recalcitrant and implacable world is a real world.’36 The ideal of governance, divine or human, if bestowing total control through total consciousness means the abolition of something that is both a mainstay of fiction and of life generally: chance, contingency, absurd or unexpected outcomes and endlessly forking paths. *** Despite the novel’s more-or-less happy ending, the restoration of Yah contains, then, no guarantee of freedom, peace or ultimate stability; no definitive release from a basic two-power struggle. That struggle, on earth, is parodied in the novel as a clash between rival forces, both of which are control freaks: a corrupt Church (Christian-Islamic!) and a corrupt State (Communist-Fascist), as well as assorted surveillance fantasies focusing on ‘The Government’. Dick’s novel was published in 1981, during the Cold War; and his fiction from the 1950s till his death did not recover from the surveillance efforts of the McCarthy and Nixon eras, and a Woodstock hangover. The Gnostic and Kabbalistic idea of a crisis within the Divine may also be pertinent. It features, as in Blake, a catastrophe-creation: our deceptive world. The world as we perceive it, with its split into murderous dualities, as well as competing schemes for total political control, is not the world. ‘Appearances’, the author declares in one of numerous similar statements, ‘are a vast and interlocking lie’.37 Hence there is no theology that can be based on natural experience, only on supernatural revelation. ‘There is no Natural Religion’ is the title of two of Blake’s earliest polemical pamphlets. Much of Dick’s ‘Exegesis’ diary contains articulate but also pathetic variations of that axiom and amounts to a plea for salvation; specifically, salvation of a writer who heaps ‘the burning coals of anti-meaning’ on himself, seeking truth in trash, and distinctively American pop-trash at that.38 The author evokes a world whose tricky phenomenality can only be countered by the antidote of the novelist’s trickery. His cosmic yet claustrophobic imagination generates a fictional medium playing with a large, eclectic store of theosophic as well as technosophic imagery. Yet there are, at the ever-receding horizon of his various imaginary worlds, glimmers of a great reconciliation. Theolepsy posits, after all, a good world (the Urgrund, a notion taken from Jakob Boehme) under the evil. As in the Woodstock era, revolutionary and apocalyptic thoughts merge with flower power intuitions. Zina, one of two magical female characters, embodies more myths than Joseph Campbell could ever come up with in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces. As ‘the female side of God’ she also has innumerable names, even claiming that of Torah, the sacred blueprint for

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the Creation, which may have been consulted by the boy divinity of this tale who is pitted against an evil and immeasurably resentful ‘goat-thing’ called Belial. Although Zina’s soft power continues to radiate a fairy-tale charm, like the flower absent from all bouquets, and Linda Fox (a seductive Hollywood singer whose repertory includes John Dowland’s seventeenth-century lyrics) also turns out to be magical in her role as Comforter or Paraclete; and while both women eventually prevail in the book’s final, eloquent pages, the reader is left with an uneasy feeling about the novel-form’s adequacy to theopoetic themes. *** Henry James deplored the novel’s tendency to be a ‘loose, baggy monster’. Dick’s version, moreover, even while trying to get out of ‘the science fiction ghetto’, competes both with pulp fiction and a psychedelic supernaturalism. The result: realistic character portrayal gives way to sci-fi settings, to suggestions of a doppelgänger or parallel identity for the characters (drawn from their other, ET existence), to diverging temporalities called ‘timepaths’, and what at best reaches an intensity similar to (metaphysical) discussions in the novel of ideas. Yet these discussions are not anchored firmly in everyday types of personality, or in the depiction of realistic moral issues. There is no strongly conceived or nuanced characterization, no one resembling fabled charismatic American preachers, or their victims. Thus serious social realism is undermined; and although that outcome may fall within the destructive side of Dick’s purpose, namely his attack on the counterfeit we call reality, nothing counterfeit-proof emerges. Even on the level of verbal artistry, Dick’s prose rarely attains memorability. At the same time, the very failure, as in psychosis, of discriminating between words and things, or inner and outer, leads into his plot’s episodic intrusions of uncanny signals that a divine invasion is in progress. Here too, then, the novel’s attempt to distinguish itself from the romance seems to break down: Dick’s Gnostic search for reality simply expands the borders of romance.39 *** This failure (not relevant to most of the hundreds of successful short stories Dick wrote) is marked by a fundamental ambivalence. I have mentioned that a peculiarity of Dick’s novel is that its super- or preternatural effects can be jocular rather than lofty and terrific. Dick even voices a suspicion that a tutelary spirit is toying with him.40 Does he doubt his own sanity, given the seductiveness of the preternatural incidents he has authored? In a light-hearted story Shadrach Jones becomes involuntarily King of the


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Elves. Goethe’s famous ‘Erl-Koenig’— not an Elf King but a mythic relative, a spirit of the wood—had also depicted a divine seduction or rape. Pascal’s terror at the silence of infinite stellar space also does not play a significant role. Sci-fi vertigo is caused more by inner than outer space. Despite the extraterrestrial scenarios there is no sense of the heavens as a silent abyss. ‘The universe is information’, Dick insists more than once. Earth and sky in The Divine Invasion are crowded with cyborgs, androids and paraphernalia acting as servomechanisms, including those that beam data—a beaming which is not a neutral luminescence but a lasersharp radiation that snoops and directs, even takes over. Always lurking, however, is ‘the mustard seed of the funny at the core of the horrible and futile’.41 So trouble starts in The Divine Invasion when the official communication system is hacked by a mysterious intruder. The latter gets through to the novel’s focal character, Herb Asher, despite a concrete web of deceptions, a brainwashing environment. Asher, dead after a fatal accident, yet in ‘cyronic suspension’ and believing he is still alive, has the duty of relaying, from billions of years away in space, the informational beam of a mother ship. He does not realize something is wrong until a faint power-source interferes by altering crudely a song of Asher’s favourite chanteuse as well as piping in endlessly and unbearably (this is the one truly funny invention in the book) ‘soupy’ strains from Fiddler on the Roof.42 These incongruous signals, suspected to come from Yah (couldn’t Yah not find a better signature tune?), initiate a fantastic odyssey in which Asher and his wife discover their involvement in Yah’s attempt to return from outer space to earth. Through such cartoon-like diablerie, Dick draws us back from galactic and technological marvels to an all-too-human and affecting moment. What is of most consequence, however, is the impact of the mysterious signals that get through, indicating the existence of another world, another power. The signals trigger a lost memory, together with sublime or even suicidal desires. Some of Dick’s short stories show this pattern in a more poetic and condensed manner than his longer works: especially powerful is ‘Upon the Dull Earth’, a tale of wonder and terror that rivals E. T. A. Hoffmann. The symbolism of the white, flaming, wind-winged creatures from the other side, attracted with Hitchcockian ferocity to Sylvia’s as well as lamb’s blood, serves to highlight a major theme: the fierce mutual attraction of the human to the more-than-human, to an ecstatic crossing to the other side and the surprisingly sensitive if violent response by a nether or upper world. The realm of the human, then, is precariously close to the non-human; and the non-human, however different or distant, crosses over and invades at any time.43 So Belial, in The Divine Invasion, after deceptively assuming

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the shape of a loveable if wizened little goat, inflates into a rough beast and begins to control Herb Asher’s will while mocking his quest for reality amid Gnostic unrealities: ‘Now you are awake’, it remarks sarcastically, ‘I will show you things as they are, pitilessly’.44 We are nonetheless moved to sympathize with this shape-shifting two-susim kid when it complains of all the animals maltreated and sacrificed, and hints that the whirligig of time will bring its revenges. *** What moral is suggested by this overview of The Divine Invasion and some of Dick’s short stories? A heap of ominous, funny, myth-drenched symbols, a comfort to hearts sick of what passes for reality, is where, today, all ladders end, where the fallen morning stars of theopoesis, its once ‘masterful images’, go to be composted and recycled. Except for the funky, distinctively American side of Dick’s imagination, and looking away from the compromises he makes because of his chosen sci-fi genre, we are still close to (yet how distant from!) poets who bear the gods, in the sense of giving a new birth to, as well as bearing up under them—like Keats in his incomplete Hyperions. Nor are we far from visions coming to Yeats through his medium (his wife) by way of tutelary spirits only identified as ‘communicators’, or from Blake’s prolific Prophetic Books, or James Merrill’s Book of Ephraim (published in 1976, during the most intense years of Dick’s own mystical perplexities). Theology fiction perseveres. (Superman’s at once kenotic and exalted devolution from Krypton’s Kar-El to Clark Kent, is another version of the secret interplanetary infiltration of a divine or quasi-divine child.) Yet a Great Awakening, like that of Albion at the end of Blake’s Jerusalem, does not occur, and the concluding sentence of Dick’s novel provides its own emblem for the enduring labour of mythic bricolage, here suspiciously resembling a garbage collection: ‘Above them “Herb and Linda”, the city machine worked, gathering up the remains of Belial. Gathering together the broken fragments of what had once been light.’45 News for the Wallace Stevens oracle: the death of Lucifer is not a capital tragedy for the imagination, because he has not died, and keeps coming back. *** I should not close without commenting on the very different way A Scanner Darkly (1977) links sublime aspirations to the depressive reaches of Dick’s fantasy. Scanner’s hellish picture of the California drug scene is Dick’s


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The Wasteland. It is even more of a dead end than Eliot’s poem, yet insinuates, albeit faintly, glimpses of redemption through awkward Eliot-like infusions of high culture quotes from Goethe, Heine and Beethoven’s Fidelio. Though one might wish to apply to Dick what Kenneth Burke said of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, that it redeemed his drug, the horrific scenes in Scanner yield almost nothing that is redemptive except such alleviating literary touchstones. The fatal background is addiction: explicitly to substance D (for Drug, Donna, Death . . . and the Divine?). Ironically, however, the drug is distilled from a small blue flower—the traditional colour of hope and a Romantic symbol, ‘die blaue Blume’, that can be traced to Novalis. The novel’s druggy world projects a complex caricature of the often deadly desire for illumination, the desire to see—and be seen—‘face to face’ rather than ‘in a mirror darkly’.46 The cruel joke, moreover, underlying the novel’s picaresque intrigue, is that the entire impossible system of total surveillance is a manic response to the debilitating fear of a conspiracy against a police state’s own conspiracy aiming at total control through monopolizing substance D. Defensive mechanisms like the scanner system (‘What does a scanner see? Into the head? Into the heart?’), and scramble suits that make recognition a blur through the constant flicker of fractional physical identities, reflect a multiple imagistic schizophrenia and prevent any non-dark seeing, any steady, private self-knowledge free of kaleidoscopic fragmentation. Toward the fable’s end, the spectre of death invades: the living and the unliving are rumoured to exchange properties, while religious sounding phrases (‘I saw death rising from the earth’) try to hold onto a minimal hope for some sort of revelation. Substance D has become this culture’s fateful divinity. But Scanner’s setting remains entirely human, with a minimum of technological fantasies. In most of Dick’s other writings the zany gamut of the author’s inventiveness deploys updated modalities of invasive and deceptive modes of being, of what eighteenth-century poetics called the ‘machinery’. We are surprised by telepaths, precogs, replicants, androids, sly roborob mechanisms and a variety of revenants; as well as, most dramatically, by an erasure of the boundary between life and death, as in the cerebral globes of preserved ‘half lifers’ revved up in Ubik’s Beloved Brethren Moratorium. The intense if also frustrated desire for a personal, extra-institutional revelation recalls what may have led to the authoritarian suppression of ‘Enthusiasm’ in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in turn set off backlash literary explosions called Smart and Blake. As for the (kind-of) omniscient author: he is far from uncritical of his complicity in the game he plays, or which is being played with him.47 He formulates in his

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last novel, through its principal character, Bishop Tim Archer, a new theory about Satan: that his sin was—precisely—Gnosis, understood as the ambition to know God as He knows Himself. Only in that way can Satan be like God, if just for an instant.48 In Minority Report, and many other stories, the author shows how delusive the science of prescience is, and how fatally one wish dominates the imagination: piercing the hymen between human and divine. *** Dick’s work as a whole, but intensely after his experiences of 1974, is pervaded by an obsession with mechanisms of defence against a supernatural messaging whose fall-out is like the leakage of atomic radiation. Everything, therefore, must be put forth under a protective shield. Fiction becomes less an imitation of reality—of ordinary, unreal reality—than insulation against a real unreality: the seductiveness of psychedelic experience. The final, haunting question when we read theology fiction of this kind is not ‘Where, or in what form, does the divine show itself’, but ‘What is truly human about it, and can we get at that, can it be handled without drug-craziness, psychosis, or playing with the fire of mystical messaging?’. ‘All human forms identified’, Blake wrote at the end of Jerusalem. That remains the aim of an artist working some two centuries after Blake, an artist equally deceptive, but more vulnerable to being swallowed whole by his own fantasy, and haunted, as servomechanisms take over, by the dominance of ‘fierce cold things’.49 *** Finally: how far does Dick succeed in erasing the distinction between literature high and low, popular and highbrow? In his introduction to the symbolic system of A Vision Yeats is defensive on the subject of a ‘popular spiritualism which has not dared to define itself’. He adds that ‘The Muses sometimes form in those low haunts their most lasting attachments.’50 Today something in our literary value system has changed, for better or worse; for while Blake had to wait a century and more to be fully published and recognized, Dick was recently canonized. Four of his novels were accepted into the ‘Library of America’ scarcely 25 years after his death. The quarantine has shortened. He is no longer UFO, an Unidentified Fictional Object.

Chapter 3

God’s Little Mountains: Young Geoffrey Hill and the Problem of Religious Poetry Kevin Hart

In 1917, a year before World War I would finally end, Mary Webb published her second novel, Gone to Earth. It is the story of Hazel Woodus, an unlettered girl, daughter of a gypsy and a harp player, who lives in the Callow, ‘a spinney of silver birches and larches that topped a round hill’, apparently one of the Stiperstones bordering on Wales in the sparsely populated south-west of Shropshire.1 She lives flush with the hard, beautiful country of those parts, freeing trapped wild animals and looking after her fox cub, ‘Foxy’. Without any great desire to do so, she marries Edward Marston, a non-conforming minister. He lives ‘on a hill five miles from the Callow, called God’s Little Mountain’, where one finds a chapel and minister’s house, ‘all in one—a long, low building of grey stone surrounded by the graveyard, where stones, flat, erect, and askew, took the place of a flower garden’.2 On the day he sees her for the first time, Marston hears Hazel singing to the accompaniment of her father, a song about singing to Christ accompanied by a ‘splintered harp without a string’.3 ‘Poor child!’ Marston thinks to himself, ‘is it mystical longing or a sense of sin that cries out in her voice?’4 It is neither of those things, the narrator tells us: ‘It was the grief of rainy forests and the moan of stormy water; the muffled complaint of driven leaves; the keening—wild and universal—of life for the perishing matter that it inhabits’.5 Certainly, God’s Little Mountain does not at first attract the earthy, pagan Hazel. Yet she listens to what the hills tell her: They were of a cold and terrific colour, neither purple nor black nor grey, but partaking of all. Kingly, mournful, threatening, they dominated the life below as the race dominates the individual. Hazel gazed up at them. She stood in the attitude of one listening, for in her ears was a voice that she had never heard before, a deep inflexible voice that urged her to

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do—she knew not what. She looked up at the round wooded hill that hid God’s Little Mountain—so high, so cold for a poor child to climb. She felt that the life there would be too righteous, too well-mannered.6 Her intuitions are partly right: the marriage is not consummated. Beautiful and vital, Hazel soon finds herself the object of Jack Reddin’s passion, who she dislikes at first because he goes fox hunting, and who is as sensual and narrow in his worldliness as Edward Marston is spiritual and gentle in his other-worldliness. The narrator says of Reddin, ‘love that was abnegation was to his idea impossible’, yet that is the love affirmed and practised on God’s Little Mountain.7 Her sexual desires awakening, Hazel hastily interprets a blue petal on her path to be a sign to go to Reddin. And so she does. He rapes her, yet she is nonetheless drawn to him, even after the act. Indeed, the violence is figured as protection: ‘He caught her and flung her into the bracken, and suddenly it seemed to her that the whole world, the woods, herself, were all Reddin. He was her sky, her cloak’.8 Hazel lives with Reddin at Undern Hall, while also longing for the love she has known on God’s Little Mountain. Pulled in different directions by her sensual desire and spiritual longing, she is torn apart, while rural Shropshire broods in the background, sometimes flexing itself and becoming the foreground: pre-Christian, lyrical, almost suffocating its inhabitants with the intensity of its timeless presence. During a storm Hazel looks toward her former home: ‘Yet the Mountain shone in paradisal colours—her little garden; her knitting; the quiet Sundays; the nightly prayers; above all, Edward’s presence, in the aura of which no harm could come—for all these things she passionately longed’.9 She goes back to Marston, who has now lost his faith precisely because he realizes that in introducing Hazel to Christianity he has given her a ‘mortal wound’.10 He realizes that ‘he must care for Hazel as Christ cared for the lambs of His fold. And darkly on his dark mind loomed his new and bitter creed, “there is no Christ”’.11 There is to be no happiness for the injured couple, however, in this new Godless world: Hazel and Foxy are torn in pieces by the hounds on one of Reddin’s fox hunts. She has gone to earth, although her hiding place will be the grave, as it already is for so many British soldiers in the Great War. Nature and humankind respond alike: ‘There was silence on God’s Little Mountain for a space’.12 *** In 1952, the expression ‘God’s Little Mountain’ was doubled: the original remained in Gone to Earth while its copy became the title of a poem in

God’s Little Mountains

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Geoffrey Hill’s first booklet of poems (the eleventh in Oscar Mellor’s Fantasy Press series) and so took on a new life. At the time Hill was a 20-year-old undergraduate reading English at Keble College, having come up to Oxford in 1950 from Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, south-east of the Shropshire countryside so densely and piercingly evoked by Mary Webb. The booklet contained only five poems, the second one being ‘God’s Little Mountain’: Below, the river scrambled like a goat Dislodging stones. The mountain stamped its foot, Shaking, as from a trance. And I was shut With wads of sound into a sudden quiet. I thought the thunder had unsettled heaven; All was so still. And yet the sky was cloven By flame that left the air cold and engraven. I waited for the word that was not given, Pent up into a region of pure force, Made subject to the pressure of the stars; I saw the angels lifted like pale straws; I could not stand before those winnowing eyes And fell, until I found the world again. Now I lack grace to tell what I have seen; For though the head frames words the tongue has none. And who will prove the surgeon to this stone?13 Anyone opening up the Fantasy Press’s Geoffrey Hill would have recognized the author to be a highly literary young poet. The first poem is entitled ‘To William Dunbar’, the fifth, ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’; others pay homage to eighteenth-century poets: ‘Genesis: A Ballad of Christopher Smart’ and ‘Holy Thursday of William Blake’.14 Only the second poem, ‘God’s Little Mountain’, is not immediately recognizable as offering tribute to another writer, unless, of course, one has read Mary Webb’s novel. And even if one does know Gone to Earth, the relations of the lyric to the novel are less than clear, if there are any in the first place. We know with hindsight that Hill had long meditated on the moral weight of World War I as registered in English poetry, and so the allegory of Gone to Earth would have lodged as firmly with him as the evocation of the countryside.15 Neither landscape nor war is marked in the poem, though; and we are more likely to read ‘God’s Little Mountain’ as establishing a distance from the visionary William Blake

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of Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), perhaps by way of A. E. Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896), than as creating a space for itself inside the narrow world of Gone to Earth. Why then does Hill draw the title of his poem from Mary Webb’s novel? On opening the booklet, the reader will sense that the poet admires from a studied distance different things in the semantics and rhetoric of several contemporary American poets: Allen Tate (a poem such as ‘The Traveller’), Richard Eberhart (‘The Groundhog’ in particular) and Robert Lowell (‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’, among others). The young Hill is a formal poet, and, as he says in ‘The Poetry of Allen Tate’ (1958), ‘the ideal of “form” dismisses the legend of the “mad” disruptive poet, and affirms the social value of the Respectable Artisan’.16 Hill is not a formal poet in search of smoothness, however; he is drawn to a ‘wanton roughness of form’, apparent in his preference for slant rhymes.17 He may not play a splintered harp, but his harp has splinters nonetheless. Yet what distinguishes Hill, even at this early stage of his writing, is less an interest in the formal possibilities of the modern lyric (an interest shared, after all, by a good many other English-speaking poets at the time) than a stress on the value of the letter of the poem. In the essay from which I have just quoted, Hill quotes, with approval from Tate’s essay, ‘The Man of Letters in the Modern World’ (1952). Tate says: [The task of the man of letters] is to preserve the integrity, the purity and the reality of language wherever and for whatever purpose it may be used. He must approach his task through the letter—the letter of the poem, the letter of the politician’s speech, the letter of the law; for the use of the letter is in the long run our one indispensable test of the actuality of our experience.18 ‘How splendid and how true this is!’ Hill exclaims after quoting it. And as we shall see how well its lesson is taken to heart by the young poet. Anyone opening up the thin booklet would have identified Hill as a religious poet, and would have asked, as though with Edward Marston, whether he speaks here out of mystical longing, or a sense of sin or both. If he is a religious poet, he is one of a peculiar kind, someone for whom Christianity has been received as a blunt ache and a quiver of sharp questions, and a poet for whom ‘religious poetry’ has become a problem more than a means of expressing immortal longings. ‘Genesis’, a highly condensed, postlapsarian hexameron, as powerful in its lyrical way as the more orthodox homilies on the six days of Creation by St Basil of Caesarea,


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St Ambrose of Milan and St Bonaventure, concludes with stanzas that will disconcert a believer and nonbeliever alike: On the sixth day, as I rode In haste about the works of God, With spurs I plucked the horse’s blood. By blood we live, the hot, the cold, To ravage and redeem the world: There is no bloodless myth will hold. And by Christ’s blood are men made free Though in close shrouds their bodies lie Under the rough pelt of the sea; Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight The bones that cannot bear the light.19 The speaker (call him Hill) reflects not on the creation of human beings on the sixth day but, rather, on a postlapsarian human act: he digs his spurs into the horse’s sides in order to make it go faster.20 Is Hill actually doing God’s work or is he merely running around observing it? Either way, his attention to God leads him to cruelty. In turn, the horse’s blood prompts him to ponder the Fall and the Atonement. And, in a sense, he has repeated the sin of Adam in the wake of Adam’s sin, for he plucks the horse’s blood as the first man plucked the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, an act that quickly led to the spilling of blood in the murder of Abel. Hill’s meditation is far from orthodox. We are likely to read the second stanza as saying that only blood-myths—those of infanticide, matricide, patricide, self-sacrifice and war—have sustaining power, and that while they ravage us they also redeem us from insignificance. The thought rubs up against Blaise Pascal’s Pensées that ‘Man’s greatness lies in his knowing himself to be wretched’.21 Other myths, such as the story of the Pleiades or that of Atlanta, do not have holding power; they explain something or entertain us but do not enter deeply into the mystery of being human. Things change with the third stanza. We are told in no uncertain terms: ‘And by Christ’s blood are men made free’, which catches on the earlier verb ‘redeem’ as well as on 1 Peter 1.18–19 (‘ye were . . . redeemed . . . with the precious blood of Christ’). What are we to make of this? We seem to have two choices. First, we may fold the allusion to the Atonement back into the general claim about blood-myths, which makes the Atonement into a myth. The claim is certainly possible to make in a poem written in 1952: Rudolf Bultmann’s

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controversial essay ‘Neues Testament und Mythologie’ (1941), with its sharp insistence that we must strip away myth from the New Testament in order to reveal its kerygma, was already well known and widely discussed.22 The speaker of this poem needs the myth of the Atonement, it seems, although one may well wonder whether one can need a myth when it is known to be a myth. Second, we may see the allusion to the Atonement as contrasting with what we have been told of blood-myths. The Christ event bespeaks the truth and has genuine power to redeem us, unlike all bloodmyths. For no myth, whether bloody or unbloody, can support belief because, being a myth, it is bloodless. Only the suffering and death of Christ can ‘ravage and redeem the world’. If we accept this second interpretation, the poem does not remain for long in the comfort of orthodox Christian hope, particularly when we consider the final statement: ‘Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight / The bones that cannot bear the light’. Is this merely a conventional remark, that the bodies of the drowned sailors are dead (with the hope of the general resurrection being understood)? Or is it a more final statement, at odds with Christian doctrine about the last things, that some of the dead will not rise again? The ambiguity turns first on the verb ‘bear’. It could be that the bones of the drowned cannot endure the light because they are in inky darkness on the ocean floor, or it could be because they cannot affirm the revelation of God in Christ. And the ambiguity turns, second, on how we read ‘Though’. We might take it to be an adjective in which case the final couplet maintains that, in spite of the terrible pressure at the bottom of the ocean that crushes their bones, the drowned will be resurrected in the flesh. Or we might take it to be a conjunctive adverb that modifies what has been asserted so that the line says the drowned that have lost faith in Christ have been ground to nothing by the Earth and Ocean to which they have foolishly entrusted themselves. As an undergraduate reading English at Oxford, Hill’s education was regulated at a distance by, among others, J. R. R. Tolkien, then Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. Tolkien had worked on the Oxford English Dictionary after World War I, and on his return to teach at Oxford in 1926 was concerned to revise the curriculum of the School of English Language and Literature. He did so in 1932, and the new curriculum remained solidly in effect while Hill was at Keble. That revision was essentially to overcome the old (and sometimes bitter) divide between philology and literature at Oxford, requiring students to balance, if not always to interlace, philology and literature.23 Hill grew up hearing lectures and participating in tutorials that presented the need for sound philology


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almost as a moral imperative, to which he added—in his poetic practice if not in his weekly papers—elements of the formalism of the New Criticism with its emphasis on the letter, which leads readers to maintain a focus on ambiguity and paradox. Both were in the air, and had been since William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). Many critics of the day, Christian or not, read English poetry, confessional or not, in terms of the paradoxes inherent in the faith (Jesus as God-man, Mary as Mother of God, suffering as redemptive, weakness as strength and so on), sometimes in a manner that can only seem reductive. They did not do so for long with impunity. After completing The Structure of Complex Words (1951), Empson turned from doubleness in literature to more ethical concerns, setting himself with fierce determination against the Christian faith, which he thought promoted a wicked view of God and life in general, and sideswiped those critics—‘Neo-Christians’ he called them—who reduced the complexities of moral experience to the paradoxes of the faith in the service of ‘Eng. Lit.’.24 Helen Gardner, Hugh Kenner, Rosemond Tuve and W. K. Wimsatt were readily caught within his sights. What seems to have upset Empson particularly is the ease with which critics would appeal to the interpretation of the Atonement known as ‘penal substitution’ in order to explicate poets as different as John Donne, Andrew Marvell and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is, as he put it in later life, ‘the belief that the Father could be bought off from torturing mankind eternally (or rather, a tiny remnant of mankind) in exchange for the specially intense pleasure of having his Son tortured to death’.25 It is hard to know who to credit with this blood theology when it is caricatured so freely. Empson associates Tertullian with the teaching on the basis of the theologian’s idea of hell, but in fact Tertullian had very little to say about the Atonement.26 Saint Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo is a case in point, as is Martin Luther’s 1535 commentary on Galatians and in the Institutes John Calvin speaks of the Atonement in terms of criminality.27 No one, though, conceives the Father taking pleasure in the suffering of the Son. In their different ways, each speaks of the unity of love and justice. Empson’s is a crude misunderstanding of the Atonement and of sacrifice in general, one that shows no awareness of kenoˉsis or of personal love as self-sacrifice.28 Clearly, he liked his Christianity vulgar. What one finds in ‘Genesis’, however, is not something that would have given the Neo-Christians much satisfaction, or given Empson cause to savage Hill.29 We find there an abiding interest in the letter of the word, one that is fastened to what Tate calls the ‘actuality of our experience’, which for Hill means that the double nature of some words in his poem bespeaks an ambivalence to what they denote: in particular, an ambivalence to the claims

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of visionary experience and the Christian teachings that underwrite it.30 If Hill would come highly to value certain martyrs and saints—St Edmund Campion and St Robert Southwell, in particular—he would also deepen his interest in the pathology of martyrdom and sainthood.31 This ambivalence would be practised at a high level in Tenebrae (1978), especially in ‘The Pentecost Castle’ and ‘Lachrimae’, although the particular worry of those poems is already in evidence in Hill’s first poems, in ‘Genesis’, to some degree, though more clearly in ‘God’s Little Mountain’. *** To which I turn, beginning with the title, which, taken from Gone to Earth, is left with the sixteen lines beneath it and an open set of references produced by the conjunction of ‘God’ and ‘mountain’ (not to mention the teasing qualification ‘little’) to help make sense of it. Plainly, the speaker of the poem has climbed the mountain and failed to be worthy of a revelation at its summit, nor even been able to articulate what has been heard there. The questions remain, ‘Which mountain is it?’ and ‘Why is it little?’ The poem begins with Hill high on the mountain. ‘Below’, we are told, ‘the river scrambled like a goat / Dislodging stones’. This small disturbance pales to nothing when compared with what comes next. ‘The mountain stamped its foot, / Shaking, as from a trance’. The title constrains us to think of God, but the lines themselves suggest that a fairy-tale giant, like the one that bothers Hop o’ My Thumb, has been woken from a deep sleep. It is a far cry from the self-denying love one finds at the top of God’s Little Mountain in Gone to Earth. We may well wonder if this great being is angry for good cause or is merely petulant. In an odd way Hill is protected by the sudden noise; it is the means by which he experiences ‘a sudden quiet’ that blots out every other sound. The quiet, I take it, is wholly interior or entirely beyond the senses. The huge thunder may well have ‘unsettled heaven’ if the stillness is any index.32 What could have caused this catastrophe? Only, it seems Hill’s presumption in attempting, as an impure man, to climb the holy mountain. And how could this show of anger or petulance have rendered heaven no longer at ease? That last question is engaged, if not fully answered, by a metaphor in the sixth line, ‘And yet the sky was cloven’, that picks up the allusion to the goat in the first line and extends it, since the Devil is often represented as a goat.33 The sky is not simply divided; it is demonically torn in two by flame. If we thought the good, great God rules Heaven while the Devil is consigned to Hell, we must revise our judgment. For now we have no coercive reason to draw a strong clear line between God and the Devil,


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either because there is no such distinction in fact or because we cannot tell the difference between them in the first place. Hill protests that he waited ‘for the word that was not given’, and yet something seems to have been given to him: the flame leaves the air ‘cold and engraven’. Commenting on Deuteronomy 33.2, the mediaeval rabbinic scholar Rashi observes in the Jerusalem Talmud that Torah existed before Creation: ‘It was written with letters of black fire upon a background of white fire’.34 Rabbi Isaac the Blind, the father of Kabbalah, suggests that the mystical, written Torah is engraved in the white fire while the oral Torah is persevered in the black fire.35 Mystical Torah is illegible, and will remain so until the Messiah comes. Could it be that Hill expects the legible Torah and consequently misses the offer of the mystical Torah? If so, he is neither Moses, who receives biblical Torah and fully understands the mystical Torah, nor the Messiah who will actually receive the mystical Torah. On God’s Little Mountain Hill is ‘Pent up into a region of pure force’, and we may wonder whether this purity bespeaks raw, elemental power or a more elevated moral or spiritual strength. Either way, Hill is constrained by the divine will to remain on the mountain, and is subject to great cosmic powers. Also, he is strained by what is overfull within him. Is this his desire to receive the word? It would seem so. Equally, it could be that he is overfull with what he wants to say and is unable to express it, whether because it is forbidden or because he fears competing with the great poets of the past (‘the stars’). The ‘pure force’ may be outside him, confining him, or it may be what is deep within him, wanting to get out but blocked by what Harold Bloom calls ‘the anxiety of influence’.36 Certainly Hill sees poetry in visionary terms. As he writes in ‘A Letter from Oxford’ (1954): ‘The young student, the poet, maybe, hunched in his mackintosh on the top of the bus in the Banbury Road, sits apart from the crowd. Or he follows in the wake of a vision of life that goes before him and which he cannot grasp, a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night’.37 And certainly Hill is not denied a vision: ‘I saw the angels lifted like pale straws’. The point is that the vision is too intense for him: ‘I could not stand before those winnowing eyes’. It is a biblical image of divine judgment. We think of Isaiah, ‘You shall winnow them, the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them’ and Jeremiah, ‘And I will winnow them with a winnowing fan in the gates of the land’.38 In Hill’s poem, though, the impure prophet or poet is winnowed, not the wayward children of Israel. He is not allowed to descend the mountain with dignity but falls and finds ‘the world’ again. Back in ‘the world’, an expression slightly stained with a Pauline sense of distaste, Hill finds that he lacks ‘grace’ to tell what he has seen. Reading this

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line with Christian mystical visions in mind, we recall Paul saying how someone he knew (himself, in all likelihood) ‘was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter’.39 There is no grace given to Paul to repeat the holy words of paradise. Yet Hill has already told us what he has seen: ‘I saw the angels lifted like pale straws’ and ‘those winnowing eyes’. There must be more that he has seen but cannot report or express. At the same time, we may take ‘grace’ to be elegance and charm, in which case the complaint is that he cannot write the visionary poem he has in mind for want of inspiration or refinement of poetic skill. ‘God’s Little Mountain’ would therefore be the workmanlike, fallback poem that can be written but that is composed without grace. And so the poem provides its own defence against criticism for some stiffness in its lines. The slightly arch question that remains, ‘And who will prove the surgeon to this stone?’, asks both who will enable Hill to speak properly of his religious vision and who will help him to write the visionary poetry that is pent up within him or, if not that poetry, then another kind. *** Hill has climbed part of the way up God’s Little Mountain. Stripped of all particulars, it does not seem at all like the mountain in Gone to Earth. Except for the river at its base and the allusion to the Devil, it appears to be like a smaller version of Mt Sinai. We have only to open the Bible to make the identification. ‘And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly’.40 Yet Hill is no favoured prophet like Moses: ‘And the LORD came down upon mount Sinai, on the top of the mount: and the LORD called Moses up to the top of the mount; and Moses went up’.41 While Moses is on Mt Sinai, the children of Israel urge Aaron to build an object of worship. Angered by His people’s turn to idolatry, God sends Moses down to the people; the prophet smashes the tables of the Law that God has given him. After praying for the people, Moses returns to Mt Sinai, God allows him to see his ‘back parts’ and new tablets of the Law are made.42 Must we take God’s Little Mountain to be another peak, not the great mountain of the Lawgiver? Not necessarily, for God did not choose Mt Sinai because it was the tallest mountain in the area but because it was the most desolate and the most pure. The Talmud points us in the right direction. ‘R. Joseph said: “Man should always learn from the mind of his Creator, for behold, the Holy One, blessed be He, ignored all the mountains and heights and caused His Shechinah to abide upon Mount Sinai”’.43 God overlooked mountains higher than Sinai, such as Mt Tabor and Mt Carmel, even though


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those peaks each thought it deserved the honour of hosting the Lord God. And He did so because idols had been placed upon them and had rendered them impure; only Sinai was untainted, and so it became God’s little mountain, its relative smallness being a sign of God’s modesty and a challenge for us to be modest as well. Indeed, so unassuming is Mt Sinai that we are told in Midrash Tanhuma that it had to be miraculously expanded in order to be able to receive the glory of God and the ‘thousands and thousands and a myriad of myriads’ of angels and chariots that accompanied Him when He descended in order to give the Law to Moses.44 ‘The Holy One said to it: “Widen and lengthen yourself to receive the children of your Lord”’.45 Perhaps, though, God has other mountains that are qualitatively little in comparison to Mt Sinai. One contender, with a plausible basis in the poem, is Mt Parnassus in central Greece, the home of the muses and therefore the mountain sacred to poetry, music and learning, three things that are very important to Hill. There are several possibilities here. One is that Hill tries to climb Mt Parnassus and fails: the muses disregard him, or at least the one he especially wants to court shuns him (maybe Polyhymnia, the muse of sacred song). Yet the allusion to angels in the lyric cannot be decently accommodated by this interpretation. Another possibility is that Hill climbs Mt Sinai but as a poet rather than as a prophet, thinking—with Eugenio Montale, among others—of poetry as a scala a Dio, which would mean that he wishes to use poetry as a means of ascending to God or that he proposes to make poetry out of ‘religious experience’.46 For climbing the sacred mountain in the wrong spirit or with impure motives he is inevitably judged by God and thrown back to ‘the world’. The third possibility is the most complex. Here Hill climbs the sacred mountain, doubtless believing that he is called to do so, yet is judged unworthy of high prophetic calling. Falling back into the world, he turns his experience into poetry: not, to be sure, a religious poem but a poem that analyzes failed religious experience. Hill is no Moses, no Joannes Climacus, no Guigo II; he is neither a prophet nor a mystic.47 Nor is he a visionary poet, let alone a mystical one. He is, rather, an artisan who examines the desire for vision and its consequences. It is instructive to look sideways for a moment, and to consider another twentieth-century poem, a far greater one, that is concerned with descending from on high. In ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’ (1921) Wallace Stevens introduces us to the spirit he will later call ‘that mountain-minded Hoon’.48 It is a memorable meeting: Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

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Religion, Literature and the Imagination What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? What was the sea whose tide swept through me there? Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.49

In his dignified descent, hearing hymns of his own composition, Hoon maintains his visionary intensity. He wears the purple and has been anointed with ointment: so he holds Episcopal office, or, better, is a priest-king. Despite his elevation he has not lost himself in ecstasy, as the implied questioner has presumably suggested before the poem begins, but rather has found his self in that high state. Where ‘God’s Little Mountain’ figures Hill as waking an angry or petulant deity, and being summarily dismissed by Him, Stevens’s Hoon has consecrated himself as priest, prophet or king (or all three), and speaks to us in tones of supreme self-confidence. ‘Out of my mind the golden ointment rained’, he declares. Where Hill asks for a surgeon to loosen his tongue, Hoon is sublimely indifferent to anyone other than himself, his ears making ‘the blowing hymns they heard’. And where Hoon finds himself Hill merely finds ‘the world again’. In his fall from the mountain, Hill is unable to express himself properly. Yet in his stately descent Hoon finds himself ‘more truly’. He does not find himself ‘more strangely’, as we would expect from the grammar, since the poem ends more strongly if it places an emphasis not on how he finds himself but on what he finds: his irreducible strangeness. That Hill ends his poem with a question rather than with the assurance of Hoon’s self-discovery indicates a sharp division between the visionary Stevens and the Hill who must content himself with examining failure of religious vision.50 At first, we might say that the question does not seem to be a stumper. The surgeon who can treat his wound—we think of the ‘mortal wound’ that Hazel receives—and make him able to speak of what he has seen is God. T. S. Eliot, whose later poetry is not greatly admired by Hill, is nonetheless surely in the background here when Eliot writes in ‘East Coker’ (1940), ‘The wounded surgeon plies the steel / That questions the distempered part’, the surgeon being Christ.51 And the surgeon who can


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help Hill speak with more elegance and charm is the muse, or perhaps none other than his true self. The reader of Hill’s later books, especially King Log (1968), Tenebrae (1978) and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983), recognizes that the surgeon has finally performed his operation, enabling Hill to say everything while using just a few words. A second look at the question, though, shows it to be more difficult. Who will prove to be the surgeon who can make me speak? That is the question on which the poem ends, and it is a genuine, urgent question: is it God or is it the muse? Is Hill’s silence, his inability to write the poem that ‘God’s Little Mountain’ should be, due to a religious failure or an artistic one? *** What is ‘the problem of religious poetry’ for the young Geoffrey Hill? First of all, as ‘God’s Little Mountain’ makes plain, it is that he cannot write religious poetry (as Blake, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Paul Claudel and Eliot can, despite their many differences of confession and style) but only a poetry that considers failed or flawed religious vision. Part of the reason that a more elevated poetry is out of reach for him is because, as he says in ‘The Bidden Guest’ (1953), ‘The heart’s tough shell is still to crack’.52 But hardheartedness is not all. In falling back into the world he has been unsettled far more than heaven has in his bid to be considered worthy. The problem is with him, at least in this early lyric: he is not a mountain (like John Milton, like Blake) but a hill. Still an undergraduate poet, he is God’s little mountain, Geoffrey Hill, using a pun that was waiting dormant for him in Gone to Earth (‘a hill five miles from the Callow, called God’s Little Mountain’). God’s true little Mountain is actually south of Shropshire in Worcestershire: such is the joke of the poem. Second, the problem is that Hill cannot decide whether he needs surgery from God or the muse. Is his problem in writing visionary poetry to do with the state of his heart or with the state of his poetic skill? In ‘God’s Little Mountain’ the problem is posed simply at the level of indecision, which tends to make the final question seem a little coy. It is a beginning, and only a beginning. With ‘Lachrimae’ the problem will be raised to a higher power, and Hill, no longer so little, will worry more deeply whether art is constitutively a distraction from authentic spirituality. Art, ‘this trade’, will become identified with ‘Self-love’, and the religious poet— Southwell or Hill—will come into focus as a ‘Self-seeking hunter of forms’.53 Are these poetic forms, which turn the poet into a martyr for his art, or are they the forms of martyrdom, which turn the martyr into an artist, perhaps, distracting him from his or her religious vocation? That is the cruel

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ambiguity around which ‘Lachrimae’ is constructed. But for the Hill of ‘Genesis’ and ‘God’s Little Mountain’ that was unimaginable. He must first address himself to ‘the unfallen’, those who, unlike him, have not fallen from the mountain or fallen in the more recent Second World War, and he must also pass through the difficult years of King Log (1968) and Mercian Hymns (1971).

Chapter 4

Religion, Truth and the ‘New Aestheticism’1 Robert Eaglestone

In the short but extraordinarily influential ‘Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism’, the authors wrote that, as time unfolds, ‘poetry gains a higher honour, it finally becomes what it was at its inception—the teacher of humanity’; when ‘we make ideas aesthetic’, ‘eternal unity will reign among us . . . A higher spirit, sent from heaven, must found this new religion among us, it will be the last, greatest task of humanity’.2 This short text underlies or inaugurates a significant Romantic and post-Romantic tradition, and in recent years there has been a return to this tradition in literary criticism and theory, a return often named as the ‘New Aestheticism’ and mediated through the thought of Theodor Adorno. Yet the relation between this recent critical turn and religion is not clear. This is not altogether surprising, for while the ‘Oldest Programme’ names a ‘new religion’, its relation to religion is not really clear, either. The aim of this chapter is not to take on the enormous task of investigating this relationship with religion, but, more modestly, to contrast the recent critical turn (and its unclear relation to religion) with religious readings of literary texts, specifically those made in the name of Christianity. The literary and the religious have an extremely complex interaction in modernity. One tiny historical thread of this enormous tapestry is the development of Anglophone literary criticism. It has been inextricably intertwined with religion, from the establishment of the teaching of English Literature in India as a replacement for missionary work in the first half of the nineteenth century, through the Newbolt Report of 1921, which argued that ‘literature is not just a subject for academic study, but one of the chief temples of the Human spirit, in which all should worship’, to, say, the late work of Terry Eagleton and his move away from a noticeably messianic Marxism to a more sympathetic treatment of religious themes.3 There are, then, numerous threads that could be drawn between a specifically religious critical mode and almost any Anglophone critical tradition—the idea

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of the ‘canon’, for example, has a specific religious heritage. However, the key link that I want to focus on here is the shared attitude to truth that we find in religious (specifically Christian) criticism and the ‘New Aestheticism’. Both approaches share a strong sense that truth itself is not, or is not only, to be understood as positivism (i.e., as an agreement of a state of affairs with a statement) but to be understood in some other way. This alternate, often implicit, way of conceiving of truth marks out the intellectual innovation of religious criticism and the ‘New Aestheticism’ in our current critical climate.

The ‘New Aestheticism’ The ‘New Aestheticism’ or the school of ‘Singularity’ is a turn, or perhaps even a movement, in contemporary literary theory. As I have suggested, it has its roots in German Romanticism and its heritage, and its key figure is, arguably, Theodor Adorno. These critics set themselves against what might broadly be called positivist forms of knowledge. That is, they are opposed to the major forms of historicism and contextualization, implicit and explicit, which dominate literary studies. This can be seen as part of the generational see-sawing between formalism and historicism that has been so intrinsic to literary studies over several decades. An earlier shift, for example, was analysed by Paul de Man when he complained of a pervasive attitude in the Academy that ‘the internal law and order of literature’ was ‘well policed’ and that critics could turn to ‘foreign affairs, the external politics of literature’.4 In turn, many critics decried him and the Yale school as ahistorical and apolitical. Yet the debates over how one is to read and think about literature did not stop there. In The Poetics of Singularity Timothy Clark argues that an artwork is not simply re- or pre-baked ideology; it is not just a historical document but something important, revelatory and foundational—true— in its own right. Each work of art is a singularity and understanding the nature of this singularity is ‘a mode of demand and a performative act’.5 Clark and others are opposed not to politics or emancipatory projects but to the way that critics turn, say, William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ into ‘a textual strategy expressing the stance of a disillusioned radical in the insecure context of England in 1798’. For Clark, such reading reflects an enervated-leftist Americanized institutional context.6 It is important, however, not to see the critical turn articulated by Clark and others as a rejection of history per se; instead, it is a turn against positivism, a turn against a particular sense of what truth might be. The school of singularity is

Religion, Truth and the ‘New Aestheticism’

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characterized by an interest in what cannot be easily pulled out from an artwork or ‘contextualised’. Epitomizing this interest, Peter de Bolla describes some of the questions one might ask oneself when faced with Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis: ‘How does this painting determine my address to it, and in so doing, what does that address do for me and for the painting?’ Having asked this preliminary question, the follow-up might be, ‘How does it make me feel, what does it make me feel? What is the content of my affective response?’ Beyond these questions there lies the insistent murmur of all great art, the nagging thought that the work holds something to itself, contains something that in the final analysis remains untouchable, unknowable. Hence the question that will quietly but insistently insinuate itself into the following speculations: What does this painting know?7 Michael Wood picks up on this intimate engagement in his Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, asking how, and in what ways, literary texts can know things; in what ways they can ‘taste’ (but not consume, or be consumed by) knowledge. In his powerful book The Fate of Art, Jay Bernstein reveals his considerable debt to Adorno, exploring the knowledge spoken of by Wood in a different register. Bernstein observes that in Kant, as well as in post-Kantian discourses, the spheres of morality, truth and beauty have been separated from each other, allowing the sphere of beauty (that is, the realm to which aesthetics addresses itself) to wither away and remain no longer as a major area for thought. Recognizing that art retains a powerful impact on our everyday lives, Bernstein explores what happens when the categories of truth and beauty are no longer separated and art is deemed capable of telling us about truth. The central claim of the ‘New Aestheticism’ hinges on the relationship between art and truth, and I have discussed this at length elsewhere.8 To summarize this argument briefly: I argue that much of the post-Romantic and hermeneutic tradition suggests that there is another conception of truth that is extant, as it were, below the more ‘common or garden’ positivist sense of truth as correspondence. It is not that the positivist sense is incorrect; rather, it is that the post-Romantic and hermeneutic tradition tends to rely on a more existential sense of truth. This latter sense is often described as ‘disclosing’, and is frequently analysed in or through works of art. Heidegger’s major essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ is perhaps the locus classicus for this, although, as Andrew Bowie argues in detail in his book From Romanticism to Critical Theory, it underlies much of

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the subsequent tradition. Heidegger writes: ‘The unconcealment of beings is what the Greeks called Alethiea. We say “truth” and think little enough in using the word. In the work, when there is a disclosure of the being as what and how it is, there is a happening of truth at work’.9 An artwork reveals its—and our—world; it reveals who and how we are, and how things are for us. This sort of view of the relationship between truth and the artwork is central to any ethical critique which can be made of the ‘truth only cognition’ characteristic of modernity: Bernstein writes that art ‘is the critical self reflection of truth-only cognition and its conscience’.10 This is not to suggest that the artwork becomes an example for philosophers (as, say, in some of the work of Martha Nussbaum), which would reduce the artwork to an example for thought: for the ‘New Aestheticism’ an artwork is an act of thought itself (‘what does this painting know?’), not simply an addendum to philosophical labour. I want to discuss three closely interlinked issues arising from this. The first concerns the relationship of this sort of view to politics in the broadest sense. In one way, the ‘New Aestheticism’ might look like it is playing with fire. To bring into reason’s procedures—and so into the mechanics of politics, as it were—that which is clearly not ‘reasonable’ is to risk not only a sense of ‘de gustibus non est disputandum’ in art, but, perhaps, the destruction of reason and politics: as Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe argued (after Hannah Arendt), a party that claims not to be political but to offer more profound ‘truth’, beyond secular, reason-based politics, risks destroying the political realm altogether. The ‘fact is that National Socialism at no point presented itself as a determinate politics . . . but rather as the truth of the political’.11 Conversely, though, an approach to politics that claims only to be reasonable, to embody only that which could be proven would not only be unworkable but also intolerable and (in Arendt’s sense, at least) totalitarian. This is one of the reasons that Adorno is such a key figure in ‘New Aestheticism’. Sharing some of the same philosophical trajectory as Heidegger, over the issue of truth at least, Adorno’s record of opposition to Nazism, both personally and intellectually, and his criticism of Heidegger (e.g., in the first part of Negative Dialectics and also in The Jargon of Authenticity, where he criticizes Heidegger’s disciples) means that his work can provide a dialectical framework to discuss the issues that were integral to German hermeneutic philosophy while maintaining an awareness of some of their possible results and recognizing the need for vigilance. But a second issue, and one I want to begin to examine here in more detail, is the complicated relation of these ideas to religion. In general the


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‘New Aestheticism’ is characterized by a thoroughgoing secularism. Yet in the ‘Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism’ religion— perhaps a renewed or newly understood form of religion—and literature are bound together, and this connection haunts the thinkers who follow in this tradition.12 The sorts of things that ‘this painting knows’ are rarely, say, reducible to positivistic assertions; they typically throw us back on our existential self-understandings of our own being in the world: the need for and fear of decision, our complex and uncertain sense of right and wrong, desire and love, our relation to our own extinction and so on. Are these experiences religious? Well, the discourse of religion certainly speaks to them. But they are also literary experiences, both portrayed in literature and enacted, in ways, by literature. Indeed, it is precisely the affective power of literature to inhabit these and other experiences so powerfully that caused Plato to exile poets from his Republic. And it is these particular affective experiences— rather than cultural historical detail—to which the ‘New Aestheticism’ or the school of Singularity seems to want to turn our attention. Are these experiences, brought under the eye of philosophy, religious experiences or are they human experiences understood religiously? This question, even if it could be answered (which does not seem possible at first sight), cannot be approached satisfactorily here. Yet even to be able to ask it seems to suggest that, pace Derrida, there is a thinking that ‘repeats’ the possibility of religion without religion. And this is significant because it brings back into focus what, as it were, the point of literature and its study might be. A third issue arises, too: it is the question of how the artwork actually works, how it works on the audience or the reader, how the truth, the disclosure, is disclosed. Some of the discussion of the singularity of the artwork suggests that contemplation is what is required and that is certainly right; however, more than that is surely necessary. An artwork is not naively or naturally (whatever this might mean) understood, but rather, we learn to interpret them, to become—to use another Heideggerian term—attuned to them in and through their contexts. But this too fails to explain ‘how’ an artwork works. Indeed, one might suggest that this question itself already generalizes, and that each singular artwork works in its own singular way, to the point where even the word ‘work’ becomes too general. In contrast, one can easily see how artworks build on each other, on their histories and generic rules and conventions. The ‘New Aestheticism’, then, seems to leave a number of complex issues—the relation to the political, the parallels with religion and the question of how an artwork works—in the balance.

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‘Language, Faith and Fiction’ At this point I want to turn to an avowedly religious thinker, Rowan Williams, who offers a contrasting view of the relationship between religion and literature, in the specific case of the work of Dostoevsky. Like the critics who make up the ‘New Aestheticism’ movement, Williams, too, has concerns about the role of positivism in human self-understanding, both in the public sphere—he is critical of ‘journalistic commentators’ —and in the private. Williams argues that what he names ‘metaphor’, ‘is omnipresent, certainly in scientific discourse . . . and its omnipresence ought to warn us against the fiction that there is a language that is untainted and obvious for any discipline’.13 Here he is using metaphor in a very general sense. It stands for the polysemic associations of all words, for the innate poetic resources of any language and also for the ways in which people see the world. Williams’s concern is specifically the ways in which the ‘language of a particular religious tradition’—its imaginative resources, its metaphors— moulds the ‘perceptions’ of believers.14 He argues that this is not a simplistic matter of how ‘imperatives supposedly derived from their religion’ dictate views, but of what believers ‘see things and persons in terms of, what the metaphors are that propose further dimensions to the world they inhabit in common with nonbelievers’.15 It is in this, anti-positivist context (if this is not putting it too strongly) that Williams turns to Dostoevsky, arguing that his writings ‘insistently and unashamedly press home the question of what else might be possible if we—characters and readers—saw the word in another light, the light provided by faith’.16 As Williams goes on to tell us: The novels ask us, in effect, whether . . . we could imagine living in the consciousness of a solidity or depth in each other which no amount of failure, suffering, or desolation could eradicate. But in order to put such a challenge, the novels have to invite us to imagine precisely those extremes of failure, suffering, and desolation.17 My concern here is not to evaluate the whole of Williams’s wider theologicalliterary-theoretical project but to explore the claims he makes for the truth of the literary. Williams argues that the ‘truth of faith is . . . something that cannot be reduced to an observable matter of fact’, that is, that this form of truth is of a different form to ‘matters of fact’.18 But this question raises (for him and for Dostoevsky) another question: ‘If the claims of Christ represent an order of reality quite independent of the ensemble of facts in the world, if they are not simply part of what happens to be the case, how exactly


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do they connect with that world?’19 This question is analogous, of course, to the question raised by the ‘New Aestheticism’ of how truth is revealed in a work of art. William’s answer to this question, worked through Dostoevsky is complex. He argues: The truth of defensible propositions, a truth demanding assent as if belief were caused by facts, generates a diminished view of what is human; it educates in ignoring aspects of human narrative that we disapprove of or find impenetrable . . . By taking the step of loving attention in the mundane requirements of life together, something is disclosed. But that step is itself enabled by a prior disclosure, the presence of gratuity in and behind the phenomena of the world: of some unconditional love.20 However, before one (well, before a literary critic, at any rate) might level accusations of ‘Bovarism’, of mistaking a text for a real world, Williams argues that ‘Dostoevsky’s working out . . . turns out to be closely connected with an entire rationale . . . for fiction itself’.21 For Williams, the writing of fiction in itself affirms ‘something other than the world of plain facts . . . the world of mathematical closure. In that world, given the evidence or the argument, the future is clear and there are not significant divisions to be made’.22 It is, in a Derridian idiom, the world of the ‘calculable’. The attempt, Williams says, to deal with ‘human affairs as if they belonged to the world of evidence and determined outcomes is bound to end in violence’, both ideological and literal. By contrast, the ‘novel in its narrative indeterminacy, is a statement of “non-violence”, of radical patience with the unplanned and undetermined decisions of agents’.23 But it is here that Williams pushes his argument further. It is not simply the case that Dostoevsky’s fiction rejects closure, unity and so on, until, in the words of one of Aldous Huxley’s fictional characters, ‘it makes so little sense that it’s almost real’—literary critical discourse has, since (at the very least) Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending and more so in the face of literary postmodernism, dealt with the indeterminacy of texts and with refusals of closure.24 Rather, if, as Williams argues, for critics like Georg Lukacs the novel as an art form marks a secularization of an enlightened West, where individual narratives and meanings are self-created, separate from and ‘disenchanted’ (as Selya Benhabib would phrase it) with a divinely sanctioned universal world view, then Dostoevsky is ‘post-secular’ in a special sense. On the side of the ‘Underground man’, Dostoevsky—and the novel— is suspicious of the very process of self-creation that Lukacs and others see the novel as embodying: indeed, they take apart the very process that they

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are supposed to embody. Williams implies a movement of the novel from apologetics to a secular (anti-religious) self-creation to, in Dostoevsky, the questioning (one might even say deconstruction) of just that process. This is not just an indeterminacy that is opposed to determinacy, but rather a form of indeterminate thinking that opposes itself to the opposition between determinacy and indeterminacy. For Williams, this form of indeterminate thinking leads to a space beyond the opposition between religious/secular, a space where that opposition itself is opposed and where the terms of that opposition are questioned. The issue here is one of risk: ‘Human subjectivity seeks, in the chaotic exchanges of speech and action, definitions that are continually renegotiated, sometimes with radical breakage and change of direction . . . turning away from the business of selfdefinition does not get rid of the risks but may intensify their tragic quality’. ‘Christian faith’, Williams continues, regards ‘choice and self-definition’ as not only open to divine grace but as themselves ‘effective enactments of divine purpose’, without being ‘“narrated” in a way that would foreclose the possibilities of failure or cost’. It is the ‘continuation’ of the possibility of choices (‘and thus the processes of self-defining which narrative works with’) that is offered by faith.25 It is not answers that enable faith but the act and possibility of questions, with their openness to failure. Williams’s thoughts here are not far from the thinking that we find in Maurice Blanchot, nor from the ambiguous ending of J. M. Coetzee’s philosophical/fictional thought experiment novel Elizabeth Costello. Williams asks: ‘Is fiction driven by the conviction (explicit or not) about an endless resource that underlies and in varying ways permeates all finite activity, or by the sheer possibility of “answering”, countering anything that can be said, and of following any narrated event with another one?’26 This view of the role of fiction bypasses the question of how ‘truth’ might be shown in an artwork by focusing instead on what—in this case, for a person of faith— this truth can be said, as it were, to ‘do’. Here, rather than simply responding to a set of imperatives provided by secular modernity with another set of (religious) imperatives, Williams suggests that the novel—and faith— puts these imperatives into question through the continuation of the possibility of choices.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the discussion of ‘truth’ in two critical moments: The first, the ‘New Aestheticism’, a turn in criticism inspired by Adorno


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and German Romanticism; the second, the recent literary theoretical work by Williams. Both are similar in that they seek to counter, or surpass, a positivist view of truth by turning to art. Both find in art and literature something that is beyond the reach of a form of knowledge that conceives of truth as correspondence. And both are opposed to a simplistic instrumentalism. Bernard Stiegler remarks baldly in Technics and Time: ‘There is no point in looking to isolate a noninstrumental aspect to language; nothing of the kind exists. The issue is rather that of addressing the modalities of instrumentality as such . . . ’27 Yet both the ‘New Aestheticism’ and Williams might counter by saying that looking instrumentally for ‘noninstrumentality’ would result in finding nothing. More than this, both the ‘New Aestheticism’ and Williams, though giving the historical context its due, pass beyond historical or historicism readings of the works to ask what the work knows, or, even, what is released by the work in its own singular aesthetic. And it is here that the ‘New Aestheticism’ and Williams begin to differ. For the former, what is released in the work is something sui generis to the work, that is that work, even though this process of ‘releasing’ is in general what characterizes art. The work of art is a singular work, to the point where to encounter it properly is to encounter it not as (say) a novel or as a painting, save in the process of becoming attuned to it, but as a unique work. In contrast, for Williams, the complex questioning that the artwork does, rejecting both determinacy and indeterminacy as too determinate, as different sides of the same coin, will reveal the same thing, a rejection and endless continuation offered by faith. In this ‘releasing’, the artwork is not singular, though the questions it asks (the question Dostoevsky asks, for example) might be. Yet this is not all that Williams has to say on the matter. What is ‘released’—and this is why in no small part he chooses to focus on Dostoevsky—is a risk, a risk also to faith, for quite rightly this ‘continuation’ might take one away from faith, certainly from an orthodox faith: it is as if art is religion’s autoimmune system, working in it yet possibly against it. In this, it seems, Williams’s approach is at odds with the ‘Oldest Programme’ in that rather than ‘founding a new religion’, art comes to play a role in the development of extant religious forms. But in this, too, it plays more of a role than it does in the ‘New Aestheticism’, where art is seen as the final telos. Art might perhaps point to something more but it is unable to reach it. Again, this is to circle back to the unanswerable aporia concerning the experiences of the liminal: are they religious experiences or are they human experiences to be understood religiously or in some other manner? Certainly, discourses of religion offer ways to understand the ‘metaphysical’

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experiences that other discourses can find difficult to comprehend. Yet other discourses do find means of engaging with such experiences: The ‘New Aestheticism’, for instance, might turn to Adorno’s descriptions of the ‘metaphysical experience’ at the end of Negative Dialectics and in his lectures on metaphysics (where he expands on the issue). This experience is not, for Adorno, a mystical religious experience (indeed, these are, he argues, always mediated by education and traditions of mysticism).28 He finds another way of thinking about such experiences through the names that Proust writes about: In Proust they are the names of Illiers and Trouville, Cabourg and Venice. I myself have had a similar experience with such names. When one is on holiday as a child and reads or hears names like Monbrunn, Reuenthal, Hambrunn, one has the feeling: if only one were there, at that place, that would be it. This ‘it’—what the ‘it’ is—is extraordinarily difficult to say; one will probably be able to say . . . that it is happiness.29 Although when one arrives there, one does not find ‘it’, Adorno does not find the experience worthless. In the lectures that correspond to the passages in Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes that ‘even if “it” is not there’— in the village one visits—‘one is not disappointed’ because ‘one is too close, one is inside the phenomenon, and has the feeling that, being completely inside it, one cannot actually catch sight of it’. Adorno continues: ‘Happiness is something within objects and at the same time remote from them’.30 While ‘pure metaphysical experience grows unmistakably paler and more desultory’, Adorno believes that ‘nothing could be experienced as truly alive if something that transcends life were not promised also . . . the transcendent is and it is not’.31 Though this is not an overtly religious position, it does sound similar to Williams’s talk of the autoimmune dialectic of risk that faith invokes. Perhaps all this is to say that if one tries to pass beyond or reach back before or excavate under (to stretch a metaphor) the sphere of scientific secular modernity and the forms of fundamentalist religious discourse that grew up in opposition to it, and if one does so without giving up on reason, broadly understood, then the realms of art and religion do not look so far apart. And, though, of course, one can deny positivism and question secular modernity without a commitment to the divine, the sources of this questioning, which draw on each of our own fundamental experiences, do run very close to each other.

Chapter 5

The Deconstruction of Christianity: From the Hand of God to the Hand of Man1 Arthur Bradley

In his recent book La Déclosion, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has begun to articulate his long-awaited ‘Deconstruction of Christianity’ [La Déconstruction du christianisme].2 It is a project that seems to involve at least two distinct dimensions. On the one hand, Nancy seeks to show that the Christian tradition—for all its supposed complicity with metaphysics, ontotheology or logocentrism—is engaged in a process of auto-deconstruction: Christianity deconstructs itself. Yet this is only half the story. On the other hand, Nancy also seeks to argue that the post-Christian epoch—from the Enlightenment, through Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, up to Jacques Derrida’s own deconstruction—is a logical outworking of that same process of self-deconstruction: what we call deconstruction itself is inescapably Christian in origin. To Nancy’s eyes, then, it would seem that the Deconstruction of Christianity necessitates an almost unimaginably huge rewriting of the past, present and more importantly the future of western thought. If Christianity is nothing other than a perpetual movement of self-overcoming, this means that everything we normally posit as ‘beyond’ the Christian tradition—the Enlightenment, the ‘death’ of God, the so-called ‘closure’ of metaphysics and even the gesture of deconstruction itself—is inexorably reabsorbed back into it: ‘the world that is called modern is itself the becoming [le devenir] of Christianity’.3 For Nancy, the Deconstruction of Christianity poses a series of critical questions to any allegedly secular, post-Christian philosophy. Is the Christian epoch really over? What, if anything, comes after it? To what extent might we still be Christian? It is equally possible, though, to pose this last question back to Nancy himself. As Derrida has argued in his late work On Touching, the

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Deconstruction of Christianity risks making something of a Christianity of deconstruction. To be sure, Derrida concedes that Christianity can indeed be seen as a certain ‘deconstruction’ avant la lettre even if that gesture obviously passes under other names: Christ’s kenosis, ascesis, the mystical hyperousios and, particularly, the Lutheran act of destructio.4 According to Derrida, we should not be surprised to find that what we call ‘deconstruction’ today retains the memory of Christianity within it: Luther’s Protestant destructio of Catholic theology in order to return to the originary truth of Scripture foreshadows Heidegger’s destruktion of the history of ontology in the name of a more original, pre-Socratic experience of being. However, ‘there is deconstruction and deconstruction’, as Derrida puts it, and here is the crux of his dispute with Nancy.5 If Nancy is surely right to say that we cannot simply step ‘beyond’ Christianity—because the genius of Christianity is that it consists of nothing other than a series of steps beyond itself— Derrida believes that this insight is bought at the cost of a hyperbolization of the Christian tradition: the overcoming [dépassement] of Christianity is always baptized in advance as a Christian self-overcoming [auto-dépassement]. In this sense, we might wonder whether Nancy presides over the reChristianization of western philosophy: ‘All our thought is Christian through and through’.6 Yet, if all this means that the Deconstruction of Christianity is a ‘difficult, paradoxical, almost impossible task’, such ‘impossibility’ is what famously drives any deconstruction worthy of the name.7 It is not Derrida’s intention to simply rule out Nancy’s project, so much as to put it to the test by trying to imagine what form it must—and must not—take. As with any act of deconstruction, a Deconstruction of Christianity must inhabit the Christian tradition from the inside: we can only begin to overcome Christianity by accepting our utter contamination by it. However, we accept tradition in order to reveal its essential non-identity with itself. What must be affirmed— and what Nancy himself does not sufficiently affirm—is that there is no single, self-identical or homogeneous ‘Christian tradition’ in the first place. To put it another way, the Deconstruction of Christianity is not so much a question of absorbing the entire history of the west into Christianity so much as turning Christianity itself inside out: Christianity must be exposed in its very interiority to an outside that is, if possible, even more exterior than the outside it has itself ceaselessly affirmed. For Derrida, in other words, the Deconstruction of Christianity must deconstruct the historical gesture of deconstruction that just is Christianity itself. If we are to focus upon just one such paradigmatic gesture of deconstruction within the Christian tradition, Derrida argues that it must be the Luthero-Heideggerian gesture of

The Deconstruction of Christianity

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destructio: any Deconstruction of Christianity, he writes, must begin by ‘untying itself from a Christian tradition of destructio’ whereby the act of self-deconstruction is part of an economy of self-sacrifice, self-purification and thus also self-preservation.8 In that sense, what emerges from the other side of this process cannot simply be a more originary, purer ‘Christianity’. What, though, might this Deconstruction of Christianity look like? I think there are many possible answers to this question—Judaism and Islam to name only the most obvious!—but in what follows I want to propose just one. To introduce my own argument, I want to suggest that the Deconstruction of Christianity might take the form of a new continental philosophy of technology. One of the major axioms of recent continental thought (Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, the work of Bernard Stiegler and, of course, the Nancy of Corpus) is that what we call the ‘human’ is neither a biological entity (a body, a gene-carrier, a species) nor a philosophical state (a soul, mind or consciousness) but something whose ‘nature’ exists in relation to technological prostheses. According to a logic that will be very familiar to readers of Derrida’s work, technology is a supplement that exposes an originary lack within what should be the integrity or propriety of the human being itself.9 For Derrida, humanity is constituted not by any positive essence, being or substance but by a relation to what ostensibly lies beyond it: we ‘are’, so to speak, our own outside [pro-thesis]. If this philosophy of technology seems alien to the history, dogma and traditions of Christianity, Derrida suggests in a remarkable footnote to On Touching that it represents a mode of deconstruction that ‘distances itself from the (Luthero-Heideggerian) destructio’, which is specifically identified as, and with, Christianity.10 In other words, the deconstruction of the body fulfils the very criteria Derrida sets out earlier in the book for a new Deconstruction of Christianity.

*** To flesh out this point a little more, I want to focus on just one thread in the complex tapestry of arguments that is On Touching: the critique of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Didier Franck and Jean-Louis Chrétien’s phenomenology of touch in Part 2 of that work. It might well seem odd at first to use phenomenology as a means of pursuing a Deconstruction of Christianity but in many ways this is precisely Derrida’s point: Husserl and his successors are—for all the supposed scientific rigour of the epoché—by no means exterior to the Christian metaphysical tradition. On the contrary, the phenomenology of touch, which privileges tactility above all other senses as the most direct and unmediated form of intuition, belongs to a

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Christian tradition of valorizing the body that can be traced all the way back to the Incarnation: the Christian corpus or body consists in nothing other than a certain thinking of the body. However, the intention here is not merely to demonstrate Nancy’s point about the inescapability of the Christian legacy (even or especially by modernity) so much as to expose the fact that there is no one, single, homogenous Christian ‘legacy’. For Derrida, once again, the Deconstruction of the Christian origins of phenomenology is not just another way of showing that ‘everything is always already Christian’ but a way of showing how in its very ‘interiority’ Christianity is exposed to what lies beyond it. In ‘Hand of God, Hand of Man’, what lies beyond/ within Christianity is a certain technical or prosthetic logic that is the very condition of the (Christian) body: the apparent immediacy, continuity and indivisibility of the touch are always mediated by and through an other. For Derrida, this critique of the Christian history of the phenomenology of touch—of phenomeno-theology—takes the form of a sustained and remarkable reflection on the place of the hand. What exactly is a hand? Who or what does the hand belong to—animal, man or god? Why, in particular, does the history of phenomenology from Husserl, through Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, up to contemporary figures like Franck and Chrétien, accord such a massive privilege to the hand as the condition of all tactility? Let me briefly trace out answers to these questions: 1. To start with, we should note the absolute indispensability of the hand to the foundational texts of twentieth century phenomenology. As Derrida shows, Husserl’s Ideas II are remarkable for the enormous stress they place upon touch: tactility is not merely one sense among others but the fundamental condition of our relation both to our own bodies and to our lifeworld. For Husserl, the privileged means of this tactile relation is the hand: what may at first seem to be a mere appendage is in fact the sign of our existence as free, willing, spontaneous, affecting and auto-affecting egos.11 More generally, the hand is also the index of metaphysics of immediate, intuitive presence, whether it is of our own bodies or of the world: the finger that touches something is simultaneously and indivisibly touched by that something in a way that applies for no other sense. (We will have plenty to say about the obvious metaphysics of this idea of the touch later on.) In twentieth-century phenomenology, this valorization of the hand persists—beginning, of course, with Heidegger’s own paradigmatic attempt to articulate Dasein’s engagement with the world through the concept of the ‘ready-to-hand’.12 2. Yet, what none of this tells us is why the hand is so indispensable to the history of phenomenology. It may well be that tactility is the most direct and


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immediate form of intuition—though Derrida will locate problems here too—but none of this explains why the hand alone is deemed the privileged or exclusive vehicle of touch. Where does this leave the rest of the body— are the mouth and the genitalia not capable of touch? What about those bodies that do not possess hands but claws, paws and so on? Are human beings really the only beings that are capable of touch, and thus a relation to their own bodies and to the world? Of course, Husserl does not quite say this and there are good phenomenological grounds for focusing an analysis upon human beings rather than animals: we should always begin with the being that is closest to us and nothing is closer than the being that we ourselves are.13 Even so, a rigorous phenomenology should suspend all reference to the real nature of both the perceiver and the perceived—the ‘who’ and the ‘what’—and concentrate on the phenomenon alone. There are grounds for wondering whether this is really the case here. Just as Husserl’s phenomenology of the sign fails to bracket off a certain metaphysics of the voice, so his phenomenology of touch is contaminated by a metaphysical anthropology. For Derrida, that is, what is at stake in the phenomenology of the hand is a residual anthropocentrism that establishes a rigid hierarchy and teleology: the only being that can genuinely touch—and thus constitute himself as free, spontaneous agent—is man.14 3. We can go further. As Derrida goes on to argue, what we are dealing with here is not simply an anthropology but a theology: the phenomenology of touch—continuous, immediate and indivisible—inevitably touches upon a theology of touch, of contact, of consubstantiality of being that finds its paradigmatic example in the doctrine of the Incarnation. To prove this— somewhat risky—point, Derrida turns to Chrétien’s phenomenology of the ‘hand of god’.15 On one level, of course, nothing could be further from the scientific rigour of Husserl than this kind of phenomenological theology: it is no coincidence that Chrétien was, along with Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry, the principal target of Dominique Janicaud’s polemic against the ‘tournant theologique’ in French phenomenology.16 Nonetheless, we can draw a direct line from the metaphysics of the touch in Husserl’s Ideas II to the theology of the touch in Chrétien’s L’appel et la réponse. For Chrétien, it is only when we are touched by the divine that we achieve the full, immediate and intuitive plenitude promised by Husserl: only the hand of god genuinely delivers up the spatial and temporal presence offered by the hand of man. If we commonly think of the ‘hand of god’ as nothing more than a metaphor or analogy drawn from the sensible, finite hand of man, in other words, then Chrétien turns this logic on its head: it is the hand of man that is a figure for the real, authentic and immediate touch offered by the hand

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of god. Now, this is not to say that Chrétien simply opposes the philosophical privilege accorded to human touch above all others because what defines the spiritual touch for him is precisely the doctrine of the Incarnation, that is to say, the becoming human of the spiritual. Rather, we might say that the hand of god is paradoxically the only means of ensuring the historical privilege accorded to the hand of man: it is the hand of god that gives the hand of man, that reveals itself to that hand and redeems it from its creaturely finitude. So, the historical excellence of the human hand is preserved as that which is called by, and responds to, the spiritual touch of the Incarnation. In all these senses, we might wonder whether Chrétien’s analysis of the ‘hand of god’ does not so much represent a ‘theological turn’ in phenomenology (à la Janicaud) but rather the final outworking of the anthropotheological assumptions that have always been in play in discussions of the human hand: Christianity deconstructs itself in order to reappear as the phenomeno-theology of touch.

*** What form, though, might a deconstruction of this Christian phenomenology of touch take? It is, once again, a question neither of opposing that history from some spurious exterior position, nor of hyperbolizing it, but of exposing its own ‘outside’ within it: the anthropo-theological hand is not at one with itself. As Derrida tantalizingly suggests, it is possible to offer an other history of the hand that exists independently of all anthropo-theology: the ‘history of the hand’ remains ‘impossible to dissociate’ from the ‘history of technics’ he writes.17 What are some of the implications of this position? 1. To Derrida’s way of thinking, as we have already seen, it is clear that a certain technicity—mediation, spacing or substitutability—always exists at the heart of the phenomenology of touch. Of course, we can again trace this critique back to the very beginning of his philosophy: what Voice and Phenomena did for the metaphysics of speech, On Touching now does for contact. As we move from Husserl, through Merleau-Ponty, all the way up to Nancy’s own discussions of the plasticity of the body in Corpus, we find that mediation always insinuates itself between the apparent spatio-temporal immediacy of contact: there is a spatio-temporal difference even between the simultaneity of the touching and the touched. Why is this? For Derrida, as his discussion of Franck makes clear, we might go so far as to say that the ‘phenomenology of touch’ is, even on its own terms, an oxymoron: what makes it possible for us to analyse touch as a phenomenon—the reduction or bracketing of the world in all its contingency, variability and changeability—is precisely what forbids any real experience of


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contact itself. The phenomenon of contact—with all the immediacy, simultaneity and presence it entails and guarantees—is only constituted on the basis of the suspension of real contact. In this essential mediation that constitutes our very experience of the immediate, the originary technicity of perception, affection and auto-affection is born: ‘What calls for “technics”, then, is the phenomenological necessity itself’.18 2. Perhaps we can best witness this technicity in operation by returning to the question that drives Derrida’s entire discussion: what exactly is a ‘hand’? Who does it belong to? Where does it come from? Of course, anthropo-theology provides one answer to that question: the hand is the hand of man, the hand that defines man as man and not animal, the hand that enables him to touch himself and his world, the hand that guarantees his privileged status as free, spontaneous, self-moving, affecting and autoaffecting ego. However, there is another history of the hand, and another Deconstruction of Christianity, albeit one that is only alluded to by Derrida himself in the footnotes to the text.19 For the French palaeontologist André Leroi-Gouhran, whose groundbreaking work Le Geste et la parole is discussed by Derrida as early as the Grammatology and referred to once again in the notes to On Touching, the hand is the engine that drives the process of hominization itself: the birth of the hand is the birth of the human.20 What led Leroi-Gourhan to this conclusion was the post-war discovery of human remains that possessed very limited brain capacity but that, nonetheless, were upright, bipedal and tool-using. Quite literally, Leroi-Gourhan argued, palaeoanthropology had got things the wrong way up: the brain was not the cause of tool use, language and so on, but the effect. The attainment of an upright posture by prehominid man freed the hands for tool use, which, in turn, liberated the lower jaw for language and enabled the cerebral cortex to develop to a position where it was capable of symbolic thought. This means that what makes human beings ‘human’ in the first place is not consciousness, intelligence and so on, but precisely our relation to the (allegedly) nonhuman world of technicity. In Leroi-Gourhan’s account, the site of this originary interface between the human and the non-human is the hand. 3. What, then, is a hand? In Leroi-Gourhan’s view, we can give a radically different and more surprising answer to that supplied by the history of anthropo-theology: the hand is not the guarantee of immediacy so much as the first mediation. It is what we might paradoxically call a ‘natural’ or original prosthesis—an exteriorization that constitutes the interior of our body. To put it another way, the hand of man evolves in a reciprocal relation with the technical implements it wields. On the one side, of course, the hand

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shapes the environment around it into a tool or instrument: the very act of picking up a twig in order to dig in the earth transforms that twig into a technical implement. On the other side, though, the hand is shaped by the environment into a kind of meta-tool, a tool-using tool: the act of picking up a twig requires a gripper with independent digits, opposable thumbs, that is, another technical implement. For Bernard Stiegler, whose multivolume La technique et le temps is heavily indebted to Leroi-Gouhran, what all this makes possible is the recognition of the coevolution of the human and the technical: ‘The human inventing the technical, the technical inventing the human’ across history.21 More radically still, the technical history of the hand proposed by Leroi-Gouhran also calls into question the anthropological privilege accorded to the human by Christianity and, latterly, the phenomenology of touch. If phenomenology speaks of the hand of man—the hand as the sign, attribute and extension of a pre-existing human being who occupies pole position in a teleological hierarchy—the philosophy of technology turns that logic inside out and forces us to speak of what we might call the man of hand: the human race possesses no positive substance, such as a soul, free will or consciousness, because it is constituted through and through by its relation to technical prostheses. The relation to technology is what constitutes the human, then, but humanity cannot claim even this bare relation as a defining or exclusive property. This capacity to make and use tools is also possessed by a wide range of species—most notably, but not just, large primates—that do not possess the human hand.22 So, what becomes of homo faber when man is not the only maker? In simple terms, then, I am arguing that what appears to be most proper to the human—to constitute our privileged status within the world as free, spontaneous, (self-) affecting egos—is in fact that which utterly expropriates the human: our experience of ourselves is always mediated because the very agency of that self-experience—the hand—is itself a medium.

*** What is the meaning of this insight? It has been my hypothesis that the Deconstruction of the body is also and at the same stroke a Deconstruction of Christianity: a body that is ‘originally and essentially open to the techne’ is also one that is involved in a ‘“deconstruction of Christianity”, of the Christian body, a deconstruction of Christian “flesh”’.23 Everything hinges upon the point that the phenomenology of touch is inseparable from a Christian theology of immediacy, of plenitude, of consubstantiality of Son and Father and ultimately of incarnation. Such, at least, is the wager on which On Touching stakes itself: we would have no phenomenon of


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touch—no concept of the spatio-temporal identity between the touching and the touched—without Christianity. Yet if Christianity tells us that the hand of man always contains within it a real, divine presence, I have tried to show that the philosophy of technology turns that hand inside out, like the fingers of a glove, exposing the exteriority, mediation and technicity from which it is stitched. To put it another way, the hand exists not in order to touch without mediation but because there is no touch, no immediacy: it touches upon what is essentially and irreducibly untouchable, that is to say the unmediated experience of touch itself. Let me conclude by sketching three of the larger areas of enquiry for this Deconstruction of Christianity and thus for theories of technology more generally. First, I think that the philosophy of technology necessitates a genealogy of religion as part of the evolution of technical prostheses. It is becoming increasingly urgent, as Derrida puts it in the essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’ to think ‘faith’ and the ‘machine-like’ together as one and the same possibility and we can detect similar moves in the recent work of Jan Assman, Régis Debray and Stiegler.24 We need to trace the technological conditions— language, the invention of alphabetic writing, scrolls, effigies, idols and icons, the printing press, virtual media and, less positivistically, what Derrida calls the trace—that make faith, religion, the (apparently unscathed or unmediated) experience of the sacred itself possible.25 In Debray’s view, the Semitic world bequeathed two great gifts to humanity: God and the alphabet. But what if they are the same invention? Secondly, we also have to consider the implications of the philosophy of originary technicity for our ethical, political and religious present. It is now something of a cliché to speak of how new scientific and technological advances (e.g. artificial intelligence, the mapping of the human genome, advances in genetic engineering) are challenging our idea of ‘what it means to be human’. To be sure, the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben on the biopolitical is an indispensable reference point here but perhaps, as Derrida indicates in his one famous and rather damning reference to Agamben in Rogues, we need to go beyond the residual naturalism implicit in concepts of bare life.26 If human beings exist solely in relation to technological prostheses, if our body is itself a kind of originary prosthesis, then this transforms the entire terms of the debate: the biopoliticization of life, as real and disturbing as it may be, is merely the logical outworking of an originary contamination of biology and politics, a political ontology, that just is ‘natural’ life itself. Who—or what—will constitute or safeguard the anthropo-theological sanctity of ‘life’ in the radical absence of any defining human essence or existence?

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Finally, to go back to where we started, what remains is the question of the future of Christianity or, if we are not careful, the Christianity of the future. We began by asking whether it is possible to think a ‘beyond’ of this most plastic, self-exceeding and self-deconstructing of traditions, without falling into the twin traps of either accepting it uncritically or reproducing it in secularized form under the pretence of overcoming it. Quite simply, what is at stake here is what is at stake throughout Derrida’s work from beginning to end: the affirmation of an absolute other that is irreducible to every horizon of expectation, whether it be a messianic dogma or a techno-scientific calculation. If the philosophy of technology is indeed a Deconstruction of Christianity, what is crucial is that it must not merely repeat (whether wittingly or unwittingly) the historic self-deconstructions of Christianity itself. Perhaps this philosophy of technology might provide an alternative to the now well-documented ‘messianic turn’ within post-Heideggerian European thought that is now broad enough to include such diverse figures as Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. To what extent, although this is a question for another day, might technology—which postHeidegger is almost exclusively, but now very reductively, associated with pure calculability, anticipation and the foreclosure of the future—actually constitute a more powerful way of affirming the radical, non-teleological openness of futurity that is elsewhere called the messianic?27 In each case, the task of going beyond Christianity will always be to think ‘substitution without sacrifice’, deconstruction without destructio, and an emptiness emptier than the kenosis through which Christianity has always refilled itself.28 Such, perhaps, would be a Deconstruction of Christianity that did not make a Christianity of Deconstruction.

Chapter 6

Deity in Dispatches: The Crimean Beginnings of Muscular Christianity Louise Lee

This chapter explores the response of the Victorian novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley to the potent theological yield of a bold new print phenomenon in the 1850s: the newspaper dispatch. As a hard-working parish priest, Kingsley was used to throwing himself at the heart of a problem, witnessing for himself sickness, death and ‘the rest of the devils’. But the rise of the newspaper dispatch as the primary means of reporting the Crimean War changed everything; driving Kingsley ‘half-mad’ as he sought to come to terms with his absence from combat. Kingsley’s dissatisfaction provided the driving force for what would later become known as muscular Christianity, a physically active form of Christianity that was progressively associated with militarism throughout the nineteenth century. This chapter argues that, ironically, muscular Christianity—a term first coined in a review of Kingsley’s post-Crimean novel Two Years Ago (1857)—grew out of what Kingsley perceived to be his own inactivity during a grave national crisis. And it was guilt over this non-engagement that manifests itself in Brave Words for Brave Soldiers and Sailors (1855), an anonymous in absentia battlefield address written from Kingsley’s study in Hampshire. In this very strange piece of pamphleteering, which operates as Kingsley’s own form of newspaper dispatch to the troops stationed around the Black Sea, he tries to link the bravery of Jesus Christ to the bravery of the British soldier. It is an assay that shows how susceptible Kingsley was to seeing divinity within the semiotic interstices and untenanted spaces of mid-Victorian Britain’s newest media technology. But it also starkly exposes the inherent problems of a middle class author responding to the war from his armchair at home, while attempting to attain spiritual identification with working class soldiers dying and enduring at the Front.

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Russian Bullets and Reaction Shots On a bright autumnal morning in October 1854, the journalist William H. Russell sat on a hill in the Crimean Peninsula and watched in quiet disbelief as a small group of British cavalry prepared to charge at an embedded Russian battalion: At ten minutes past eleven . . . they swept proudly past, glittering in . . . all the pride and splendour of war. We could scarcely believe the evidence of our senses. Surely, that handful of men was not going to charge an army in position? Alas! It was but too true—their desperate valour knew no bounds . . . By thirty-five minutes past eleven, not a British soldier, except the dead and the dying, was left in front of these bloody Muscovite guns.1 This description of the Light Brigade at Balaclava was one of the defining moments in the imaginative life of the nineteenth century. After reading Russell’s report in The Times, Tennyson famously leapt from his armchair at his home in Farringford in the Isle of Wight, and ‘within a few minutes’ penned one of the most famous poems in the English language.2 Yet while the parlous concatenation of circumstances that led to the Charge—the badly worded order from Lord Raglan, the hopeless situation of the soldiers, their bravery in acting on the command—might alone have been enough to spike itself unforgettably on the nation’s consciousness, what provided the ultimate coup de foudre was the shocking new textual formatting of the information: the newspaper dispatch. Reading this provoked the poet laureate and, indeed, the rest of the country, into a collective and frenzied response of admiration, anger and empathy. A Punch cartoon of November 1854 captured this collective reaction shot: it depicts a Victorian father, standing at his warmly lit hearthside, brandishing a poker in the air, and play-acting the suicidal assault of the noble six hundred while reading Russell’s report to his tearful but enraptured wife and children.3 In the era of the Victorian novel, Russell had inaugurated a bold new iconic age: transforming Russian cannon fire and home-grown valour into a serial bombardment of action-packed prose, delivered to the breakfast tables of England in bite-sized chunks of shock and wonder.4 For a country that had not known military action for 40 years, the furore over the war (potentially involving friends and family) might be understandable enough. But the newspaper dispatch was peculiarly responsible for circulating its effects, collapsing the distance, both literally and

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metaphorically, between the reader and the soldier, between fierce battles abroad and cosy domesticity at home. As Stefanie Markovits has recently described, Julius Reuter’s establishment of a telegraph agency in 1851 allowed official dispatches from the Crimea and unofficial translations from foreign presses to arrive in a matter of days. Mail boats took longer but they were ‘still extraordinarily quick’ in comparison to the months needed to bring news from the Napoleonic Wars.5 As a result, the events of Varna, Alma, Balaclava and Sebastopol could be reported in England within just a few days of them taking place, transporting a daily rapid-fire round of anxiety and disbelief to the tender cerebellums of the newspaper reading public. As Michael Paris observes: Russell’s reports written as ‘Letters to the Editor’ . . . marked the beginning of an organised method of reporting wars for the civilian population at home . . . [that] ended the remoteness of war by giving events an immediacy that made civilians feel a part of the experience.6 Actually, Paris’s statement does not go far enough. The psychic world of mid-Victorian Britain may recently have become habituated to the cliff-hangers of fictional serializations but the newspaper dispatch posed a desperate new kind of thrilling instalment: reality, or at least a print-ready version of it. No less a wily interpreter of the public mood than Wilkie Collins noted in a tone of somewhat unrestrained panic: ‘If this war continues . . . the prospects of Fiction are likely to be very uncertain to say the least of it’.7 The threat to fiction posed by the war was easy to see. Russell’s reports were not stolen from foreign newspapers (as in previous decades) or penned by a ham-fisted junior army officer more adept at sharpening his bayonet than polishing his prose; this was war, up close and personal, rendered by an independent eyewitness in gripping, prescient style. In part epic glory-mongering on the brilliance and horrors of military encounter, these first-hand accounts were also crammed with the intimate details of daily life; textual snapshots that stayed with the reader long after he had read them. After the battle of Alma, for example, Russell was astounded at the loudness of the gunfire (‘the rush of shot was appalling’, he recalled), but he was far more alarmed by what was potentially happening above him: ‘I was particularly annoyed by the birds flying about distractedly in the smoke . . . [as if they were] fragments of shell’.8 Sparrows mistaken for bombshells seem to be particularly redolent of the newspaper dispatch’s unique ability to convert distant, far-off bullets into an intimate arsenal of prose fit for

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domestic consumption; while also enforcing the very real sense of an apocalyptic menace raining down upon the generation of the 1850s. But amid the exploded shells and the plumes of cannon smoke, the dispatch was also very self-referentially about the act of reading itself; further increasing the sense that time and space were compressed between geographically divided parties involved in the simultaneous activity of consuming the printed word. In Russell’s reports, he records the effect of soldiers reading messages from home: ‘Some had received letters from wives and children by the mail, which made them look grave and think seriously of the struggle to come’.9 These homely missives lingered poetically and in some cases, finally, as Russell adds: ‘Many a laugh did I hear from those lips which in two hours would be closed forever’.10 These textual devices invited readers at home to summon up their own images and then react to these creations, and through repeated updates, to sustain a daily relationship with them in their imagination. They also re-created what Esther Milne has called ‘the fantasy of bodily proximity’; a sense that the reader could almost reach out and touch the soldier.11 This was further compounded by Russell’s highly somatic manner of reporting the war; a mode he adopted both to authenticate his bulletins, to prove that he was actually there, but also because he was naturally outraged at the suffering that he witnessed.12 In one report, Russell recorded how he had watched grimly and silently as English and Irish bodies were piled into mass graves.13 On another occasion, Russell described how he met a corporal ‘with his foot dangling from his ankle’ who, after gratefully and thirstily taking a dram of brandy, felt a momentary bout of philosophical relief from his mortal injury and cheerfully gave thanks to Russell: ‘Glory be that I killed and wounded some of the Russians before they crippled me, anyway’.14 Stories like these created a peculiar form of mediated intimacy that elided geographical distance and cut across all boundaries of class, gender and shared experience. The response of the readership at home was unprecedented, full of bodily care and solicitude for the soldiers. Daily—and in great quantities—home-knitted gloves, socks, woollen blankets and warm clothes flooded into the London offices of The Times. Nearly a century later, that old warhorse Ernest Hemingway would worldwearily denounce the apparent corporeality of the battlefield correspondent’s reports: ‘Real war is never like paper war, nor do accounts of it read much the way it looks’.15 But the newspaper readers of the 1850s did not know this. The Crimean was Britain’s first ‘paper’ war, being waged not just on the shores on the Black Sea but also in the minds of the readers at home;

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and to them, these accounts really did summon up bodies that felt almost palpably real. Frederic Jameson has postulated a ‘waning of affect’ in the postmodern era, asserting that late twentieth-century culture was so saturated by text and images that it became inured to them.16 For the midVictorians, in a world before radio and TV, the ontological wound caused by reading these reports (their only way of connecting with events and loved ones abroad) directly conjured up the bodies of the injured, dying and dead soldiers, invoking their imaginary physical ‘presence’. While Russell’s retelling of these events was, pace Hemingway, to some extent rhetorical, it was also grounded in the harrowing bodily reality of real suffering and privation. Such suffering was particularly poignant to readers who keenly felt their own comfortable existence by comparison and who were, as yet, unschooled in the trick-box ontological effects of mass media culture. Benedict Anderson has described the psychic changes that occur during mass newspaper reading, changes that are private but also marked by a pressing awareness that others are doing the same. It is an ‘imagined community’ that, as Anderson suggests, also has implicitly religious connotations: The significance of this mass ceremony—Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers—is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically-clocked imagined community can be envisioned? At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his . . . barbershop or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life.17 For the generation of the 1850s, the ‘mass ceremonial’ of newspaper reading created a peculiar alliance with the ultra-modern counting-out of days and hours in news time, but it also connected readers to a sense of an ahistorical, eternal and perhaps Christian reality. Many Victorians felt the potentially electrifying deity of words delivered by telegraph: it was a paradigm set by the inventor of the telegraph himself—Samuel Morse—when he first stuttered out his message: ‘W-h-a-t h-a-t-h G-o-d w-r-o-u-g-h-t?’ The gaps between letters and meaning-making made for indistinctness as much

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as clarity, and these pauses in transmission were pregnant with utopian potential. As Olive Anderson observes: It was undoubtedly the Crimean War which began a dramatic change in attitude towards the army of British society in general and of the religious public in particular. For the first time troops were hailed ‘as the people’s army’ and idealised notions of what they were fighting for, together with unparalleled identification with their hardships before Sebastopol, combined to give them an immense emotional appeal.18 This appeal was also compounded by an epistemological confusion. Russell’s dispatches, received from unknown terrain into British hearth and home, talked about the soldier who both was, and was not there, and who at any moment might be killed; this made him not only a charismatic, desirable and ultimately unattainable figure, but also confusingly close. This relationship forms a linkage between writer, reader and soldier that, as I shall be suggesting later, creates an imaginative and productive space, perhaps even a secular trinity, that would invite quasi-spiritual meaningmaking.

‘Not Fit for Such Brave Work’: Writing Not Fighting It would be difficult to overstate the effect these reports had on the novelist and parish priest Charles Kingsley. For him, the terms of both novel writing and heroism changed irrevocably with the Crimean winter of 1854. While the crisis of the Newman controversy in 1864 would leave him publicly humiliated, it was the private crisis of the war that would leave him secretly indicting himself for years to come. In September 1854 he was sitting holed up in the garden room of his holiday home in Bideford, Dorset. While he was ostensibly there for family purposes (his wife Fanny was struggling to return to full health after a miscarriage), he was also halfway through Westward Ho! (1855), the history novel that he had been planning from the beginning of the year, and which he also hoped might improve his considerably dwindling finances.19 This, at least, is the neat, materialist version of his situation; the emotional reality of writing the book is mired in considerably darker forces. From the outset, Kingsley’s reaction to the war was one that oscillated between profound admiration for the soldiers and profound remorse at his own absence from the fighting. As he wrote to his friend, the theologian

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F. D. Maurice: ‘It seemed so dreadful to hear of those Alma Heights being taken and not be there; but God knows best and I suppose I am not fit for such brave work but only . . . une pauvre creature née pour faire des vers’.20 A poor creature born only to write verse: this sentence strikes one as peculiarly un-Kingsleyan. It suggests writing not as an honourable pursuit but as a form of backsliding, of not doing, of not participating; in short, of negation. Yet this sentiment, (its painful inexpressibility accentuated by its transposition into another language) dramatizes a central anxiety at the heart of Victorian letters. When the world beyond the page was one of courage, endeavour and danger, when corporals and captains were bravely skirmishing in frozen ravines on distant foreign escarpments for the glory of God and Queen, what was the use of the writer with his desk job at home? The wiry-figured Kingsley had his own rather eccentric method of combating the potentially enfeebling lassitude of the writer’s life: he wrote standing up in his study at a shelf; after composing his paragraphs, one at a time, pacing up and down the part of his garden called the ‘Quarterdeck’ at his home in Eversley, Hampshire.21 And, up until his crisis of confidence about the Crimean War, he was able to bat off emasculating phantoms about writing by pursuing a significantly vigorous day job. Indeed, his role as the vicar of Eversley was dispensed with what his publisher Charles Kegan Paul called ‘twenty-parson power’.22 Diary accounts attest to an exhausting cycle of through-the-night parishioner visits, sermons and teaching in addition to his burgeoning novelistic career. Such was his love of direct action and getting to the heart of a problem that he carried around a small hand drill on his parish duties, so that he could punch holes in his parishioners’ walls to improve ventilation.23 Kingsley’s wall punching seems to manifest a peculiarly Victorian approach to work and the world: an implacable belief in the righteousness of his task propelled by an unquestioning commitment in his duty to do it. But this direct impact on the world was essential. For Kingsley, writing about the world was only permissible if he was also working in the world. It was only through his public labours that his writing attained, by his own judgement, the status of authoritative cultural discourse. But these complex and gendered imbrications of novelistic identity were radically reappraised by Kingsley in September 1854: at the moment when the first Russian shells exploded in the bodies of the first British soldiers. While war in many ways was the logical extension of everything Kingsley had so far expounded—collective masculine action performed energetically and heroically for a purpose bigger than oneself—it also showed all too clearly how illusory Kingsley’s previous thinking had been;

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how difficult it was to believe in the public heroism of writing when others were encountering the world not just with brave words but with brave deeds in battle. Shedding blood for your country was an entirely different expenditure to shedding ink: Kingsley’s mood became darker and more haunted as the war progressed. The events in the Crimea would come to weigh on his mind ‘like a dreadful nightmare’ over the next few months.24 In a later letter to Maurice, he describes himself eking out a peculiarly obsessive and bifurcated existence, ‘living on the newspapers [my emphasis] and my old Elizabethan books’.25 Living on the newspapers implies a level of totalizing interest and concern verging on physical dependency, a mental state that was replicated across the country. As one bemused cabinet minister commented: ‘The excitement, the painful excitement for information, beggars all descriptions’.26 This mood of terrified curiosity is reprised in Kingsley’s post-Crimean novel Two Years Ago when the hero Tom Thurnall passes a crowd standing outside a London theatre: He passed one of the theatre doors; there was a group outside, more noisy and more earnest than such groups are wont to be; and ere he could pass through them, a shout from within rattled the doors with its mighty pulse, and seemed to shake the very walls . . . it was news of [the battle of] Alma.27 The ‘mighty pulse’ here was not just moving as one, but feeling as one. Kingsley was experiencing the colossal reverberations of what had quickly become ‘a national ritual of reading’, an experience that would strongly mark his writing in Westward Ho! 28 For Kingsley, to be part of this reading community might well have been reassuring, but only in one sense. During the turbulent 1840s, he had yearned for a unified readership—complaining in his first novel Yeast (1851) that the reason he could not write a coherent storyline was because his divided readership was preventing him: I confess [my characters] to be unsatisfactory . . . but how can I solve problems which fact has not yet solved for me? How am I to extricate my anti-typal characters when their living types have not extricated themselves; when the age moves on, my story shall move on with it.29 The age had moved on in the 1850s. But now Kingsley found himself part of a home crowd of desperately united readers and this was decidedly problematic: for what it reinforced even more to him was that he was at home, and not fighting in the war, or even as Russell was, writing in the war.

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This was a thought that made him, ‘sometimes very sad—always very puzzled’.30 ‘Puzzled’ is a distinctly odd word here: it implies a minor theoretical conundrum, a mere trifle of trouble; hardly adequate to convey what was becoming, in the context of the war, an all-consuming, joy-sucking mania of guilt. But the fuzzy thinking of ‘puzzle’ shows perhaps that Kingsley could not, or dare not, interrogate his own motives too closely because if he did, he would not be able to acquit himself of an unpardonable charge: cowardice. In Vanity Fair (1848), William Thackeray discusses this lily-livered spectre: From the time of Troy down to the present day, [literature] has always chosen a soldier for a hero . . . Is it because men are cowards in heart that they admire bravery so much and place military valour so far beyond every other quality for reward and worship?31 Cowardice is far too harsh a reproach for Kingsley but then his manicdepressive tendencies gave him a talent both for suicidal self-recrimination and, also, the opposite, a kind of swaggering over-confidence. There really was no serious reason why Kingsley should have expected to go to war: he was 35 when it started, he was not a professional soldier, and his double lives as parish priest and writer were more than enough to keep him at home. It would have been no more fitting that he should have donned a red and white uniform and trooped off to the Turkish Peninsula than say Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins or any other male writer (or cleric for that matter) still in their physical prime. But Kingsley had failed by his own self-devised codes of engagement and his mortification is palpable: ‘I am learning’, as he told Maurice ‘to be sure of what I all along suspected . . . that I am a poor queasy, hysterical half-baked-sort of a fellow’.32 Hysterical, queasy, half-baked? But this was Charles Kingsley, self-proclaimed prophet of direct action, who had made it his business to hurl himself manfully at problems in times of grave national crisis. This was Charles Kingsley who had, without a care for his own safety, jumped on the first train to London on the morning of 10 April 1848 and rushed unarmed towards Kennington Common, where police had positioned themselves around Chartist marchers in full anticipation of a violent bloodbath. This was Charles Kingsley who had toured the squalid slums of Bermondsey and Jacob’s Island and written a controversial but epoch-making novel about tailors’ sweatshops, Alton Locke (1850), earning the praise and approbation of among others, Harriet Beecher Stowe and even Queen Victoria herself. This was Charles Kingsley whose many campaigns for sanitary

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improvement, and for working men’s education, were materially involved in improving the lives of others; all public works and serious causes that, as his friend Thomas Hughes described, Kingsley took on ‘with all his intensity and keen sense of responsibility’.33 This was Charles Kingsley whose face was often the last seen on earth by the dying parishioners he had ministered to, through the long and repeated bouts of cholera at his parish in Eversley. Now, this same Charles Kingsley sat staring out at the burnished hydrangeas at his Bideford holiday home, writing a ‘most ruthless bloodthirsty book’ and getting himself into a state over war reports written by someone else.34 Where was the ‘brave work’ in that? This was other men’s ‘brave’ deeds, and other men’s brave reporting of brave deeds: doubly false for a writer who had prided himself on action and getting to the heart of things. In Two Years Ago, the narrator describes the aftermath of the first major battle and its effects in England: ‘The last day of September. The world is shooting partridges and asking nervously when it comes home, what news from the Crimea?’35 The world was not shooting partridges but Kingsley was; and this image tellingly reveals how his self-perception was changing. Partridges: those small, inoffensive feathery creatures not generally renowned for their bellicosity. Yes, that’s what Kingsley had become: a slayer of plump fat little causes; easy targets. He described himself to Maurice ‘screaming and scolding when one knows one is safe, and then running away when one expects to have one’s attack returned’.36 This is an astonishing image for the self-professed controversialist but then Kingsley’s guilt over his place of safety—on the one hand, not asked for, but on the other, crucially, not contested—was eating into him. It was beginning to settle on him, with all the bitterness of middle age regret, that the only horse he would be riding into battle was a hobbyhorse. If Kingsley was grim about his personal failings, he was even more pessimistic about the form that he had chosen to write in. The newspaper dispatch appears to have induced in Kingsley a one-man crisis of literary production. When, after the publishing success of Westward Ho!, William Cox Bennett dedicated War Songs (1855) to Kingsley, honouring him as the presiding spirit of the conflict, he replied in cringing, almost embarrassed, terms: For beside this war, one has not heart to sing of anything but it; & of it I cannot sing. As for battle songs, I cannot write them for I have never been in battle. I must have felt the cannon fever and seen men drop at my

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side (not to mention starvation, cold, defeat and the rest of the devils) before I can put them into words. For I am essentially a Pre-Raphaelite . . . and can only imagine what I have seen.37 The collocation of negatives in this passage—‘cannot’ (twice), ‘has not’ (once) and ‘never’ (once)—makes for a heartfelt statement of denial; hardly the triumphant, air-punching reply you might expect from a writer who has just been anointed as high priest of the war; as England’s pugnacious animus. Yet the reasons that Kingsley provides for his gloominess are worth lingering on. The fact that he could not imagine what he had not seen certainly did not pose much of a problem when he was writing his history novel Hypatia (1853), set in fifth-century Alexandria. But Kingsley’s dissatisfaction about Westward Ho! was apparent from the moment he finished it. In a letter to Thomas Hughes in December 1854, as he was completing the final pages, he wrote: ‘It seems to me only half as good as I could have written and only one-hundredth as good as should be written’.38 This may well have been faux modesty on Kingsley’s part as he wrote to his friend, a yet unpublished novelist, but it appears to have a very real cause. Kingsley patently regarded the novel, or more specifically his novel, as a tarnished form. Not only that, Kingsley himself felt unworthy for this national cause. ‘I am fit for nothing better’, he told Hughes.39 But what really lies behind this genre-damning statement? How could the novel now be so unfit for purpose when it had apparently served so well in the 1840s? As I have already suggested, the newspaper dispatch had eclipsed the novel, albeit temporarily, as the authoritative form of cultural discourse in the mid-1850s. So much so that while the Crimean may have been a readers’ war and a soldiers’ war, it most certainly was not an authors’ war.40 Remarkably few canonical writers wrote contemporaneously about the conflict, aside from Kingsley, despite a vast outpouring of autobiographical writings, letters and poetry by the soldiers themselves.41 Walter Benjamin’s joke about Charles Baudelaire being ‘heroic’ for writing Fleurs Du Mal in an age when mass circulation was killing the poetic lyric can be aptly reapplied to Kingsley.42 To write a novel about war when the national engagement with war was through the newspaper dispatch required some considerable stoutness of resolve. But Kingsley was used to sailing against the prevailing cultural wind and a minor dip in the novel’s hegemonic potency was tolerable enough. What was not tolerable was that Kingsley could not authentically tell a story because, as he said, he had neither seen it nor felt it: he had not seen men drop at his feet or felt cannon fever.

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In ‘The Storyteller’ Walter Benjamin considers the threat to narrative authority and a shared sense of tradition posed by war. While Benjamin was writing about the First World War, the challenges posed to the writer as he attempted to offer a literary response to a contemporaneous or recent conflict (from which he is absent) are comparable. In the 1840s Kingsley’s own experiences had given him authority, a moral and narrative gravitas. But the experience of the Crimean war, or rather in Kingsley’s case, the nonexperience, posed a radical hiatus to Kingsley’s habitus: that set of writing assumptions and attitudes that, as Pierre Bourdieu informs us, makes the author the controller of his own fictional world.43 Authority comes from what Benjamin calls the act of witnessing; or more specifically, witnessing death: ‘[It] is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. In other words, it is natural authority to which his stories refer back’.44 But Kingsley was suffering from a peculiar form of sensory deprivation whereby newspaper war reports had given him access to a world he thought he knew, but had not actually lived. Kingsley wanted imaginative proximity to the soldier but was unable to write it out fully because he had only read about it. The resulting dissatisfaction would become high influential in a new newspaper-driven cultural force that would later become known as muscular Christianity.

Muscular Christianity: But Can Words Be Brave? So, the relationship of Charles Kingsley to the Crimean war was one of authorial disintegration and sacerdotal invisibility. He no longer had a grounded relationship to lived events; it was mediated through other forms and other writers or journalists like William H. Russell and the press troupe at the Black Sea. At nearly every level, as priest and writer, Kingsley’s self-determined role as a man of deeds rather than a man of words, as a doer rather than a sayer, was challenged by the war. Here was a writer who talked like a soldier but when the call-up for battle came, he sat in his study and read about the fighting instead of joining it, either as a combatant or a minister. In his sermon ‘Heroism’, Kingsley quietly but nonetheless affirmatively denounced his own lack of engagement with the war: I know that it is very difficult to draw the line between mere obedience to duty and express heroism. I know also that it would be both invidious and impertinent in an utterly un-heroic personage like me, to try to draw that line; and to sit at home at ease, analysing and criticising deeds which I could not do myself.45

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With phrases such as ‘an utterly un-heroic personage’ and ‘sit[ting] at home at ease’, Kingsley dramatizes the total inadequacy of his rationalization that a writer could have a parity of ‘work’ with the soldier on the field. Five years later, Kingsley was still mulling over his failures: a letter from a General Hodgson to Kingsley, dated 29 April 1860, reveals that he had been making enquiries about a potential ancestor called ‘General Kingsley’.46 Royal Chaplain Kingsley, as he was by then, must have been only too aware of the ironies. His all-action-hero engagement with the world was now so shaky and tremulous that it had to be carefully massaged by some tenuous connection to distant soldiering genealogies rather than by Kingsley’s own public acts of bravery. His personal creed of active Christian manhood was in danger of becoming a mere pose. In January 1855 the pages of English newspapers continued to be filled not just with dispatches from reporters but with letters from the soldiers themselves, letters sometimes carrying stories recounted to nurses in field hospitals.47 The printed word, as Markovits observes, was the only means of connecting readers at home with soldiers abroad: To an unprecedented degree, the experience of the Crimean War was filtered through print—not just after the fact, as with past wars, when poets, novelists and historians took up their pens to memorialise the experience, but in real time and by an extraordinary range of writers.48 This emphasis on direct communication between soldiers from the battlefields and the readers at home had a galvanizing effect on many newspaper readers, and particularly some male writers. As a result of this outpouring of words from soldiers at the Front, a peculiar circularity of effect occurred from the early to mid months of 1855, which saw Men of Letters scrambling to scribble for the Crimean, to prove their support for the war and also, in some way, to shore up their querulous sense of identity. To Kingsley and a number of other authors, the soldier had become not just a valued and highly prized protagonist of letters and poetry, but also, in their imagination, the chief consumer and ideal reader. Hallam Tennyson’s biography of his father records how a chaplain sent to the Crimea by The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel proclaimed: ‘The greatest service you can do just now is to send out on printed slips Mr A. T’s “Charge At Balaclava”. It is a great favourite with the soldiers—half are singing it and all want to have it in black and white so as to read what has so taken them’.49 Later that year, in August 1855, Tennyson wrote to his publisher John Forster: ‘Having heard that the brave

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soldiers before Sebastopol, whom I am proud to call my countrymen, hav[e] a liking for my ballad on the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, I have ordered a thousand copies of it to be printed for them’.50 Kingsley, too, was anxious to communicate directly with his military readers, and though his war novel had been sent to the publishers by December 1854, he still felt vastly dissatisfied with it. He also felt, at a personal level, outdone by Tennyson’s ‘blundering and hundred-ing’, as he called it.51 Kingsley knew the value of poetry that ‘could make men sing’, but nonetheless, as he exasperatedly complained to Thomas Hughes, he could not ‘rhyme diddle with fiddle’.52 Yet if the poetic lyric deserted him, the religious instinct did not. Kingsley’s next work Brave Words for Brave Soldiers and Sailors owed much more to the pulpit than to art: it was his own religiously suffused dispatch to the Front; one which, among other things, attempted to gain its authority not from the seen action and bravery of war but from the unseen deity and bravery of Jesus Christ. Fanny Kingsley’s biography records its provenance: On receipt of a letter telling [Kingsley] of the numbers of tracts sent out to the soldiers which they never read, but looked upon as so much waste paper, and urging him to write something which would go home to them in their misery, he sat down, wrote off and dispatched the same day to London, a tract Brave Words for Brave Soldiers and Sailors.53 Brave Words was published anonymously in January 1855. It is a 16 page pamphlet which functioned as a battlefield address in absentia. Strikingly, (in contrast to the soon-to-be published Westward Ho!) the tone of this pamphlet contains no funny asides; none of the schoolboy high jinks of his war novel: it is intensely serious. Indeed, in a writing career that spanned nearly every Victorian print form, from political journals to industrial novels, books for children, published sermons, reviews, historical fiction, geological papers and travel writing, it is, by far, Kingsley’s most idiosyncratic work. Its oddness must at least in part arise from the entirely unprecedented spatial relationship that Victorian media technology had induced, whereby a man in his study in a Hampshire rectory could talk, almost in real-time, to soldiers on a freezing, body-strewn battlefield, 3,000 miles away. Kingsley, who had begun his church and writing career in a world organized around the predominantly oral culture of parish life and Sunday services, now found himself part of a new global ‘technopolis’, where a writer’s words or a preacher’s words would issue forth into unknown terrain and unknown countries, almost at the speed at which they were written.54 As Stephen Kern

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has noted, an intensified consciousness of simultaneity is one of the most long-lasting and wide-ranging psychological effects associated with the advent of telecommunication technologies in the nineteenth century.55 Yet despite this highly peculiar relationship, Kingsley’s absence from the events, writes itself more declaratively than any of Kingsley’s words. Brave Words starkly exposes the inherent problems of a middle class author responding to the war from his armchair at home, using his writing to gain spiritual identification with working class soldiers dying and enduring at the Front. If a twenty-first century reader is not inclined to take into account Kingsley’s religious belief, or to understand the way the newspaper dispatch might have produced an unprecedented new structure of emotional affect, Brave Words could be seen as a potentially callow piece of middle class expediency from a bourgeois author using his privileged interiority and access to education and oratory, to exhort (mostly working class) soldiers, who did not even have the vote, let alone socks and gloves to ward off the Sebastopol frostbite, to lose their lives in battle. Kingsley tries to collapse the distance of both space and experience by personally addressing the soldiers as ‘My friends’, thanking them for their bravery and suffering, and also their capacity to endure many hardships. He also invokes Christ, whom Kingsley calls ‘the bravest man who ever lived’ and tries to reassure the soldiers that they too will have the gift of eternal life, if they carry on suffering and enduring, as Christ suffered: My friends, I speak to you simply as brave men. I speak alike to Roman Catholics and to Protestants. I speak alike to godly men and ungodly, (although I heartily wish you all were godly.) I speak alike to officers and to men. I speak alike to soldiers and sailors; though more especially to soldiers; because they, alas! just now require most comfort. If you are brave (and brave you are, to judge by your last three months’ work), read these words. I call them brave words. They are not my own words or my own message, but the message to you of the bravest man who ever lived, or who will ever live; and if you read them and think over them, He will not make you brave (for that, thank God, you are already,) but keep you brave, come victory or defeat . . . You have now fought three bloody battles, and you have fought them like heroes. All England is blessing you and admiring you; and England is feeling for you, in a way which it would do your heart good to see. For you know as well as I—you must know better than I, my brave friends—that nothing is so comforting, nothing so cheering, as sympathy; as to know that people feel for one.56

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Perhaps the most striking aspect of Brave Words is the phrase ‘I speak’, which is used over thirty times. In a short written text, this seems to be almost an act of perversity. It signals an attempt to materialize the author through words but it also represents a self, and a voice, fractured in the field of communication. Throughout the piece, Kingsley interjects with the seemingly self-justifying question: ‘Are not these brave words, my friends? Are these not soldier-like words?’57 But the notion of ‘soldier-like words’ or ‘brave words’, written by a man in a study, seems to be a particular kind of verbal casuistry. ‘Brave words’ could surely only be plausible if Kingsley were, Henry V-like, speaking from the battlefield before leading his men into a fight. And this is the most conflicted aspect of Kingsley’s work: the attempt to formalize, as the title Brave Words shows, the relationship between the value of ‘brave’ words spoken by the author and the value of ‘brave’ deeds done by soldiers. The fact that later editions of this work, which was published throughout the century, changed the title from Brave Words to True Words suggests the essential untenability of the ‘brave’ relationship that Kingsley was attempting to engender. Brave Words is shot through with the worrying belief that words alone are not sufficient to ‘bridge the chasm’.58 Yet, in Kingsley’s defence, the relationship between brave words and brave deeds was not a meretricious conceit drummed up for an act of selfjustification; it was a discussion Kingsley was having with himself all his life. Can religiously inspired words have the same value as religiously inspired deeds? By the end of the 1840s, Kingsley had imagined that only through the physical and manly materialization of human flesh, could the spirit of Jesus Christ be present on earth; he rejected the notion that words alone could provide a conduit to God; they were all too subject to the venal modalities and modifications of the speaker. Body speech, putting your back into life, was the way you proved that God was alive within you. But now, under the new technological pressures of the war, Kingsley was forced by circumstance into a new position. The word, and the printed word at that, was his only resource of communication; his only point of connection with soldiers 3,000 miles away. Despite this, Brave Words was not an act of face-saving self-fashioning. As Fanny Kingsley describes, the pamphlet was published anonymously, ‘to avoid the prejudice which was attached to the name of its author in all sections of the religious press’.59 Indeed, the anonymity is an unusual device for someone like Kingsley, whose default position till then had been to transport his personality to the situation. Perhaps the real reason that Kingsley published anonymously is because it facilitated what might be called the ‘inspired voice’. As James Secord suggests in Victorian Sensation,

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‘to write under no name meant to be absolutely no-body and to live absolutely no-where’.60 This body-less voice—the ‘I speak’—gave an otherworld effect; an effort of ventriloquizing or scribing for God. John Durham Peters refers to the kind of divine voice generated across technologically generated distances ‘as the prophetic pose of secret knowledge’.61 Whether this is a pose or a stance, it is difficult to say, but to take Kingsley at his word, he was doing what he had spent his life doing in the pulpit and at bedsides, acting as a proxy for God and giving words of comfort. As C. Kegan Paul recalls, Kingsley’s pulpit style was one free of obscurantism and the theological dogma that beset the sermons of many other Victorian clergy: Kingsley’s reading of the Bible, whether at family prayer or in church, sounded like a true message from God; his sermons thoroughly unconventional, written in admirable English, were vigorous, reverent and awe-inspiring. He knew every man, woman and child in his scattered parish, and, with less effort than I have ever seen, with less sense of incongruity, could pass from light badinage in any casual state to deep religious talk on the state of the interlocutor’s soul. He was, theology apart, the ideal pastor of his people, living among them, wholly devoted to what he believed his divinely given work.62 As regards what Kingsley saw as his ‘divinely given work’ to preach, he also keenly felt that there was a need for a specialized religion for the solider.63 Kingsley can be seen to have been formulating a new style of religion from the beginning of the war. In a series of lectures at Edinburgh, he described the metaphysical state of Alexandria and its analogies with the Britain of 1854: Mythology was in a rusty state. The old Egyptian gods had grown in their dominions very unfashionable under the summary iconoclasm to which they had been subjected by the Monotheist Persians—the Puritans of the old world, as they have been well called. But Ptolemy, self, people (women especially) must have something wherein to believe. The ‘Religious Sentiment’ in man must be satisfied. But, how to do it? How to find a deity who would meet the aspirations of conquerors as well as conquered—of his most irreligious Macedonians, as well as his religious Egyptians.64 In this speech, you can see Kingsley applying his notions of what a democratic Christianity would look like. But this was not just Kingsley being

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professionally workmanlike about religion or being fanciful about mapping ancient history onto the modern day. He was also motivated by an intense sense of gratitude. For Kingsley, as for many other Victorians, there was a sense that the soldiers, in some way, had become Christ. Kingsley’s voice from the distance, from the fog of home, going out to the fog of Inkerman and Sebastopol, signified an attempt by Kingsley to use the only resources he had, his experience as a comforter at bedsides and in pulpits, to give spiritual sustenance to men who had little else. In 1877, the Rev Baldwin Brown, an admirer of Kingsley, claimed that the clergy tended to enclose both themselves and their Church in ‘the confines of a narrow pale making but a small and dreary kingdom of heaven’.65 While muscular Christianity began predominantly as a mental coping structure for newspaper readers at home, Kingsley was nonetheless highly influential in changing the face of popularized religion. In the mid-Victorian imagination, heaven was no longer a place for the spiritual elect but for the heroic working man.

Chapter 7

Israel Zangwill, Jewish Identity and Visceral Religion1 Jo Carruthers

At first glance it may seem strange to approach questions of Jewish identity and visceral religion via Israel Zangwill, a relatively obscure literary figure who wrote at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet when it comes to debates about multiculturalism or early twentieth-century Jewish identity, Zangwill’s writing is frequently treated as canonical. Jonathan Sacks, for example, opens a chapter on the history of multiculturalism with Zangwill, introducing him as an English Jew and author of the celebrated play The Melting Pot, which opened in Washington in 1908 before an audience that included Roosevelt.2 Despite his subsequent neglect, Zangwill was by the time of The Melting Pot’s opening a celebrated author, famous on both sides of the Atlantic for, among other things, his first novel, Children of the Ghetto (1892).3 As Sacks outlines, the title of Zangwill’s play ‘came to sum up an entire generation’s approach to identity in the New World’.4 And it is for the heritage of his Melting Pot that he is best known today, an image that, as Sacks explains, has come to symbolize ‘the disappearance of difference into a new hybrid or cosmopolitan identity’.5 The Melting Pot dramatizes the story of David Quixano, a musician and Jewish-Russian migrant whose family were killed in the notorious Kishinev pogrom. David becomes engaged to Vera Revendal, a Christian-Russian migrant whose initial anti-semitic prejudices are overcome by David’s musical genius. At the centre of the play is David’s symphony for America, which communicates his vision of America as the great Crucible or Melting Pot. The couple’s engagement is traumatically broken when David meets Vera’s father, Baron Revendal, at whose hands David’s family were murdered. David’s traumatic recollections make impossible the fulfilment of his dream of the Melting Pot: intermarriage and the extinguishing of old European prejudices. However, David’s symphony is a triumph and the couple’s love for one another enables

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a reconciliation in which Vera relinquishes her old Christian and familial ties and David overcomes his traumatic past. Despite being such an iconic figure, Zangwill and his work are haunted by critical confusion. While Sacks’s critique of Zangwill’s heritage hangs upon the latter’s status as an assimilationist, as ‘a Jew who no longer wanted to be a Jew’, David Biale contends that Zangwill’s bias towards Jews is so strong in The Melting Pot that the ‘end product’ of the smelting process ‘is to turn all true Americans into Jews’.6 Elsewhere, in contrast to Sacks’s reading of Zangwill as an assimilationist, David Feldman introduces him as ‘the English Zionist Israel Zangwill’.7 As Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan note in Beyond the Melting Pot, Zangwill’s Zionism led to him being ‘much involved in one of the more significant deterrents to the melting pot process’.8 According to Joseph Udelson, Zangwill’s religious affiliations and assertions are living contradictions: ‘That Zangwill was unable to distinguish between Christianity and the authentically Jewish is startling enough. It is particularly surprising in the light of his persistent denunciation of reformers of Judaism and of converts to Christianity’.9 Critics have also found a series of contradictions and ambivalences within Zangwill’s work itself. Describing The Melting Pot as a text ‘pregnant with ambiguity and tension’, Biale locates the root of this ambiguity in the ‘double consciousness’ of the Jewish community at the turn of the century, who, he claims, ‘envision an America in which the Jews might be both integrated and still retain their distinctiveness’.10 Nahshon also responds to what she calls Zangwill’s ‘ambivalence about full assimilation’, pointing to his use of Faust’s Cathedral music in the play and describing it as ‘a deeply buried fear that in forsaking his heritage for a glorious futuristic vision David Quixano might be selling his soul’.11 Nahshon implicitly points to a subconscious ambivalence, a ‘deeply rooted’ fear that is manifest in the ambivalences of the play itself. Biale’s and Nahshon’s points about Zangwill’s ambivalence are convincing, not least because major passages from The Melting Pot demonstrate this tension. They are evident even in David’s final, rousing speech, as he ends the play looking over New York from his rooftop vantage: There she lies, the great Melting Pot—listen! Can’t you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth—the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,—black and yellow— . . . East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the

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crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God . . . what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward! . . . Peace, peace, to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant continent—the God of our children give you Peace.12 There are a couple of points worth noting here with regard to Zangwill’s idea of the Melting Pot. First, it is the Cross and Crescent that enter the crucible, not the Star of David; a rather obvious omission in a play in which the central characters are Jewish and Christian. Second, it is a Jew who bestows this benediction, and blessing, over America. Is it that for Zangwill, despite his ‘bubbling’ and ‘seething’ melting pot, the Jews remain a ‘peculiar’ people (as the subtitle of Children of the Ghetto describes them and as Biale has asserted), set above all others just like David Quixano is here, literally ‘above’ New York with God’s eye view and bestowing blessings? Philip Gleason addressed the ambiguous nature of Zangwill’s Melting Pot as early as 1964 when he posed questions of the play that reveal its slipperiness: ‘Does it refer to biological “blending”, that is, intermarriage, or does it refer to cultural assimilation? Is the theory to be understood as descriptive, or prescriptive; does it show us how a process is taking place, or tell us how to further the action of that process?’13 The purpose of this chapter is not to find a ‘solution’ to Zangwill and his play. Instead, I want to take seriously Zangwill’s description of The Melting Pot as a Tendenz-Schauspiel, as Gleason explains, ‘in the sense that it dramatized a problem rather than trying to provide an answer to the problem’.14 The tensions in the play testify to the thorny nature of identity politics and difficulties of migration and multi- (or pluri-) culturalism. Zangwill’s representation of the Jewish community in Children of the Ghetto, which I will turn to shortly, suggests that Zangwill understood the complex workings of modern identity and identified both centripetal and centrifugal impulses that he was subsequently faithful to in his writing. These impulses are dramatized in The Melting Pot through David’s and his Uncle Mendel’s conversation. The two engage in an explicit and heated discussion of David’s Melting Pot concept in Act II, following David’s decision to break off his engagement. Although one can see a bias towards David’s arguments, the discussions perform Zangwill’s Tendenz-Schauspiel and suggest a more dialogic presentation of issues of assimilation. At one point David is enlarging on his vision of the ‘Crucible’,

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‘where the roaring fires of God are fusing our race with all the others’, to which Mendel responds (‘passionately’, as the stage directions note, and without rebuff): ‘Not our race, not your race and mine’.15 Shortly afterwards Mendel insists that the ‘Jew has been tried in a thousand fires and only tempered and annealed’. David counters: ‘Fires of hate, not fires of love. That is what melts’.16 It is an unsatisfying exchange in which appeals to tradition, family and history are maintained alongside an idealism that despite (and possibly because of) its naivety, are unconvincing. The uncomfortable combination in The Melting Pot of Jewish particularism and a desire for melting and fusing of peoples represents what Zangwill saw as the inevitable outcomes of migration; it dramatizes the problems, the complex, living realities of identity and is not (or at least not solely) the result of personal ambivalence on the part of the author. While a nation of immigrants, such as America, would work to integrate, even fuse, different groups; long-held affiliations, traditions and beliefs would inevitably hold an emotional and spiritual anchor for many. The Melting Pot does not present assimilation as an easy process: old prejudices, memories, intranational discrimination, and religious attachments make individuals resistant to change. Zangwill’s play does not even portray assimilation as altogether desirable: Vera loses her Christianity for love of David, who does not lose his Judaism, and the housekeeper, Kathleen, takes on Judaic rituals and habits out of love and pity for David’s grandmother, Frau Quixano. If The Melting Pot is read as a play that promotes assimilation, these old affiliations and prejudices will be viewed as hindrances to David’s vision. If the play is seen instead as a Tendenz-Schauspiel then a positive reading of these affiliations become possible. In the remainder of this chapter I want to reflect further on this profound exploration of affiliation and consider what it reveals about the visceral nature of religion. In Children of the Ghetto the visceral character of religious affiliation, tradition and belief is suggested by Chapter XII, ‘Sons of the Covenant’, perhaps the most vivid portrait of Zangwill’s ‘Peculiar People’ in the novel. Its portrayal of an early nineteenth-century Jewish synagogue serves to illustrate in greater detail the ways in which the community’s ritualized everyday life set in place deep emotional and spiritual attachments that galvanized group identity. From the very outset of the novel, Zangwill paints a picture of the Jewish community that illuminates his sense of the enduring nature of Jewry, and indeed of the reasons for Jewish religious and cultural endurance through centuries of persecution. In the ‘Proem’ to Children of the Ghetto, Zangwill frames the novel as a whole with his sketches of a simple, pre-modern, early nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewry:


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They would have been as surprised to learn who they were as to be informed that they were orthodox. The great Reform split did not occur till well on towards the middle of the century, and the Jews of those days were unable to conceive that a man could be a Jew without eating kosher meat, and they would have looked upon the modern distinctions between racial and religious Jews as the sophistries of the convert or the missionary.17 Harking back to a simpler time, this passage introduces Zangwill’s readers to the subject of the novel and also historicizes and thereby challenges the dominant frames of identity that pervaded at the time of Zangwill’s writing. It is this promise of an alternative way of thinking about identity that frames my reading of Chapter XII. Chapter XII is largely concerned with the community’s synagogue and its worship, and is sandwiched between two others concerned with ritual: ‘The Purim Ball’ (the chapter in which begins the romantic thread of the narrative between Hannah and David) and ‘Sugarman’s Bar-Mitzvah Party’. These two events—the ball and the party—are modern celebrations that even Zangwill’s Christian readers would be familiar with in a general sense. As such ‘Sons of the Covenant’ stands out, due to the contrast it makes with the modern worlds of chapters XI and XIII; it is a step into what Zangwill presents as a timeless world of ancient ritual, a world apart from the secularized ball or party. Having opened with the insistence that the synagogue ‘sent no representatives to the club balls’, the chapter presents a portrait of the simple East End ‘ghetto’ synagogue that meets in a room on the ground floor of No. 1, Royal Street, in which many of the protagonists of The Children of the Ghetto live. The ‘Sons of the Covenant’ resist the modern and show signs of an archaic, yet perhaps reassuringly Victorian, religiosity, including that of gender separation ‘lest [the women] should fascinate [the men’s] thoughts away from things spiritual’. As the synagogue rubs shoulders with the residences of the ghetto, so Zangwill demonstrates the cohabitation of the spiritual and the worldly, with the narrative explaining that the synagogue rooms back onto cowsheds. As a result, the ‘“moos” mingled with the impassioned supplications of the worshippers’, the everyday mixing with the otherworldly, the bestial with the divine, the earthly with the heavenly. Religious life is infused with the everyday: the worshippers came ‘in their work-a-day garments and their grime’. The narrative explains: ‘This synagogue . . . was their salon and their lecture-hall. It supplied them not only with their religion but their arts and letters, their politics and their public amusements’. Zangwill emphasizes the intimacy of the synagogue

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when he insists that ‘[i]t was their home as well as the Almighty’s’ and ‘on occasion they were familiar and even a little vulgar with Him’; demonstrating the ways in which religion and everyday life were infused, one within the other.18 The picture that Zangwill paints is of a visceral Judaism in which everyday life and spiritual activity are one; in which the body and the mind, the secular and spiritual, are distinctions that make little sense. With its characteristically ironic overtones, Zangwill’s ‘Proem’ moots the idea of a visceral religion early on when it writes of early nineteenth-century Jewry: ‘Decorum was not a feature of synagogue worship in those days, nor was the Almighty yet conceived as the holder of formal receptions once a week’.19 Zangwill portrays a form of Jewish identity that is grounded in the visceral communication, in ritual form, of the sentiments and beliefs of religious being. It is a mode of being that is felt as much as understood; it is habitually performed as much as it is consciously chosen. The men that Zangwill depicts sing and pray in Hebrew and the narrative describes ‘the Passover melodies and the Pentecost, the minor keys of Atonement and the hilarious rhapsodies of Rejoicing, the plain chant of the Law and the more ornate intonation of the Prophets’. He draws forth the mesmerizing tones of liturgy, which, he explains, ‘was known and loved and was far more important than the meaning of it all or its relation to their real lives’. The nature of Hebrew recitation, with its closer affinity to singing than reading, is a corporeal living out of ritual and Zangwill is clear to de-emphasize meaning here. It is not that meaning was not present necessarily, but that what was ‘known and loved’ were the ‘minor keys’, the ‘rhapsodies’ and the ‘ornate intonation’. He goes on to explain more explicitly: ‘Their religious consciousness was largely a musical box’, playing with pervasive conceptualizations of consciousness as being something primarily of the mind: here the religious consciousness is essentially non-cognitive.20 Expounding the visceral function of religious ritual, Zangwill explains: ‘But if they did not always know what they were saying they always meant it. If the service had been more intelligible it would have been less emotional and edifying. There was not a sentiment, however incomprehensible, for which they were not ready to die or damn’.21 ‘Meaning’ is toyed with further here. Distanced from knowledge (‘they did not always know’ but ‘they always meant it’), meaning is also distanced from the ‘intelligible’ but coupled with ‘sentiment’. That which they ‘meant’ is something felt as well as abstractly recognized: it is the meaning of ‘meaningful’ rather than the meaning of a cold or rational calculation. Zangwill’s emphasis is clear: it is sentiment, not comprehension, which leads to enduring attachment;


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indeed, a lack of intelligibility seems to be a prerequisite for an enduring attachment. Far from his portrait of a sentimental rather than knowing congregation being disparaging, Zangwill writes about the Sons of the Covenant with clear affection; it suggests that he has a more profound point to make here about the nature of attachment and affiliation. Zangwill’s description of ritual’s performative working views the physical action of ritual as bypassing cognition in order to embed itself even more tenaciously in the emotions. The description anticipates Judith Butler’s formulation of performative activity, in which ritual behaviour does something to the inner sense of being without there being any intelligent sense of choice. In Butler’s theory, the Cartesian outworking of the self to expression is turned on its head; she insists, instead, that activity creates and sustains the subject’s sense of an inner ‘self’. Applying this theory to the gendered body, Butler explains that the latter ‘has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’.22 Zangwill’s notion of visceral learning is also strikingly resonant with Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, which highlights the counterintuitive working of ritual and regulative practices on the individual, and, as such, the relegation of ‘meaning’ to bodily practice. ‘It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing’, Bourdieu writes, ‘that what they do has more meaning than they know’.23 What Zangwill shares with these theorists, without proposing an explicit coherent theory himself, is a rejection of the reification of reason as the centre of human agency. Later on in Chapter XII, Zangwill calls the Sons of the Covenant, ‘half-automata’, only just falling short of identifying them as full-fledged automata. Following the passage cited above regarding the ‘ornate intonation of the Prophets’, he comments that ‘page upon page was gabbled off at rates that could not be excelled by automata’; the ‘gabbling’ of the cantors makes cognitive engagement with the subject matter doubtful.24 For Zangwill, the Sons of the Covenant are beings who are produced and even constituted by ritual’s repetitive behaviour. Non-doctrinal and non-cognitive at its core, religious affiliation becomes doctrinal and cognitive only on this bedrock of emotional attachment through religious practices. Being born into a Jewish family does not mean that one becomes Jewish, but immersion in its rituals is the vehicle for sentimental affiliation to Judaism. The startling similarity between Zangwill’s representation of the Sons of the Covenant and more recent theories of performativity and habitus suggests a shared desire to recover the emotive and corporeal aspects of the individual as a counter and balance to the dominant Enlightenment rationalist models of identity. Zangwill’s recovery of a visceral alternative to

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Enlightenment models of identity is evident elsewhere in Children of the Ghetto. One of the principal narratives of the novel involves Hannah’s struggle to choose whether to reject her faith and family in order to run away with her lover. Ultimately, it is the music of the synagogue that reveals to Hannah her profound, and unbreakable, attachment to her religion, family and tradition. The passage conveys the warmth and homeliness of her community: Hannah scanned the English version of the Hebrew in her Machzor as she sang. Though she could translate every word, the meaning of what she sang was never completely conceived by her consciousness. The power of song over the soul depends but little on the words. Now the words seem fateful, pregnant with special message. Her eyes were misty when the fugues were over . . . What wrong had she ever done that she so young and gentle should be forced to make so cruel a choice between the old and the new? This was the synagogue she would have been married in; stepping gloriously and honourably under the canopy, amid the pleasant excitement of a congratulatory company. And now she was being driven to exile and the chillness of secret nuptials.25 The trauma of choice between ‘old and new’ is vividly portrayed here. Although Hannah’s choice is an impossible one that forces her to choose between the two most precious things in her life, her visceral attachment to her community is such that she finds she has to reject her lover. The strong draw of habitually learned affiliations are again made explicit as Zangwill portrays Esther Ansell’s apparent preference for her English over her Jewish traditions: ‘Far keener than her pride in Judas Maccabaeus was her pride in Nelson and Wellington’. In explaining Esther’s national pride, the narrator observes that ‘[t]he experience of a month will overlay the hereditary bequest of a century’, but goes on to qualify this by explaining that ‘yet, beneath all, the prepared plate remains most sensitive to the old impressions’.26 Despite rational exploration of alternatives, the individual is nonetheless most profoundly subject to the earlier and generative impressions of everyday ritual in childhood. This anti-rationalist element also resonates throughout The Melting Pot, first in the importance of emotion to the working of the Melting Pot and second in the motif of music that dominates its conceptual framework. While dramatizing the visceral construction of identity, that the ‘prepared plate remains most sensitive to the old impressions’, Zangwill also demonstrates


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how such ‘prepared plates’ may be subject to melting. When Vera’s estranged father, Baron Revendal arrives in New York unexpectedly, Vera asks him to meet her Jewish fiancé. He refuses and when he is offered an ultimatum to accept David or lose his daughter, he states his powerlessness to make such a decision: ‘I have no choice. Can I carry mountains? No more can I love a Jew’.27 Baron Revendal’s initial refusal is presented in terms of a necessity, of an impossible emotional response. He recognizes how fundamental to his being his prejudices are, yet, when he agrees to meet David, it is the equally deeply imbedded, corporeally remembered, bonds of familial affection which ‘melt’ his opposition. To his much-perturbed wife he explains: ‘She is the only child I have ever had, Katusha. Her baby arms curled around my neck; in her baby sorrows her wet face nestled against little father’s’.28 The embodied memories of baby arms and her wet face overcome his other, more rationalized, prejudice. As in Children of the Ghetto, it is music that helps reveal the visceral. Vera anticipates her father’s acceptance of David will be because of his musical genius. In relation to the wrinkle of obstinacy on her father’s forehead, she invokes the enchantment of David’s biblical namesake: ‘David will soothe it out with his music as his Biblical ancestor smoothed that surly old Saul’.29 David, then, is the divinely inspired prophet, who speaks not with words—which would communicate to his audiences’ minds and rationality—but through music, which is more visceral and affective. David explains: ‘The immigrants will not understand my music with their ears, but with their hearts and their souls’.30 That David’s vision of the Melting Pot can only be communicated through the medium of music suggests the futility of looking for a clear and coherent meta-argument in a play that is, after all, dependent on cognitive, linguistic means. The play’s preference for affect over reason, however partial and incomplete, undermines interpretations of the Melting Pot as a secularizing, rationalist proposal for intermarriage and the casting off of religious expression in syncretism. Yet such interpretations abound. Among those who have advocated such proposals and thereby missed the play’s challenge to rationalist Enlightenment models of identity is the Christian humanist Minister Rev John H. Dietrich, a contemporary of Zangwill. Drawing explicitly on Zangwill’s play, Dietrich applied its principles in his sermon delivered at St Mark’s Reformed Church in Pittsburg in May 1910 and advocated mixed religious marriages. One of the problems with the sermon is its use of eugenicist logic. Dietrich uses horticultural metaphors to argue that, as the crossing of species in plants and animal life brings biological progress, so might human intermarriage lead to a ‘stronger and better and more virile race’.31 He contends against what he calls ‘the crossing

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of undesirable peoples’ and deals separately with religious barriers, arguing that ‘the religion of the Jew and the religion of the Christian are essentially the same expressed in slightly different terms’.32 Dietrich interprets the Melting Pot metaphor so that it enacts both a biological melting and a religious syncretism. As such he promotes two ways of understanding identity: his horticultural metaphor promotes a biological understanding of identity (so that individual ‘strains’ can be grafted together) and his assertion that religions are ‘essentially the same’ promotes a view of individual religions as being only differing expressions of an underlying essence. As such the ethical core of religion can be dressed—and most importantly undressed or redressed—in the specificities of religious expression. Racial difference is melted through biological breeding; religious difference can be eradicated through the choice to clothe yourself with a different expression of your spiritual core. Yet the logical conclusion of Zangwill’s representation of visceral, ritualized identities is that religious practice is not the expendable clothing that arrays and expresses the religious core; instead, religious practice creates and sustains group (and thus individual) identity. By challenging models of identity that privilege the rational above the irrational or non-cognitive, Zangwill seeks to recuperate the visceral dimension of humanity. This visceral dimension presents a fundamental challenge to Enlightenment values and to the dominant conception of identity in modernity: that of the division of the self into voluntary and involuntary identities, primarily conceived in terms of religion as voluntary and race as involuntary. The binary largely functions in a ‘common sense’ way and dominates in the realm of race legislation. Following the work of race theorists such as Stuart Hall, it has become normative in studies of race to question any essentialist constructions and to treat race as a social construct.33 Further, debates on multiculturalism have for a while been stressing the dangers of reifying an ethnic culture, in presenting them, as Tariq Modood explains, as ‘unmeltable minority uni-cultures’.34 That racial identities are socially constructed rather than essentialist is largely uncontested. Yet the binary of voluntary– involuntary identities remains largely intact. Even where the ‘involuntary’ nature of race is questioned, the ‘voluntary’ nature of religious affiliation rarely is. As a result, the effect of the social on religious affiliation has had very little attention.35 Outlining debate over the United Kingdom Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006, Nasar Meer cites various examples of popular conceptions of religious identity as being characterized primarily through the quality of choice. Alongside quotes from Rowan Atkinson, Joan Smith and Matthew Parris, he also cites Polly Toynbee’s insistence that


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‘beliefs are what people choose to identify with’, as well as Labour Backbencher Bob Marshall-Andrews’s view that ‘[o]ur religion is what we choose to believe’ and former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis’s comment that ‘religious belief is . . . something that someone chooses, or, indeed, chooses to opt out of’.36 As Meer goes on to insist, the positing of religious identity as a choice has left those subject to anti-Muslim discrimination unprotected under Race discrimination acts. Not only do Zangwill’s writings suggest that a division of identity into involuntary and voluntary is misconceived; they indicate that religious identity is more ‘given’ than we might be willing to credit. The undermining of the voluntary–involuntary binary has huge implications for understanding the workings of multicultural societies, especially in the cases of those who self-identify with a ‘religious’ identity but proffer no personal faith commitment. Like Meers’s arguments regarding the racialization of supposedly religious discrimination against Muslims, Zangwill’s portrayal of religious identity as, at least partly, involuntary helps us understand both the level of hostility towards Muslims in the West and also the reasons why so many journalists and politicians perceive laws against Incitement to Religious Hatred as pernicious for a liberal democracy. A liberal democracy is, by its very definition, based on the reification of choice and it is this ideal that lies behind the veneration of free speech. But what happens to notions of liberalism and democracy if our actions and choices are less our own than we suspect? What if the rational self is not the only agency in play? To contemplate the involuntary nature of religious affiliation is to challenge the dominant liberal democratic narrative of identity: choice itself. By suggesting that the Jewish religion is a matter of unconscious affiliation, in which public and personal are indistinguishable, Zangwill reveals that affectionate attachment and belonging are engendered through ritualized, everyday behaviour, and incapable of being overwritten by a rational, assimilative creed. This does not mean that Zangwill is committed to stasis, and David’s Melting Pot is essentially forward-looking and continually anticipating a promised land. When David recalls his initial vision of America, he invokes the new heaven and earth of Revelation 21: ‘All my life America was waiting, beckoning, shining—the place where God would wipe all tears from off all faces’.37 It is an idealist’s dream of a nation devoid of national prejudice and persecution, the Melting Pot acting as a purifier of humanity; his is a vision of ‘souls melting in the Crucible’.38 The key to Zangwill’s Melting Pot is not, then, agenda-based or rationally determined through the policies or principles of intermarriage or syncretism. David’s response to his Uncle’s appeal to Jewish particularism (that the ‘Jew has

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been tried in a thousand fires and only tempered and annealed’) is that all previous fires were ‘Fires of hate, not fires of love. That is what melts’.39 Despite the apparent simplistic and naïve nature of David’s enthusiasm, the point he makes here is ratified throughout Zangwill’s play. The catalyst for change that can melt the affective bonds of embodied, hereditary religious affiliation, is not rational, but correspondingly affective: old affiliations will only be overwritten or challenged by new ones forged in equally warm and inviting environments. The heritage of Zangwill’s Melting Pot, then, is a recovery of the visceral nature of religious (and likewise of community, familial and national) affiliation, one that poses important challenges to the assumptions of the Enlightenment rationalism still prevalent in political and media discourse.

Chapter 8

I Am Not Walter Benjamin1 John Schad

Preface The piece of writing that follows is different from other chapters in this collection in that it is the first chapter of an as-yet unfinished novel that revolves around the years in which I grew up. I wanted to think about Walter Benjamin’s declaration that ‘every second of time was the strait gate though which the Messiah might enter’ (words written just months before committing suicide to avoid capture by the Nazis) and soon realized that I found the declaration so compelling partly because, as a boy, I grew up within a church where it was commonplace to talk of the imminent return of Christ. This, then, is why I returned to the time of my childhood, but as I did so a second reason emerged and this was the place in which I spent my childhood—a post-war council estate near Watford. For it finally occurred to me that the estate was itself pertinent to Benjamin’s own very peculiar theology, in particular the political and tragic–comic aspects of that theology. What made the estate so pertinent is that it sprang into existence in 1948 when 15,000 bombed-out Londoners were moved there only to find themselves living somewhere soon called ‘a soulless wilderness’ and likened to a ‘Displaced Persons Camp’. I had, then, on my hands the image of a people in exile, an image that seemed to chime with the tragic aspects of Benjamin’s theology. At the same time, however, I soon realized, as I researched, that the estate had been characterized by a political energy that reflected the fact that it was, in part, built in a spirit of social utopianism—the estate was also known as the ‘Promised Land’ or ‘Cockney Utopia’. What follows is an attempt to freeze this particular moment, and thus to unleash something of its politico-theological force. Important here is Benjamin’s engagement with a politicized Jewish theology and what he called a ‘weak Messianic force’. This was central to his semi-mystical conviction that ‘we’ ourselves (an undefined revolutionary class or generation) should turn out to be the Messiah that tarries, or

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indeed that might just ‘enter’ at ‘every second’. My novel is, then, an attempt to put this wild and ironic hope to the test of history. To do this I allow the action or dialogue to keep slipping back from the midsixties of my childhood to the early days of the estate, hence my invention of two rather odd men called Painter and Porlock, respectively, who live up my road and seem still to inhabit the immediate post-war birth moment of the estate. Painter seems to be a genuine working-class Londoner whereas Porlock is probably not—he certainly does not speak like one, although he has somehow drifted onto the estate and grown to convince himself that he shares its past. The character that is my eightyear-old self is led into the world of Painter and Porlock after encountering an old man who seems to live with them. This old man says or thinks that he is Walter Benjamin—or at least ‘O. E. Tal’, one of several pseudonyms that Benjamin used. Please note that this figure, Mr Tal, only ever uses words actually written by Benjamin. Mr Tal, I should add, appears oblivious to the fact that the man with whom he is confused (Benjamin) has been dead for almost 30 years.

*** Shadows were different there; they were strangers, like the hunchbacked shadow that grew from beneath the delicate shoes of the aged man who stood before me, breathless. He was short but wore a jacket that seemed to belong to someone taller; his trousers, though tight at the waist, were thereafter ridiculously loose. In his right hand he carried a briefcase, in his left hand he had, until very recently, held a brown paper shopping bag. A glister of sweat lay like a curse on his high forehead, above which his greying hair was a wild game. He wore, I thought, the mask of one who had had enough; it was, you might say, a final face, pulled earth-toward by heavy round glasses and a thick black moustache. The man announced himself as ‘Mr Tal’—T-A-L, Tal. It was, to me, a strange name, almost as strange as his accent, but I did not say so. After a peculiar silence he spoke again; in doing so he suddenly grew even older and I even younger, for he now spoke very deliberately, as if reading from a book that he had lost somewhere. He said, ‘Every second of time’ (he paused to breathe) ‘was the strait gate through which’ (he breathed again) ‘the Messiah might enter’. I did not understand; I had grown far too young. Indeed, I was keen to go but was mindful of the bag that sat weeping on the pavement between us, the bag that he had dropped and that had spilled its innards just as we were about to pass each other. As it kissed the asphalt I offered to help Mr Tal, imagining myself to be some Good Samaritan and him the man bound for

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Jerusalem. But I don’t think he heard my offer, for he simply bent down, cradled his spilt bag, and muttered, ‘I am unpacking my library’. West Herts and Watford Observer, 29 June 1951 Whatever happened to the Promised Land? 14,000 bombed-out London workers and their families have been uprooted to rural Hertfordshire, plunged into a Wilderness, and left to their own devices. So says an official Hertfordshire County Council report. According to the report, the Oxhey Estate has proved a monstrous misconception of re-housing, a spectacular failure on the part of The London County Council to create the promised land of Cockney Utopia.

Mr Tal, his library now repacked, made as if to rise and go, but seeing him struggle with his wounded bag I offered once again to help. Mr Tal said nothing but neither did he decline my offer, and so I followed him, embracing his heavy companion in my arms. As we walked in solemn procession others turned to stare—a couple of loose boys, two tender men hovering over a fragile car, its bonnet raised to the sky, and a familiar dog, wandering masterless and free. Mr Tal walked on, his head lowered and his body leant forward as if, although the road was flat, he were slowly ascending an invisible mountain. His mountain path took him past a number of identical houses, each with uniform privet hedge, before he finally slowed as he approached a house that had no hedge but that still boasted a garden gate. There was nothing to either side of the gate. Here, it seemed, he lived and so I presumed he would ignore the formality of the absurd gate. To reach his own front door all he needed to do was simply cut a diagonal across the small front garden, but instead he slowly made his unnecessary way to the unnecessary gate. Once there he turned toward the house and paused, as if to do so were some ritual of hesitation; he then proceeded down the garden path to a door which stood, forever, wide ajar. Again he hesitated, as if this time there were some terrible but wholly unseen difficulty in passing through an open door. After a moment or two of thought, an activity that seemed, on this occasion, to require straightening his blackened tie, he astonished the world by suddenly eschewing the door, hoisting up his voluminous trousers, and climbing effortlessly through a low and open window. The old man beckoned to me to follow his criminal

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example, which I did, though struggling with what I now imagined to be a suitcase full of sand. West Herts and Watford Observer, 6 July 1951 Dear Sir, For any person non-resident on our estate to read your article, a sordid mental picture is aroused, ranging in verbal hue from the squalor of an eastern native quarter to an isolated and forgotten Displaced Persons camp. Unfortunately, for some, council estates still have the ring of drab green-and-brown walls, coals in the bath and a mild flavour of Public Assistance. Yours sincerely, Mr D. F. Haydon (110 Prestwick Road)

The room in which I had landed was carpet-less but featured a large leatherette lounge-suite, a small shiny black cocktail bar, a coffee table and, supreme in the corner, a standalone television perched on four delicate legs. On the TV was placed a single ornament, a dome-shaped snowstorm scene. Mr Tal looked around. ‘The soulless luxuriance of the furnishings becomes’, he smiled, ‘true comfort only in the presence of a dead body’. The TV was on, busy leaking early evening light-entertainment into the empty room, and so I watched as a sweating comedian staggered towards his punch line. This seemed, though, to irritate Mr Tal who, with automatic hand, switched off the TV at the very point at which the heroic funny-man was just about to bring the house down. Instead, I saw his cracking face contract to the sublime purity of a tiny white dot. Oblivious to my bereavement, Mr Tal waved his arms around and remarked: ‘The arrangement of the furniture is . . . the site plan of deadly traps . . . and the suite of rooms prescribes the fleeing victim’s path’. Even as he spoke something slight moved in the narrow hallway and then someone, a young woman, I think, flitted past yet another open door before running up the small staircase. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘The whore called “Once upon a time”’, he replied. ‘Oh I see’, I said, wishing that the TV would somehow resuscitate. Indeed, when Mr Tal moved toward my dead friend in the corner I felt a prayer was about to be answered; but instead of reaching for the set itself, he picked up the small snow-scene, gave it a quite terrible shake and then, as a miniature storm beset a miniature house, he put it back on the set just to the left of


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where he had found it. ‘The Messiah’, he sighed, ‘did not wish to change the world by force, but only make a slight adjustment in it’. West Herts and Watford Observer, 6 July 1951 Following the heated debate triggered by the county report on the Oxhey estate, we sent our reporter to knock on the door of some of the folk that live there. Here’s what Mrs J. Nielson of 15 Muirfield Road had to say: ‘Am I happy? Well, I think it’s what people make of it, don’t you? They can either make it a heaven . . . or something else . . .’.

I was, by now, growing tired of this house and was about to suggest I had better be going back home when Mr Tal beckoned me into another room, smaller than the first. Here there was even less furniture: just a small table, a massive wireless set, a slag heap of books and papers, a paraffin heater, and two upright chairs on which were dumped two men sleeping furiously; one was huge and wrapped in a trench coat, the other equally tall but slighter in build and dressed in a fading brown two-piece suit. Each sleeping body, limbs all lost and loosened, had collapsed into the astonished attitude of a murdered marionette. West Herts and Watford Observer, 27 July 1951 Dear Sir, I came to Oxhey from Fulham and curse the day we moved here . . . Say one word and the language from even the youngest child would not bear printing . . . the only time we get any peace in this house is when it is pouring with rain. The East End is quiet and respectable compared to this. Yours sincerely, Mrs H. H. (full name withheld)

Mr Tal gestured toward the marionettes, and remarked: ‘There is no telling what encounters would be in store for us if we were less inclined to give in to sleep’. He then gave each sleeper a brutal kick on the shins—‘The angel’, he commented, ‘would like to awaken the dead’. The dead, it turned out, were not pleased to be awakened. Indeed, for a second, they had the appearance of men accused of something but not sure exactly what. Very quickly, though, it was not guilt but indignation that possessed them.

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‘You’re late!’ they cried in unison. At first I thought they were talking to me, but I soon realized my mistake when the larger of the two, a man named Painter added, ‘And did you get any food you old bugger? You do know it’s liver and prunes we need, not more bloody books?’ The old bugger shook his head, as if to say ‘No, no more bloody books’. This, it seemed, was a good thing; or, at least, so said the slighter man, whose name was Porlock. He had a soiled yet distinguished air and was ridiculously well spoken. According to him, Mr Tal’s room, to be found somewhere upstairs, was already a bleeding ocean of books. The old man who sailed this sea nodded in happy agreement—‘One of the most remarkable reading rooms in the world’, he whispered to himself. I am sorry; it is possible you think my story an unlikely one, my whorish once-upon-a-time. So, allow me to explain that I did grow up on the estate; we arrived in June 1965, when my father, a minister of religion, took up ‘the cause’ (as they used to say) of St Martin’s, a small Presbyterian church; we had gone there, I think, to see, to watch, to look out for, the ‘coming of the Kingdom’. Our watchtower was one of a thin line of houses that stood facing the church and it was somewhere along this line that I first met Mr Tal, Mr O. E. Tal. Not that I have yet worked out what ‘O. E.’ stood for. ‘O. E. Tal, O. E. Tal. O. E. Tal’, he would say, as if it were obvious. It was not, however, obvious to me; but then we were well used to living among mysterious letters, like those scratched onto the backdoor of the church; these inscriptions protested, I think, wild and loose love, but seemed nevertheless to penetrate the door, or at least to get as far as the church kitchen. Here, in the kitchen, sacred and profane seemed, in fact, to embrace each other. Most famous, in this regard, was the large glass which, every Sunday, just before the service, was filled with water and then reverently carried to the pulpit for the use of the preacher—on the glass were engraved the words: ‘This glass has been stolen from the Dick Whittington Pub’. Such felony was, though, perhaps only to be expected of those who, like us, followed the Thief in the Night. Estate Voice the First: Yes, there was some petty crime, but, after all, the LCC hadn’t moved fifteen thousand angels straight from heaven to the estate.

The Dick Whittington, I discovered, was Painter’s favourite pub; he said it reminded him of London, or at least of leaving London. ‘Turn again,


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turn again’, he muttered to himself; but he did not turn, nor even look like a man about to turn. ‘Some, you know, have gone back’, he added, ‘. . . all those of us that could not bear the Promised Land’. The Estate News, vol. 1, no 2, August–September 1949 When we arrived we were very much strangers in a strange land. (Editor)

‘They just jacked it in, hopped on the Bakerloo Line and took the train straight back to Egypt, if they could afford the fare. They would take one look at this place and say “There’s bugger-all here”; and there wasn’t, not for years—no pubs, no shops, no jobs, no clinic, nothing’. Hertfordshire County Council Education Committee, 1951 After three years the estate has only one small café.

‘There weren’t even roads’, continued Painter, ‘let alone pavements, just bloody duckboards over the mud and paths of ash. Welcome to nowhere; nowhere near Watford. Not that many could afford the bus fare to Watford—but then there weren’t any buses, not when the world began. We had come looking for utopia, for the future; we came on the train, our bombed-out shoes all polished, but once here found only ash beneath our feet. The future never came, just didn’t turn up—not even for our children; there were, you see, no schools’. Estate News, vol. 1, no. 2, August–September, 1949 The barest educational needs of this community have been grossly under-estimated. (Editor)

I overheard myself protest, saying, as if someone else: ‘But all this was hundreds of years ago; and I have heard many say that, after London, after the City of Destruction, this was a brave and better place, where children of the blitz hurtled through measureless green, spinning, as they ran, a rough kind of paradise’. Estate Voice, the Second: We, the children, would spend whole days exploring the surrounding countryside—collecting birds’ eggs, damning streams, looking for wild flowers, and scrumping. . . . [I]t was truly idyllic.

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But talk of paradise could not stop Painter, who continued: ‘The rentman from the Council, he says, “Put on your hat and be happy, Mr Painter; things will improve. It may take a few years to build the New Jerusalem and a little longer to get a bus to Watford but be grateful you have anywhere. Besides, out here you have woods and fields, and er . . . woods. Just look”, he says, “just look at the lovely trees, the lovely trees . . . ” “But what”, I say, “is the use of all these bleeding trees? There are only so many because there is nothing else here . . . Nothing, and again nothing—just space.”’ Estate Voice, the First: It was so quiet, almost too quiet . . . The Hertfordshire folk may have liked their county walks . . . but to most of us it was just empty space. We felt so alone and stranded out here.

‘Firewood!’ exclaimed the grandiose Porlock, ‘—the trees, they serve in a fireplace should one not be able to afford the coal. Let’s face it, all of us have done it; several have been apprehended and some fined, but if one is bloody freezing what else can one bloody well do? Particularly, if one is ill’. ‘As many of us are’, added Painter, casually. ‘I’m sorry?’ I said. ‘Yes, didn’t you know’, responded Painter, ‘this is TB Town, Psycho City, Anxiety Estate. That’s how Dr Forelock came to be here’, he said, gesturing toward the misnamed Porlock. I looked confusedly at the elegant Doctor who lighted a cigarette, slowly raised one eyebrow and inhaled slowly. ‘Lord Doorlock’, continued Painter, clearly relishing each new variant on Porlock, ‘was, once upon a time, one of those nosey-bugger college boys who came knocking at our identical doors asking us identical questions— about health, and that. That’s why he talks like bloody Noel Coward. One day, Deadlock here decides he will ask a few more questions than he should of a certain housewife up the road, and ends up taking down more than he should—if you know what I mean’. I did not, but he carried on. ‘Her old man then comes home from a twelve-hour shift in Harrow and chases Pillock right across the cinder path and halfway up Barnhurst Path before finally losing the good Doctor who has been hiding here ever since. So, he doesn’t do so many surveys these days’. Painter paused before adding: ‘Lord Bollock, in fact, has been here so long that the stupid bugger thinks he is one of us, one of the blasted’.


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‘Indeed’, said the happily deluded Bollock, ‘You may call me the wounded surgeon’. He smiled, then remarked, tipping an invisible hat, ‘Pleased as man with man to dwell—even sick man. Even’, he paused, ‘those whom they would call “tubercular persons”’. I must have looked confused again, for he continued, ‘Welcome to Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp’ and threw me an exhausted copy of a book, a novel by someone who was clearly dead. His name was Thomas Mann and his story, I would one day discover, was of a TB sanatorium, a fine and sublimely ordered place, lost high among the Alps. Europe upon stilts. Child Castorp went just to visit, as a guest, but gradually rose to the status of patient. ‘Yes’, said Porlock, ‘illness, my dear Hans, is what we do up here; it is our vocation, our vocabulary—above all, it is our history, the only one we have. Read him one of the lists, Mr Pinter . . . ’. Porlock too insisted on spinning names like plates. Mr Pinter kicked at a pile of loose papers till one he recognized finally emerged. He picked it up and wearily read aloud: ‘“General Practice on a New Housing Estate” by J. H. F. Brotherstone and S. P. W. Chave (London School of Health and Tropical Medicine) with A. Clewyn-Davies, A. S. Hunter, D. A. Lindsay, A. Scott, C. B. Thomas and E. J. Trimmer’. ‘Ah, the great E. J. Trimmer!’ sighed Porlock with a wistful, nostalgic air. Painter, still weary beyond belief, carried on reading: ‘Forty-five percent of the families on the estate have been granted some priority for rehousing on medical grounds’. ‘No, you stupid arse!’ cried Porlock, ‘Read one of the lists, one of those enchanting litanies of local afflictions!’ Painter threw the learned article away and found another one, this time filed carefully behind a stained cushion. He yawned and started reading yet again: ‘The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, vol. 37. no. 4 (1959)—’ ‘Get on with it, Pointer!’ He did, suddenly reading like a machine gun: ‘Backache. Breathlessness. Catarrh. Constipation. Coughing. Depression. Eyestrain. Headaches’. ‘No entry for F?’ ‘No, no flatulence here . . . present company excepted’—he looked sternly at Mr Tal. ‘Headaches. Indigestion. Nerves. Personality Disorders . . . and, er, Running Ears’. Pointer paused for comic effect—there was none. ‘Sleeplessness. Stomach Pains. Swollen Ankles. Teeth’. ‘Just “Teeth?”’ interrupted Porlock. ‘Yes’. ‘Splendid’.

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‘Undue Irritability. Varicose Veins. Weak or Painful Feet . . . and—’ (he paused) ‘. . . Women’s Complaints’. Porlock, spotting the opportunity to stuff his mouth with a well-worn gag, declared: ‘Well, I can’t say that I myself had any complaints from the—’ ‘Shut it!’ snapped Painter, obviously bored of this particular routine. At this point the young woman, the one I had seen before, emerged at the doorway, just for a second. She must have fallen silently down the stairs. She looked, for all the world, as if she was about to say something. ‘Summoned or un-summoned, the secretary enters’, breathed Mr Tal, before adding, ‘She is very pretty’. Ignoring Mr Tal, and returning to Painter’s catalogue of all working-class ills, Porlock sighed contentedly, ‘Ah, an exquisite taxonomy, from a veritable epic of scholarly endeavour. The title again, please, my dear Printer?’ ‘The Families and Individuals Who Did Not Co-Operate on a Sample Survey’. ‘Marvellous’, affirmed Porlock, ‘—a survey of those who refused to answer surveys!’ ‘Such as us’, confessed Printer. ‘And, indeed, Mr Tal’, said the errant Doctor—‘. . . not one for surveys, is O. E. Tal’. O. E. Tal nodded his agreement and whispered, ‘At midnight a questionnaire on the death penalty is distributed to the cells requiring its signatories to indicate which form of execution . . . they would prefer’. We all paused for a second, as if finally somewhat alarmed by this peculiar man, before Painter carried on regardless. ‘Anyway’, he said, ‘we are all, it would seem, what the professors call “non cooperators” and thus (and here I quote) “of particular interest.” But only, mind you, to someone interested in (and I quote again) “the idea of the socially isolated person, who . . . refuses to answer questions, or sometimes even to come to the door”’. ‘Ah, that would be O. E’, commented the omniscient Porlock. ‘He has trouble with doors’. ‘No, I think O. E. is the next one’, said Painter. He then read aloud the sad case of the weary man, a non cooperator, who had, one day, lifted his weary head and wearily cried, ‘Why are people always worrying me?’ The weary man had, apparently, then added: ‘I have just about had it, what with Jehovah’s Witnesses and all the rest’. ‘I am with the weary men’, said Porlock. ‘One day someone’s at your door wanting to know if I have constipation, the next it’s someone popping round just to let me know that the World will end next Tuesday—in which case, of course, one could endure excruciating bowels. It’s enough to make


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anyone seek refuge in the oven when the young men from social medicine come knocking—but that won’t stop them working you out’. ‘Quite’, said Painter. ‘And I think they’ve got O. E. T.’s number alright— listen to this: “Those who gave only one interview . . . might . . . be reluctant to be interviewed again lest it be discovered that they now lived on the estate ‘on false pretences’ as they were no longer ill”’. ‘Or indeed, no longer dead’, interjected Porlock. ‘I’m sorry?’ I said. ‘Even the dead’, remarked O. E. T., ‘will not be safe from the enemy if he wins’. ‘Oh, will they not?’ snapped Painter, who had clearly had enough. ‘Well, I’m buggered if I know what you are on about, and have no idea as to what you may understand of dead men, but there are many among us who know much more than we will ever say’. Mr Tal nodded. ‘Was it not noticeable’, he asked, ‘at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent?’ Painter said nothing; he had grown silent. So I myself answered the question: ‘Yes, yes it is’, I said enthusiastically. The whole house, even the furniture, seemed surprised that I should speak, but I went on to explain that I knew a very old man, just down the road, a paper-thin man who, everyone said, had been through the mangle of Flanders. One day he had given me a crucifix made of bullet shells—shells collected, he said, from the beach at Ypres. Even as the flattened man handed me the crucifix he said nothing of either beach or mangle. For these he had no words, or at least none left. ‘Quite’, said Porlock, clearly hoping I had finished my local history of silence. But I had not and so I went on to explain how, a few months later, at a church Christmas Party, as the old soldier sat at his Formica-topped table eating red jelly, he had opened his Woolworths cracker to find not just a paper-hat but a tiny yellow plastic pistol. Turning to his wife, his crown now half-fallen over one ear, he had raised the yellow impostor to his temple and grinned a suicidal grin. He said nothing. His wife suggested he return to the jelly. My narrative was now finally over, but Painter had long since moved away and begun to erect a huge reel-to-reel cine-projector. In contrast, Mr Tal had grown still, like a Displaced Person. He seemed to have on his mind the trained killer with the paper-hat, for he said to himself: ‘In a dream I took my life with a gun. When it went off I did not wake up but saw myself . . . lying. Only then did I wake’. ‘Seems to me’, remarked Porlock, ‘that you can’t quite make up your mind as to whether you are dead or alive’.

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Mr Tal was about to reply but Porlock continued, saying: ‘And that is precisely why you vanish so easily into the wallpaper up here on Magic Mountain’. He coughed into his handkerchief and cheerfully waved at us a bright red spot of blood. ‘In fact’, he added, ‘to let you into a little secret, we the people of the mountain have come to suspect that we might just be the exported dead of London—or at least the exported proletariat, which comes to much the same thing. They say the London County Council didn’t move fifteen thousands angels to the estate, but they are wrong’. ‘The angel of history’, interrupted Mr Tal, trying to help. ‘I beg your pardon’, said Painter, looking up from his monumental projector. ‘The angel of history would like to stay . . . but a storm is blowing from Paradise’. ‘Shut it, you lunatic!’ shouted Painter. ‘Please! my dear Pointer, do not stop Professor Tal’, said Porlock. ‘Our beloved Tal is attempting the rough magic of a prose poem. Indeed, perhaps he sings of a certain Mr Fred Angel who lives at the top of the road, on the right; or possibly one Mr E. T. Angell, another tenant-seraph, he who once, in a famous fit of boredom, wrote to the Council regarding the problem of parking his car, his angel-car. As the infernal John Milton has shown, angels, or at least those straight from paradise, do struggle to pass the time. They wrestle with nothing’. West Herts and Watford Observer, 21 November 1952 Mr and Mrs Alfred Nutt, residents on the Oxhey estate, have made enough toys to fill a complete stall for the Clitheroe Club sale of work. Mr Nutt, a woodworker, has made three ducks, three railway engines, two trucks, a boat on wheels, and half a dozen monkeys on a stick. Mrs Nutt has made over twenty stuffed toys … When asked how they came to make so much, Mr Nutt explained, ‘It gives us something to do. You see, we have all day’.

Mr Tal nodded, as if to agree with something, and then resumed his magic: ‘This storm’, he breathed, ‘irresistibly propels the angel of history into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward’. ‘Ah! the skyward debris’, said Porlock, thinking of Mr and Mrs Alfred Nutt.


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Mr Tal, though, had not finished his angel dirge: ‘This storm’, he added, ‘is what we call progress’. ‘Or perhaps’, interrupted Painter, ‘what them beggars at the LCC call the er—’, he cleared his throat in mock reverence, ‘… the er—County of London Plan, as prepared, of course, by Messrs Foreshaw and Abercrombie. It’s why we are all here. This here disaster’, he said looking at me, ‘is no accident—it’s all thoroughly planned, a well-run policy of ship-the-bloodyworkers-out-and-dump-em. They call it Dispersal, the Export of Populace, even Spontaneous Mass Decentralization’. ‘Better still’, remarked Porlock, ‘let us agree with Professors Foreskin and Aberzombie and call it “overspill”. I confess that I do somewhat relish “Spontaneous Mass Combustion” (or whatever it is) but the charming epithet “overspill” is not only suggestive of a purely natural event but has, I dare to suggest, a certain poetic force, conjuring up an image of London as one vast storm water-butt filled to the very rim and brim, and . . . ’. ‘Bollocks!’ shouted Painter. Porlock looked wounded, but before he could respond, the young woman I had seen before made another appearance. This time she looked in at us through an opened window; behind her was an abandoned garden. She wore finely applied lipstick but stared scornfully at the benighted men; they froze. Then, as if commenting on a badly acted farce and addressing no one in particular, she declared: ‘So: War or weather, which is it? Which is the reason why, the reason why we are here? Is it true we are angels born in a storm? And is that why we only get peace round here when it pours with rain? But then, “With God”, said the preacher, “there is no spillage”, not a drop, not a single drop—not with God. Perhaps, perhaps; or rather, we shall see, we the displaced, we shall one-day see. But yes, we were all born, still born, in a storm’. Once the weary girl had finished, the men began again to move. Indeed, Painter, clearly determined to sustain her theme, picked up an ancient newspaper-clipping and stood at the table; he seemed to have temporarily mistaken it for a lectern and thus, as if addressing the wall, intoned melodramatically as follows: West Herts and Watford Observer, 8 April 1949 A small worker’s canteen on the Oxhey estate was, on Thursday, the birthplace of a Community Association designed, in time, to serve 15000 ex-Londoners. The hut

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was crammed to capacity with over 300 residents and, in darkness relieved only by the flickering light of two hurricane lamps, this pioneer movement was born. The reader looked up and remarked: ‘They are, you know, shit-scared of us, shit-scared of the darkness and hurricane. Little Moscow they call us, and as soon as we dare ask for a clinic they say we are agitating . . . ’. As if to prove his point Painter reached for yet more holy writ—this time it was, as he announced, ‘The Advancement of Science, vol. XIII (1956) . . . “Social and Psychological Aspects of Re-Housing” by H. G. Maule’. I was beginning to fall asleep but was prevented as Painter raised his voice and read: ‘It was in the very early days that the Community Association began its agitation. Back then its motives were widely regarded as being . . . political’. ‘There!’ said Painter; and, with his point now proven, he abruptly discarded The Advancement of Science, chucking it over his huge shoulder. Porlock, though, rescued The Advancement and read aloud the very next sentence, all the while affecting the dull scholastic caution of H. G. Maule: ‘While, though, I do believe there were political motivations’, mimicked Porlock, ‘to propose that this is the whole explanation would be to underestimate the tendency of such situations to bring to the fore certain . . . rather aggressive types of personality’. Porlock glared at Painter who froze for a second before blaspheming, aggressively. He then crumpled in a huge heap, clutching his head. He was, I felt, cut to the quick. ‘Ah’, commented Porlock, ‘what exquisite agony it is to find that someone out there really does know you . . . even if that someone is called H. G. Maule’. Painter, however, quickly recovered his full stature, a large and resurrected man. He then returned to his projector, continuing to swear but now in the direction of this monumental machine. Meanwhile, Porlock levered himself onto the table and, once there, sat cross-legged; he held before him a beautiful white book, embossed on the front of which were the words ‘County of London Plan, 1943’. He held it upside-down. Mr Tal was now staring out of the window and into the garden; it was that girl again, but this time she was simply balancing on several planks of wood loosely assembled into the likeness of a wrecked boat. She was looking up at the unplanned sky, crowded with dark improvised clouds. Her hands were planted in the tight back-pockets of her deep blue jeans, which tapered away to her pointed shoes. Beside her I could see a transistor radio and


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soon she was swaying to electrified music we could hear but not decipher. Shakespeare is in the alley. Outside, I thought, the air was full of America. When Mr Tal finally realized that I too was looking at the girl that watched the sky, he remarked, ever so slowly, ‘I have met a woman here who is the female counterpart of the Angelus Novus’. I looked confused, so he drew from the inside of his jacket an old postcard. I eyed the card eagerly, as did Painter, but was disappointed to see what turned out to be only a hopeless parody of the human form with its clumsy arms raised as if in surrender or shock, and its wide and worried eyes looking left. It seemed, however, to be smiling. ‘A Klee painting’, he muttered, ‘named “Angelus Novus” . . . an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread’. I confessed to Mr Tal that I did not really think it looked much like an angel or indeed anyone I knew, but he ignored me and, still looking out of the window, he said again: ‘I have met . . . here . . . the female . . . Angelus Novus’. I muttered, with some embarrassment, that I considered this femaleseraph to be quite pretty. At this, Mr Tal turned his head and whispered to me, as if confidentially: ‘You’re the only neophyte I’ll introduce to this angelology’. I did not really understand what he meant, but grasped enough to study still more keenly the movements of this Angela Nova. She was now tightropewalking along a lapsed washing-line that snaked through the grass and beneath a curious sky. I was, though, soon distracted from this distraction by the witless whirring of Painter’s desperate projector—his ‘Light of the World’, he angrily called it, as he pulled to the curtains. The girl disappeared. The screen, a casually papered wall, struggled for an instant with the light that was hurled against it. Then suddenly the legend, ‘Came the Day’, flickered diffidently into focus. The simplicity of the lettering suggested that the film had been made locally, up here on Magic Mountain itself. This opening frame was itself almost colourless, but it promised that the film to come would be in ‘Kodakchrome’; this turned out to mean luminous, daydream colour. And so we watched, and as we did we saw a pale man stooping at dawn to lift from the asphalt a solitary piece of paper; he then runs his finger along words that announce a day of carnival. It is 1957. The word ‘carnival’ appears etched upon a banner pulled across an empty sky by a plane that a child has drawn. The film is silent, or rather it has fallen silent; Painter

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explains that there was once sound to accompany the film but that this sound has somehow been misplaced. I express the hope that one day it will be found again in, say, an attic or a wardrobe or a case. For now, though, the only soundtrack to this flickering carnival is provided by the cinematographer’s violent breathing and the transistorized music from across the Atlantic. On the wall, the pale man who holds the discarded piece of paper is, we see, a dust-man and has himself a discarded face. The rough finger of this mover-on of dust has now finished reading, and the film spins back in time to uncover days that are hurried with preparation for carnival. The man-ofdust, we now understand, is at his work on the morning after the Day that Came. Mr Tal looks in the direction of the Kodachromatic wall and, as if watching the film a few seconds behind the rest of us, declares: ‘What we will see is a ragpicker, at daybreak, picking up rags of speech’. Mr Tal then halfechoes himself, murmuring, ‘. . . a rag-picker early on, at the dawn of the day of the revolution’. Porlock, without looking up from his inverted book, mutters, ‘Bloody fool! Someone tell him that revolutions do not, as a rule, entail fancy dress, bunting and a carnival queen’. But I am not so sure of this as the film wheels on and the familiar roads of the estate, usually supine in the dead arms of organized space, suddenly appear animated by a huge American marching-band that is being cheered and followed by hundreds of people, some on foot and some on bikes, as if all are storming some beautiful future. Their roads have finally become streets; they, at last, are a crowd again, and the sign on one carnival float says ‘The Bull and Bush’. The future toward which so many pedal and scurry is also the past. London. As I stare closely, looking for a face I might know, I see that two figures head the other way and attempt, in vain, to walk toward the emptiness at the rear of the crowd. One is a busy woman, her head in a shopping bag, and the other a slow man on a slow bike. He looks, I imagine, like Mr Tal. The unlikely cyclist, still standing next to me, turns and says: ‘The quest . . . for happiness’ (he pauses) ‘runs counter to the Messianic direction’. He then adds: ‘I had quietly turned my back on the carnival and strolled down to the harbour’. ‘Harbour!’ cried Porlock, ‘there are no bloody harbours anywhere near here you stupid arse. You’re watching the wrong bloody film’.


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At that moment, the right film, the one Mr Tal was no longer watching, suddenly crashed; it did so just as a mother stands at a gate waving goodbye to her daughter as the girl sets off for the carnival—the mother has just applied a final line of lipstick to the adventurer’s mouth, but now she (and the film) is gone. The great projector had failed. In anger, Painter struck his beloved machine; he then pulled off one huge reel and replaced it with another. This second film was in black and white but secretly dreamt, I dreamt, of Kodakchrome. It was a profoundly silent film; and so very old that, unlike the first, it had been mute from birth. This time, in this film, we are on board a train, a steam-train, and we, along with the camera, are hypnotized by a countryside that reels past. Soon, though, the fields begin, one by one, to give up on us as we descend into what seems to be an infinite city. Suddenly, this city has a name as both train and camera head straight toward a sign that screams ‘Berlin’. There is no visible exclamation mark but Mr Tal reacts as if there were. ‘O. E., I know, has seen this film before’, remarked Porlock, before adding, ‘as, indeed, have I’. Porlock now grew donnish as he explained, to no one, that this classic Weimar film had been sewn together by a thousand dwarves in 1927, was known as ‘Berlin: Symphony for a Great City’ and was, as he put it, ‘most memorably screened by the Watford Film Society way back in the hazy-lazy, oh-so-halcyon, salad days of . . . ’. He broke off unaccountably and then resumed his sentence in a tone of purest black: ‘. . . of nineteen-bloody-fifty-one!’ By now our train-to-Berlin has come to a spectacular, steaming halt and we are looking down empty or emptied streets. It is dawn, the world has not yet begun, and no one is here yet. The first we see, or think we see, has a painted face and wears a chemise that reveals exquisite shoulders; but she, this Eve, is a mannequin and stands in a shop window. At last Adam, a man walking a dog appears; and soon others emerge to haunt the streets: first, empty-handed workers walking to factories, then men of business catching the tram to the office. Finally, leisured men and women, beautiful automata, waltz through the arcades of a city half in love with itself. Mr Tal watched with the intensity of a man seeing something either for the very first time or the very last; indeed, he almost flinched as the train approaches the station. It was as if the screen were just inches away rather than feet. ‘People’, he said, without a tear in his eye, ‘are taught to cry again by films’.

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‘Though not’, opined Porlock, ‘on a lost Sunday evening at the Watford Town Hall when the particular film in question is shown courtesy of a visiting Irish evangelist, and quizzically entitled “The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse: Are they About to Ride Again?” It was, thankfully, a free filmshow, but guaranteed, we were informed, “A delightful evening’s entertainment”; and so it was—a film, you might say, that taught many of us to laugh again . . . Ah, those were indeed the days, vintage days for the end of the world’. I was quick to point out that at my father’s church those days were perhaps still with us, and to explain that this did sometimes make me somewhat anxious. Indeed, if ever there were summer lightning over Magic Mountain I would rush to my bedroom window and look up to the sky to see if this were, at last, the Second Coming. However, to my infinite relief, all I had seen to-date was the old deaf-and-dumb man who lived next door. On these occasions I would see him, all alone, in the cool of the evening, solemnly playing clock golf on a well-mown lawn as yet another dusk was closing, with every second, upon his circle of silence. I paused to remember the golfing mute, but was suddenly interrupted by a cry of ‘Christ!’ Alarmed, I turned round to see that Mr Tal had drawn a huge screwdriver from his jacket-pocket with which he then proceeded to assault Painter’s projector, violently poking out the once bright eye of the gleaming Cyclops. Berlin turned to darkness. ‘Berlin’, announced Mr Tal, ‘is a deserted city’. ‘Well it is now!’ howled Painter. ‘You bastard—look what you’ve done!’ ‘To interrupt the course of the world’, muttered Tal, ‘that was . . . the intention of Joshua . . . to stab the world in the heart’. ‘Joshua! Don’t give me sun-stopping Joshua you bloody lunatic. Who the hell do you think you are?’ Mr Tal paused, as he considered this question. He then took out a piece of a paper, a certificate of some kind, and pointed at the typed name ‘Benjamin Walter’, as if to say that was who the hell he was. (When Walter Benjamin died, as an unknown fugitive in the Spanish border town of Port Bou, there was, for some reason, a bureaucratic error that led to the inversion of his name in all official documents relating to his death.)

‘No you’re not, you stupid beggar, you’re Mr O. E.—bloody—Tal!’


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Mr Bloody Tal looked doubtfully at his briefcase, which had stood all this time at the foot of the table; he turned to me and said: ‘You shall now become the first person to learn my new pseudonym, intended for use abroad’. He looked away, and then back again: ‘O. E. Tal’, he whispered, ‘is an anagram of the Latin “lateo” . . . “I conceal myself”’. He breathed before slowly repeating these last three words as if they were the only ones left: ‘I’ (he said) ‘conceal’ (he said) ‘myself’.

Chapter 9

‘The Oldest Dream of All’: Heaven in Contemporary Fiction Andrew Tate

‘Heaven is manufacturable’ (Douglas Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead1)

This chapter explores the various ways in which postmodern fiction, so often associated with ambiguous and multiple endings, imagines or manufactures heaven, a life after the traditional end of the story.2 It addresses visions of the world to come in novels and short stories by Julian Barnes, Alice Sebold and Douglas Coupland. This might seem to be a hopelessly quixotic endeavour since the landscape of the contemporary Anglophone novel appears far more readily adapted to the horrors of modernity than it does to a recuperation of heavenly hope. Rachel Falconer, for example, writes of the prevalence of hell as a topos in ostensibly secular literature since 1945, across a range of genres, and the persistence in the West of what she names ‘the katabatic imagination’ or, more plainly, ‘narratives of descent’.3 One such journey into the underworld is undertaken by the heroine of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a boldly humanist rewriting of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In The Amber Spyglass (2000), the final volume of the trilogy, eternal life is figured as a drab and desolate space lacking all liberty and joy from which the dead long for release. Lyra, determined to rescue her murdered best friend, breaks into the land of the dead and frees its miserable citizens from their hopeless prison. This spirit world is far closer to mediaeval visions of hell and to classical concepts of the underworld than to the New Testament anticipation of creation renewed. In Pullman’s dizzying fictional universe of multiple, interlocking parallel worlds, heaven is properly obtained only by the oblivion conferred on the suffering when they are freed from the torment of everlasting existence. As Graham Holderness has argued, the narrative is profoundly indebted to

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the Christian tradition of the harrowing of hell—Lyra’s descent into the land of the dead is distinctly Christlike—despite its rejection of orthodox creeds such as union with God and the resurrection of the body.4 Perhaps the most vivid point of difference between Pullman’s narrative and that of Christian eschatology is the attitude of the former to the possibility of a resurrected life: the hope of an eternity in which conscious, individual identity endures in relation to God is presented not just as wishful thinking but as a morally abhorrent idea. At the end of the trilogy Lyra, who has helped to bring about the death of an oppressive (and fraudulent) god, commits herself to building ‘the republic of heaven’.5 This Romantic concept displaces Christian notions of the Kingdom as a hierarchy but retains the idea of a space of eternal justice. If Pullman’s fantasy is indicative of a persistent interest in the world to come (even among sceptical novelists), other, less mystical fictions continue to explore the imaginative possibilities of eternal life. The hell-on-earth genre of post-apocalyptic fiction has rarely been more healthy (or despairing): Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007), for example, all continue aspects of the foreboding dystopian tradition of Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and J. G. Ballard. These hellish, speculative fictions are rarely supernatural—in each novel cited, for example, the torments suffered by humanity have a human rather than divine or diabolic cause—but their ruined worlds can be read as surrogate spaces for everlasting punishment. Heaven, by contrast, might seem to be a less felicitous prospect for novelists as its associations with eternal happiness seem to signify an end of narrative possibilities. Yet, amidst this plethora of bleak visionaries, it is also possible to detect an alternative tradition, one that limns narratives of ascent into the heavenly realm. Optimistic, popular, modern concepts of eternal life such as reunion with loved ones and perpetual happiness—frequently shaped by folk belief rather than directly derived from orthodox Christian theology—might have mutated, deteriorated, been marginalized or become hopelessly vague. As Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang observe in their compelling history of heaven, ‘vigour in defining eternal life has much diminished’ in the capitalist West.6 Similarly, Tom Wright, an influential British theologian, is convinced that ‘most people, including most practising Christians, are muddled and misguided’ regarding the future life: Often people assume that Christians are simply committed to a belief in ‘life after death’ in the most general terms, and have no idea how the more specific notions of resurrection, judgement, the second coming of

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Jesus . . . fit together and make any sense. Let alone how they relate to the urgent concerns of today’s real world.7 Yet McDannell, Lang and Wright all emphasize that belief in heaven has not disappeared altogether and, the absence of a single, coherent theology of the future life that might act as a common bond among believers has given rise to an extraordinary number of alternative conceptions of the world to come. There is an irony in the way that cultural representations of heaven—the realm of transcendence and the infinite—are always compromised by the artistic and philosophical constraints of their historical moment. In the late 1960s, for example, Robert Hughes complained that ‘modern ideas Heaven and Hell are diluted’: Heaven is vaguely thought of as a stretch of blue sky, with pearly gates like those in a hairdresser’s movie ad . . . It is all as clean as the inside of a new ice-box and to anyone with a trace of blood in his veins it is a prospect of appalling boredom, like being confined forever in Disneyland.8 This concept of eternal, enforced leisure in a sanitized faux kingdom is, as Hughes suggests, surely closer to opulent everlasting punishment than authentic salvation. Yet it might not be very far from the images of a vaguely hoped for futurity that persist today. In one of Coupland’s most vividly theological stories (‘How Clear is Your Vision of Heaven?’), a prophet-like character connects excessive, unquestioned material comfort (‘mortal splendor’) with a ‘collapsed vision of heaven’.9 The twentyfirst century imagination, apparently polarized between radical scepticism and fanatical belief, certainly creates some idiosyncratic dreams of eternal life. What role does fiction play in perpetuating or subverting such visions? How do these competing pictures of eternity, particularly those generated in the apparently post-religious West, relate to traditions of Jewish and Christian eschatology? Can humanity imagine an afterlife that it might both deserve and enjoy? Have visions of an eternity spent in perpetual union with God been displaced by a synthetic, worldly paradise? The chapter will attend to contemporary eschatological debate (the branch of theology that emphasizes the traditional four ‘last things’ or, in Paul Fiddes’s terms, ‘the final advent of the Lord of the cosmos, the last judgement, heaven and hell’).10 It will also explore the contrasting heavenly visions of Barnes, Sebold and Coupland in the light of these questions and, to borrow Wright’s phrase, consider ‘how they relate to the urgent concerns of today’s real world’.11


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‘Heaven is democratic these days’: A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989) In an essay on his troubled relationship with religion, Salman Rushdie, one of the most controversially theological writers in modern history, recounts the painless loss of faith that he experienced as a teenager. Significantly, Rushdie associates non-belief with his desire to produce fiction and suggests that his vocation as a writer might be inspired ‘in part, to fill up that emptied God-chamber with other dreams. Because it is, after all, a room for dreaming in’.12 The connection between scepticism, storytelling and a space in which to dream is similarly explored by Julian Barnes in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, a novel unconventionally structured around thematically linked (and, in some instances, rather essayistic) short stories. In ‘Parenthesis’—the titular ‘half’ chapter and the sole story in the work not given a number—an insomniac narrator gazes at his sleeping lover as she dreams; the (semi) chapter, a brief escape from the catastrophes of human history, meditates on the ordinary miracles of romance and art. The restive narrator re-presents the novel’s thematic focus on homo narrans: man as storyteller. The grand narrative of history, he argues, is primarily an effect of suffering: ‘Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history’.13 The act of ‘fabulation’—storytelling that is a product of life’s contingencies rather than born from a burden to tell the truth— includes the capacity to imagine an end to all stories but the narrator notes that the ‘current model for the universe’ is quite unlike the consoling ending of religious belief. Heaven has been displaced by ‘entropy, which at the daily level translates as: things fuck up’.14 The universe ends, according to this paradigm pace that of T. S. Eliot, neither with a bang nor a whimper but in the profane comedy of a curse word. ‘Parenthesis’ suggests that all theological language has reached an impasse. ‘Religion’, reflects the narrator, ‘has become either wimpishly workaday, or terminally crazy, or merely businesslike—confusing spirituality with charitable donations’.15 This somewhat precipitate terminal diagnosis for religion is tempered by a hope that humanity might find an alternative form of transcendent meaning: ‘Tertullian said of Christian belief that it was true because it was impossible. Perhaps love is essential because it’s unnecessary’.16 The narrator’s tentative statement of faith in the gratuity or the absolute freedom of love is no more logical than unthinking assent to the creeds of Christianity but it embodies Barnes’s concern with those phenomena that somehow exceed rationality. The hope of a future life might be regarded as the most commonly shared piece of unreason and this is

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addressed in another chapter that is similarly associated with the reveries of sleep. ‘Why do we have Heaven? Why do we have these dreams of Heaven?’ asks the narrator of ‘The Dream’, in Barnes’s final chapter in his comically brief history of the world.17 This final chapter is a subtle piece of ‘fabulation’ in which Barnes confronts the idea that the collective suffering of humanity—as detailed in the previous nine and a half chapters—might be appeased with the apparent hope of a happy eternal life. ‘The Dream’ ostensibly offers a critique of the concept of heaven as a consumer fantasy. In this uncanny tale, the narrator dreams of waking up in a world that superficially resembles day-to-day reality but in which individuals can fulfil their each and every desire without limit. All idiosyncratic fantasies—sexual, culinary and sporting (the hero witnesses his beloved football team, Leicester City, win the FA Cup; a heavenly fantasy indeed)—are satisfied in the dreamer’s reverie-induced world of eternal pleasure without either spasms of guilt or fear of punishment. Despite such an embarrassment of satisfactions, heaven is, for the dreamer at least, ultimately unsatisfying. ‘The Dream’ redefines the novel’s thematic focus on how ‘catastrophe’ is transformed into ‘art’ (a question explored in peculiarly vivid detail in a chapter that actually incorporates a copy of Theodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa) by suggesting that humanity is unsuited for eternal happiness.18 The ‘catastrophes’ of suffering, discontent and failure are, the narrative implies, fundamental to human identity and necessarily at the centre of popular culture. How then might a novelist represent paradise? This heaven-set short story is the culmination of a self-consciously absurd miniature history of all human activity—tragic and trivial, comic and cruel—that encompasses diverse literary genres, moods and worldviews. Indeed, Vanessa Guignery argues that the novel’s ‘variety of stylistic registers’ and mix of ‘contradictory versions, narrative voices and focalisations’ produces a ‘dynamic polyphony which is that of history’.19 Yet the narrative, replete with ingenious linking allusions and motifs, gains a kind of ironized coherence in its appropriation of a sacred text. Barnes’s novel is not only haunted by religious questions but is structured around a semi-parodic version of the Jewish-Christian scriptures. As Matthew Pateman observes, the ‘apparent chaos of history’—one of the novel’s key concerns—‘is formally bounded within the rigidly teleological structure’, of the biblical narrative, that begins with Genesis and ends with the book of Revelation.20 The opening entry in this mini-history of the world, ‘The Stowaway’, is a distinctly cynical reimagined account of the flood as narrated in Genesis 7.1–24. Life on board Noah’s ark is recounted from the perspective of a species excluded from the saving project of the vessel.


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The mysterious narrator reveals himself, in the final line of the story, to be a woodworm.21 This surreal twist establishes Barnes’s emphasis in seeing authorized versions of history (by turns religious and political, but always invested in protecting the powerful) from alternative, unprivileged perspectives. Barnes’s woodworm is an unlovely, unwanted creature that literally and symbolically gnaws its way through the flimsy structures erected by conceited humanity: self-justifying stories are reduced to dust as effectively as the wood of a Bishop’s throne is ruined by one of the heirs of the woodworm in a later short story.22 The licensed mischief of the garrulous larva-cum-refugee—who describes Noah, the ‘pious patriarch’ of the scriptures, as an unpredictable, rather cruel drunkard—opens up questions of narrative reliability and suggests that sacred texts might best be understood by the dispossessed and marginalized.23 Indeed, just as ‘The Stowaway’ is an illicit iteration of the deluge narrative from Genesis, ‘The Dream’ offers a muted, secular and suburban version of John’s Revelation, the culminating volume in the Christian account of history. While Barnes explicitly challenges the validity of Judeo-Christian teleology, the novel is also utterly dependent on the structure of this redemptive story. The Godless, democratic heaven of ‘The Dream’ is a parody of what we think we want—a dream of endless, perfect ‘[s]ex, golf, shopping, dinner, meeting famous people and not feeling bad’.24 In this version of eternity, hell (‘a great disappointment’) exists only as an optional theme park within the safe confines of heaven itself.25 Significantly, the dreamer is disappointed at the lack of divine judgement; in lieu of a final reckoning with his maker, the narrator is offered a blandly bureaucratic assessment: ‘You’re OK’, he is assured by his angelic auditor.26 He meets a host of dead celebrities, statesmen and artists but is discouraged from meeting Jesus.27 Indeed, he discovers that ‘Old Heaven’—the space of eternal praise—has been ‘sort of closed down’ and God has become optional for the pious (‘We’ve built them some very nice churches’).28 His angel—another rather prim bureaucrat—tells him ‘dreams of Heaven used to be a lot more ambitious’.29 The dreamer’s fantasy is an index of contemporary aspirations in which churches have been largely displaced by supermarkets and spirituality has mutated into one option among many for personal fulfilment. Barnes defamiliarizes the everyday concept of heaven: is it a place of eternal reward or just a fantasy of fulfilled desire? In stark contrast to the erotic space of the shared bed in ‘Parenthesis’, a tender philosophical celebration of love in all its fragility and transience, there is no intimacy in this heaven. Self-gratification is ultimately more like hell than heaven (its residents ‘can’t believe their good luck at first, and then, a few hundred

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years later, they can’t believe their bad luck’).30 ‘Why do we have these dreams of Heaven?’ asks the dreamer.31 Is Heaven simply ‘the oldest dream of all’, one that humanity is incapable of growing out of? Pateman notes that ‘The Dream’ represents heaven not only as an ‘illusion’ but furthermore as ‘a rather weak and obvious product of wish-fulfilment that sustains itself as an idea only for as long as the individual can invent things worth wishing for’.32 Although this iteration of eternal life is, as Pateman suggests, ‘little more than a depressingly conventional decadence’, the short story also quietly implies that the biggest problem lies not with Christian eschatology but with the human capacity for rendering such spiritual hope into something blandly consumerist.33 Pateman is right, I think, to note that the novel’s rational scepticism precludes it from engaging with the complexities and potential richness of different religious beliefs; ‘the novel’s history of religion’, he suggests, may well be another product of ‘fabulation’.34 The counterfeit heaven of ‘The Dream’ culminates the novel’s fascination with competing human desires: the longing for authenticity, the demand for unmediated truth, and the need for comfort, solace and escape. Despite the novel’s evident suspicion of the sacred—transcendent religion is represented as at best outmoded and frequently inhumane—it cannot quite shake off a need to test the possibilities of faith once again. The dreamer’s reverie is apparently a rationalist critique of the human capacity for delusion particularly regarding the rude finality of death. Yet the chapter’s most subversive implications might, despite its faithless orientation, be theological: the profound dissatisfaction of the narrator suggests that life without God generates other myths and desires rather than straightforward contentment with everyday material reality. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters is audacious in its representation of trauma—stories of perceived divine punishment, terrorism and shipwreck are at its heart— and, finally, in its critique of capitalist reveries. It does not, however, possess the resources to offer an alternative, prophetic story that might challenge the ground of consumerism. Where the final book of the Christian scriptures ends with John’s famous exhortation to Christ (‘Come, Lord Jesus’, Rev. 22.20), Barnes’s nameless dreamer offers the downbeat (and punning) ‘it’s the oldest dream of all, and I’ve just had it’.35 The existential isolation of the dreamer contrasts with Christian apocalyptic in a number of ways. Alister McGrath, for example, emphasizes the ‘strongly communal’ nature of New Testament stories of heaven (in which, for example, heaven is troped as a wedding feast or a city). Eternity, according to this perspective, insists McGrath ‘is . . . not a projection of an individual human existence, but is rather to be seen as sharing, with the redeemed community as a whole, in


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the community of a loving God’.36 These biblical images, of a collective, shared futurity—one of mutuality and participation—run counter to the solipsistic, consumerist afterlife of Barnes’s dreamer. In his vision, eternity is imaged only in terms of sensory satisfaction and this, as the dreamer discovers, is profoundly unsatisfying. The loss of religious belief does not appear to have stimulated any great sense of liberty or freedom to act in this instance; instead of a powerful secular form of vatic text in the tradition of other literary visionaries— such as William Morris’s Guest in News from Nowhere (1891)—this dream is one without real hope. For Barnes the ‘oldest dream of all’ is not heaven itself, but the dream of waking up: this might signify an awakening from archaic illusions but the story implies that humanity ‘can’t get by without’ such self-deception.37 Instead of following an ethical imperative to improve the life of others in the present world, the dreamer remains a rather self-absorbed figure, a paradigm of 1980s excess, too concerned with the transience of his own pleasures to consider the material or spiritual conditions of his fellow human beings. As a vision of the world to come, the narrative is playfully aware of its own necessary limits but even as a piece of social criticism ‘The Dream’ is thwarted by its inability to imagine an alternative to the greed and naked self-interest of the decade in which it was written.

‘Trapped in a Perfect World’: The Lovely Bones (2002) Whereas Barnes’s parodic vision of eternity seems to elide the pain and grief of human history so vividly evoked in the novel’s foregoing chapters, Alice Sebold’s iteration of heaven in The Lovely Bones is marked by memories of violence, loss and sorrow. Sebold’s disturbing first novel is narrated from beyond the grave by Susie Salmon, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl who has been raped and murdered by a neighbour ‘on December 6, 1973’.38 Susie ascends into an apparently Godless heaven that has an uncanny resemblance to her own world—a heaven of ‘buildings like suburban northeast high schools built in the 1960s’.39 The spatial and temporal particularity of Susie’s heaven rewrites the conventions of representing eternity. For some theologians, any material description of heaven misses the point. ‘To speak of paradise’, argues McGrath, ‘is not to hanker after a return to a specific physical place, but to yearn for the restoration of a specific spiritual state’.40 In its use of spatio-temporal specifics, The Lovely Bones delicately reminds its readers of the difficulty of representing the transcendent in a

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narrative form that is necessarily transient. Susie’s post-death world is neither the celestial city of Revelation nor the Eden of Genesis. Nor, moreover, is it the everlasting superstore of pleasures imagined by Barnes’s dreamer; it is a place featuring ‘soccer goalposts in the distance and lumbering women throwing shot put and javelin’.41 As bathetically incongruous as such images might seem, the narrative taps into ideas of a de-traditionalized spirituality in which concepts of the afterlife are shaped by everyday incidents rather than, for example, venerated scriptures or Renaissance paintings. In this world, the sacred is not a distant or discrete phenomenon but a mode of understanding that lends quotidian objects and experiences an auratic quality. During her life, the adolescent narrator yearned for the mysteries of high school and is granted an idealized version of them after death. Susie’s heaven is both idiosyncratic and utterly mundane, its shape produced, like that of Barnes’s sceptical heaven dweller by her ‘dreams on earth’.42 The Lovely Bones uses heaven as a kind of conceit, a place from which the narrator can watch the impact of her death on the rest of her family and friends. Sebold plays with ideas of omniscience, as her heroine is able to witness the disintegration of her parents’ marriage, her father’s impotent desire for revenge and her sister’s progress from quiet rage to eventual happy maturity. Susie’s initial life-after-death experience does not quite conform to the hope of the prophet Isaiah of a time when God ‘will wipe away the tears from all faces’.43 However, she is not entirely isolated and, like Barnes’s dreamer, she has a heavenly guide: Franny is a maternal presence (and a fellow murder victim) who advises this novice resident of eternity that this version of heaven is shaped by the strength of personal yearning: ‘All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why . . . it will come’.44 This Gnostic guidance echoes the consumer-driven future life of ‘The Dream’ but also draws on a selective Buddhist spirituality that emphasizes the possibility of perpetual enlightenment and growth. This idea is developed particularly in relation to Susie’s speculation about the limits of her new world. Any true heaven for her would be a place of reunion with her dead grandparents: ‘Where my father’s father, my favourite of them all, would lift me up and dance with me. I would feel only joy and have no memory, no cornfield and no grave’.45 Susie is told by her counsellor that such a version of heaven is possible but only once Susie ‘stop[s] investigating the vacuum left by your loss’. ‘Simply put’, she observes, ‘you have to give up on Earth’.46 Although Susie eventually attains this level of enlightenment—and indeed by the end of the narrative occupies a place she names ‘this wide wide Heaven’—the novel itself, however, by necessity is far from ready to ‘give up on earth’.47


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The eclectic spiritualities that help to shape this sacred space also feature traces of Christian imagery that visualize heaven as a place of eternal praise. Susie describes the daily ritual of music played by her roommate and ‘the oldest resident of my heaven’ whose duet creates ‘a crazy schizoid solace’. Significantly, Susie describes this anomalous but moving ceremony in liturgical terms as ‘my Evensong’.48 However, this wordless hymn has no obvious object of praise and God remains conspicuously absent. Although the narrative displays none of the anti-theological bile of, for example, Philip Pullman’s trilogy, the novel is far less interested in the nature of divinity than it is in addressing human success and failure. The afterlife imagined in The Lovely Bones echoes what McDannell and Lang have named the ‘anthropocentric heaven’ of nineteenth-century liberal Christianity and Spiritualism, particularly in the United States of America.49 In this inclusive but consciously mundane vision of heaven, God is displaced and is figured as less important than the spiritual progress of the individual soul. Alternatives to the transcendent comforts of religion are alluded to throughout Sebold’s novel: Susie’s outrageous Grandma Lynn, for example, describes Benzedrine as ‘my own personal saviour’.50 This casual comment is indicative of the way in which redemptive language has been appropriated by apparently strident secular phenomena such as pharmaceuticals. Personal salvation, in such a world, is no longer a matter of conversion or an inward experience of God but something that can be dispensed in convenient capsule form. Similarly, when Sebold’s characters discuss possibilities of the future life, their visions of eternity—including those of damnation—are shaped by their attitudes to the present. This is particularly clear in an exchange between Ray Singh and Ruth Connors, outcasts at Susie’s school and the two characters who are most vividly aware of her presence after death. For example, in reflecting on the torments of High school, Ray notes that it is ‘just a temporary hell, not a permanent one’.51 This invocation of hell by a confident sceptic finds a contrast in Ruth, who confesses to an unorthodox but sincere belief in a happy afterlife: ‘I don’t mean la-la angel wing crap, but I do think there’s a heaven’.52 The almighty is certainly less present in the ‘modern’ heaven than in orthodox theologies of eternity. In place of perpetual worship of a deity who is witnessed face to face, this iteration of paradise ‘still contained the simple niceties valued by middle class Anglo-American culture. Pets, clean streets, well-endowed libraries, and non-threatening cities survived and flourished’.53 This sanitized, ordered, inorganic heaven is very close to the space occupied by Sebold’s adolescent narrator. Indeed, in a short prologue to the novel, Sebold offers a miniature version of a well-ordered but lonely universe: Susie’s father reassures her that the penguin that dwells inside her

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snow-globe is content to be ‘trapped in a perfect world’.54 The Lovely Bones is, in part at least, an ambivalent reading of what it is to live in the ‘perfect world’ of prosperous America. The novelist is not tapping into millennia of Jewish-Christian apocalyptic so much as she is ventriloquizing 50 years of American suburbanization of eternity. Robert Wuthnow traces some of the major changes to American conceptions of the afterlife to the 1950s, a decade associated with both prosperity and paranoia. Achieving the reward of eternal life, viewed by the seventeenth-century Puritan settlers and their inheritors as simultaneously hardwon and available only to the elect, became, notes Wuthnow, much easier in the era of post-war affluence: Heaven was readily available to all who tried hard, either by living good lives or by saying a simple prayer that expressed their trust in God, and it was temporally more distant, complementing a full life on earth rather than threatening to cut it short.55 Although heaven as reward for a long life is clearly not the case for the murdered narrator of The Lovely Bones, Sebold’s vision of eternity certainly plays with images popularized by this tradition. It also explores the place of the supernatural in an apparently rational era. For example, in one of the novel’s more obviously Gothic tropes, Ruth Connors is literally and figuratively haunted by Susie: immediately after her murder, Susie’s spirit somehow touches the lonely Ruth who, already regarded as something of an eccentric by her conformist school, develops an obsession with her dead peer. Ruth, in some senses, begins to incarnate Susie—fulfilling her nascent desires for the charismatic Ray, for example—and the narrative deploys the motif of spectral return. Susie’s occasional ability to ‘break through’—in one striking moment she appears to her distraught father in the shards of broken glass that litter his office—is testament to contemporary fiction’s abiding fascination with the return of the repressed in ghostly form. It is also, however, a device for offering narrative resolution. In the novel’s final pages, George Harvey, Susie’s murderer, continues to evade all legal sanction despite the best efforts of the police. Susie, no longer seeking revenge, watches Harvey as she scans the earth and, as he contemplates another murder, she watches as a melting icicle causes him to stumble into a ravine and fall to his death.56 Susie’s role in the fate of her murderer is not made explicit but the narrative’s punitive morality is clear: the wicked will receive their just reward from a divine source, if not from a human one. Julian Barnes’s dreamer, disappointed by the lack of judgement in his heaven


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(a place, after all, where Adolf Hitler can roam), might appreciate the confident morality of Sebold’s narrative. The Lovely Bones represents a distinctively American eclecticism in its approach to the supernatural, and its variety of influences echoes the spiritual diversity of the nineteenth-century transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Yet one fundamental element is profoundly indebted to a specifically Jewish-Christian tradition. The novel’s title itself, glossed in one of the novel’s culminating passages, participates with the promise of resurrection. Years after her death, Susie gazes at her reunited family, bruised and traumatized but joined in a melancholy joy: These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at a great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.57 This epiphanic rereading of the events of the narrative connects a motif of resurrection with the future life albeit in a demythologized, humanist fashion. This image of ‘lovely bones’ transfigured into a ‘miraculous body’ quietly echoes the episode of the divinely revived ‘dry bones’ recounted in Ezekiel 37 (‘Son of man, can these bones live?’) and Paul’s image of the Church as the body of Christ (Ephesians 4.25, for example). Sebold’s novel offers a flawed and sometimes sentimental vision of eternity but its delicate illustration of the ‘murky and blurred’ line between the living and the dead admirably avoids retreating into subjective fantasy.58 It also challenges the notion that any literary heaven must be one bereft of stories.

‘We are not with you anymore’: Life After God (1994), Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) Douglas Coupland’s fiction has been animated by whispered rumours of heaven since the publication of his influential, era defining debut, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). This audacious first novel is structured around moments of epiphany that might be described, to borrow George Herbert’s phrase, as the experience of ‘heaven in ordinarie’.59

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These visionary encounters, in which the everyday is transfigured into something transcendent (for example, strangers gather to watch an egret circle above a burned field and a bickering family is united in awed silence by a ‘dazzling fleeting empire of ideal light’ as candles illuminate their living room), are set in contrast with the drab compromises of life in a blandly consumerist society.60 Although Coupland’s first novel and its successor, Shampoo Planet (1992), superficially appear bereft of religious ideas since their characters appear to have no particular beliefs, they are, in fact, subtly theological.61 Later novels wrestle with ideas of humanity’s fallen state: Hey Nostradamus! (2003) confronts questions of theodicy in the aftermath of a high school massacre, and Coupland has commented that JPod (2006), a surreal comedy of the hyperreal age, is predicated on the notion that the rapture of Revelation has taken place and the world is occupied only by the wicked or amoral. Coupland has become the most prolific writer of apocalyptic narratives outside of American fundamentalist literature and, despite his reluctance to align himself with any particular religious community, his work is bold enough to imagine heaven itself. In ‘Brentwood Notebook’ (1994), an experimental essay-collage on a wealthy quasi-suburb of Los Angeles, Coupland suggests that Western wealth has produced the illusion that ‘[h]eaven is manufacturable’.62 The profusion of carefully tended foliage, he notes, sustains a chimerical paradise and camouflages ‘the power poles, transformer boxes and all other infrastructural blights’ prevalent in an affluent modern utopia.63 Coupland’s work displays a radical ambivalence about the possibilities of technology: he is simultaneously enthusiastic for modern(ist) innovation and sceptical of those who fetishize scientific progress. The tension between these rival impulses is emblematized in Coupland’s distinctive evocations of the afterlife. In Life After God (1994), Coupland’s third novel, a thematically linked collection of short stories not dissimilar in structure and stylistic experimentation to Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, the spiritualvisionary dimension of his fiction is prioritized. Part of that prophetic style is a concern with humanity’s capacity for self-destruction. Indeed, one of the recurrent motifs across Coupland’s first five novels (a body of work which also includes Microserfs (1995) and Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)), is the image of nuclear annihilation. Legacies of the Cold War—the end of which coincided with the beginning of Coupland’s literary career—play out in each of these novels whose characters are haunted by fears that they will witness the end of civilization in a sudden, spectacular ball of fire. Such anxieties were common for those who grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s but Coupland’s exploration of this repeated nightmare takes on a distinctively theological dimension in one of the stories in Life After God.


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‘The Wrong Sun’ is divided into two distinct sections: the first of the two, ‘Thinking of the Sun’, is an autobiographical piece about adolescent anxieties during the Cold War. It focuses, in particular, on the odd aesthetic associations nurtured by the period. The narrator recalls his unusually apprehensive first visit to a McDonald’s restaurant on 6 November 1971, a date memorable because it coincided with a widely publicized nuclear weapons test in Alaska. Although the world did not end as the nervous young fast food debutant anticipated, the experience established in his mind a lifelong connection between the popular chain restaurant and the fear of global catastrophe.64 This terror of obliteration was also nurtured by the overabundance of disaster movies produced in the 1970s (films that allow terrified teenagers ‘to be among the last people inhabiting worlds that have vanished, ignited, collapsed and been depopulated’).65 For Coupland, such fears, though memorable and legitimate, were also his generation’s way of confronting the non-negotiable fact of death itself. ‘In modern middle-class culture’, the narrator observes, ‘the absence of death in most people’s early years creates a psychic vacuum of sorts’.66 The constant threat of nuclear apocalypse, then, became a fact of life that was both terrifying and banal but also a formative way of thinking about the end of life. The anecdotes and fragmented memories collected in ‘Thinking of the Sun’ typify Coupland’s lyrical style; his spare prose finds an unusual beauty in experiences that might ordinarily be represented as either unpleasant or merely mundane. However, in the second section of the short story, ‘The Dead Speak’, the narrative moves away from a realist evocation of shared cultural memory into something much more daring and bizarre. ‘The Dead Speak’ is a sequence of nameless voices recalling their deaths during what seems to be a nuclear attack: office workers give vivid, if restrained accounts of windows exploding, plastic cups melting and the whole ephemera of a civilization disappearing before their eyes in the seconds before their own lives end. This chain of impossible stories might be read as a cathartic response to Cold War fear but for its startling conclusion. One narrator (it is not entirely clear which of the voices is granted this task), speaks from a world beyond human pain: We are not with you anymore . . . Please, take your breath, for breath is what you require—oxygen, light and water. And time. But not us. We are no longer with you. We are no longer a part of the living. The birds are here with us now—this is where they went. And the fish in the sea—and the plants and all of God’s fine animals.

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It is cooler here, too, and it is quiet. And we are changed souls; we don’t look at things the same way anymore.67 This bold, heaven-set coda invites us to reread the destructive events of the previous narrative: Coupland’s organic heaven—limned with typical brevity—stands in striking relief to the cluttered, consumer-driven landscape evoked in the short story as a whole. The language is distinctively prelapsarian: heaven is presented as an Eden rediscovered; a space of natural harmony and peace. Where death defined the atmosphere and attitudes of life in a world obsessed with the possibility of self-destruction, this nameless heaven is bursting with life (birds, fish, plants) and transfigured bodies. In vivid contrast to Barnes’s ‘The Dream’, this afterlife is not a space of determined and repeated pleasure seeking, but of stillness and quiet. Neither, unlike the heaven of The Lovely Bones, is it a place of continued sorrow or longing. Coupland takes the apocalyptic obsession with death— and, indeed, the spectacle of death as witnessed in the plethora of 1970s disaster movies—and transforms it with a vision of peaceful afterlife. Death is not figured as a desirable alternative to the struggle of life but as a part of life that is both denied and somehow worshipped, made into a fetish, in twentieth-century culture. The image of an organic heaven is developed in Coupland’s fifth and most obviously millenarian novel, Girlfriend in a Coma. Narrated in part by the ghost-angel of a shamelessly promiscuous high school football star, the novel addresses the shabby compromises of a group of ageing Vancouver school friends whose lives have been tainted by the fact that Karen, aged seventeen—the most popular member of their group, succumbed to a vegetative coma. The novel takes a brave, miraculous turn in its final third when Karen’s awakening, 17 years later, heralds the death of the rest of humanity (with the exception of her immediate circle of friends) and focuses on the attempts of this unlikely elect to retrieve a lost paradise. The apocalyptic connotations of the novel have been widely discussed in relation to its social critique and the so-called ‘sacred turn’ in contemporary literature.68 However, the novel not only offers an archetypal fin de siècle catastrophe—though the majority of humanity does perish in an emblematic slumber—but also offers a sublime vision of heaven. Jared, the aforementioned improbable angel, attempts to describe the afterlife for his friends, now dwelling in a dystopian, polluted version of Vancouver: Heaven? Heaven’s like the world at its finest. It’s all natural—no buildings. It’s built of stars and roots and mud and flesh and snakes and birds.


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It’s built of clouds and stones and rivers and lava. But it’s not a building. It’s greater than the material world.69 Jared’s evocation of heaven, like that of the anonymous sepulchral voice in ‘The Dead Speak’, echoes the tradition of eternity as paradise regained, the garden reclaimed. The brief vision of heaven that he is able to grant his friend Linus, a spiritual seeker who had become utterly disillusioned about the possibility of revelation, is enough temporarily to blind him like Saul/ Paul on the road to Damascus.70 The experience does not constitute a flight from reality but engenders a hunger to transform the debased condition of the present world. Girlfriend in a Coma is freighted with ecological anxiety, among other premillennial fears, and particularly with the wanton destruction of land for industrial and mercantile purposes. Indeed, the images of the ‘world’s end’—the time after the great sleep-plague that destroys humanity—mock the idea that heaven is achievable via progress. ‘To visit earth now’, he reflects, ‘you would see thousands of years of grandeur and machinery all falling asleep’.71 The narrative is implicitly hostile to the idea of a realized eschaton—the concept that heaven is available in the here and now and that technology is a practical avatar of the Kingdom of God. Indeed, Girlfriend in a Coma is perhaps more openly antagonistic towards the achievements of civilization—to what it names, with some ambivalence, ‘the excitement and glamour and seduction of progress’—than any other novel of the late twentieth century.72 Yet its pessimism about the human capacity for self-delusion and insatiable greed is tempered by an emphasis on the possibility of transformation: the characters, and by extension the world, are granted a second chance and the ‘countless leathery skeletons’ of the dead (like those witnessed in Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones) are revived.73 The vision of heaven shared by Jared is not offered as a pretext for escape from the mess of history, or as a reason to withdraw from the struggle for social justice. Instead, the glimpse of Eden renewed constitutes a challenge to engage with the everyday, to bring about lasting hope. Mark Forshaw has read this element of the novel as a worrying form of displaced religiosity that constitutes a rejection of authentic political resistance.74 Yet the conversion of these characters from apathetic pleasure-seekers to born-again pilgrims is not sectarian; nor is it primarily supernatural, in spite of the miraculous nature of the plot. Their new quest is one that emphasizes agency and creative scepticism: ‘If you’re not spending every waking moment of your life radically re-thinking the nature of the world—if you’re not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order—then you’re

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wasting your day’.75 Although the novel deploys a number of tropes explicitly derived from Christian eschatology (including atonement and the prospect of divine judgement), it is concerned with the ways in which the hope of heaven might transform human attitudes to the present world. Jared tells his beleaguered friends that what they have witnessed—the ‘opportunity for holiness’—will mean that they are ‘going to be forever homesick’.76 The implication is that heaven itself is the true home for those who seek to build a more just world. In Life After God, the narrator of the final story in the collection reflects that he and his comfortably middle class peers never felt the need to consider eternity: ‘Ours was a life lived in paradise and thus it rendered any discussion of transcendental ideas pointless’.77 Coupland’s fiction confronts the painful return of such ‘transcendental ideas’ in the context of the failed vision of paradise that is contemporary consumer culture. Although his work is not rooted in doctrine or orthodoxy, it does recuperate the defiantly strange quality of Jewish-Christian apocalyptic literature. A glimpse of heaven, these novels suggest, demands radical change and the challenge to ‘jettison everything’.78

Conclusion Does the return of heaven in the contemporary imagination signify an unhealthy intensification of the death drive? Barnes’s ‘The Dream’ seems to end with a resigned plea for death finally to undo the frustrations of being human via a release into non-being. ‘Christian faith’, argues Gerard Loughlin, ‘is no friend of death, for it answers to a story that has no end; that knows only the fullness of life’.79 Similarly, the best heavenly fictions, regardless of religious association, are committed to a celebration of life itself; but this celebratory mode necessarily confronts human suffering rather than offering escapist fantasies of the world to come. Death, sorrow, pain, failure, betrayal, self-deception, lies, violence and separation from loved ones are integral to the miraculous plots of Girlfriend in a Coma and The Lovely Bones. Yet these narratives are imbued with a sense that suffering is finite, that injustice has no eternal dominion, and they are ultimately emboldened with the untamed hope that a better story of the end is part of humanity’s ‘horizon of expectation’.80

Chapter 10

De Quincey’s Uses of the Bible: Biblical Time and Psychological Time Jonathan Roberts

Through his evangelical upbringing, and from his earliest childhood, Thomas De Quincey’s mind was saturated with the languages and imagery of the Bible. It remains an undersong in his autobiographies, an abiding and formative presence in his writings at large, and a topic of discussion in his essays and papers. The following pages examine the use of the Bible in three of De Quincey’s best-known works: Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), Suspiria de Profundis (1845) and The English Mail-Coach (1849).1 The texts and topics (particularly his sister Elizabeth’s death) that I cover are staples of De Quincey scholarship; however, this chapter differs from earlier critical works in its focus on the biblical—rather than the theological, liturgical or ecclesiastical—aspects of De Quincey’s writings. The critical work on De Quincey’s biblical engagement is not extensive: J. Hillis Miller discussed the images of Eden and exile present in De Quincey’s account of his sister’s death; Robert Hopkins and Vincent De Luca have both written on De Quincey’s uses of apocalyptic, millenarian and Merkabah imagery; and Michael Holstein has suggested that De Quincey’s opium addiction estranged him from chronological time in such a way that he began to understand his own life typologically.2 Only religion, Holstein argues, could provide De Quincey with an adequate framework for his self-understanding; yet while scriptural patterns began to organize his dreams, his guilt and enervated will denied him the possibility of expiation or redemption. The consequent sense of exile manifests itself in his work, by turns, in scenes of comic skittishness and complex explorations of grief and memory. In examining these scenes, I am seeking to develop Holstein’s discussion of the tension between biblical and psychological time in De Quincey’s works. The tension, I will conclude, both distinguishes De Quincey from his Romantic contemporaries and gives him a unique place in the reception history of the Bible.

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The biblical allusions in De Quincey’s work resist critical taxonomy because the Bible is far from being a static, uniform entity. In addition to its distinct Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant identities, the Bible has a diverse and active cultural and literary life outside its own covers: it is not necessary to have read Genesis or attended a church to know what ‘Eden’ signifies, for instance, because Eden has so many homes outside the Pentateuch. As a result, De Quincey’s work is full of vague paradises which are quite functional without their biblical originals, but which are nonetheless thickened by the latter’s penumbra. For example, he describes his childhood in these terms: Though born in a large town, I had passed the whole of my childhood . . . in a rural seclusion. With three innocent little sisters for playmates, sleeping always amongst them, and shut up forever in a silent garden from all knowledge of poverty, or oppression, or outrage . . .3 The imagery here is edenic, but only faintly so, and ‘shut up forever in a silent garden’ hints at a sort of incarceration not suggested by Genesis. However, it is just this vague image of a carceral paradise that makes the passage interesting, as it whispers a suggestion in the reader’s ear, which he or she may then take back to the Bible: how does Genesis look if we think of Adam and Eve being released rather than evicted? Here and elsewhere, De Quincey feeds on the rich familial ambiguity of the Adam and Eve trope. When, in Confessions, he is describing living in a barren house in London, starving and sleeping with ‘a poor friendless child, apparently ten years old’, he is still able to eke a biblical image of liberty out of this destitution: ‘Except the Blue-beard room, which the poor child believed to be haunted, all others, from the attics to the cellars, were at our service; “the world was all before us”, and we pitched our tent for the night in any spot we chose’.4 In a single sentence the couple are transformed from a dubious Adam and Eve wandering out of Genesis, into a pair of Israelites wandering into Exodus, and they do so courtesy not of the Bible itself but of the closing lines of Paradise Lost. This is the Bible at large, travelling not under its own papers, but under those—as so often in Romantic literature—of John Milton. De Quincey has many tasks for the Bible, not all of them serious. It enables him, for one thing, to breathe comic life into his texts. The almost universally po-faced reception of the Bible allows him to employ it as a foil for light relief, such as when he takes the time to reassure his reader in a footnote that: ‘I have never allowed myself to covet any man’s ox nor

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his ass’.5 It is an ironic glance at a biblical commandment that no longer seems to mean anything to an ex-grammar schoolboy quaffing laudanum in an industrializing Britain.6 De Quincey may live in rural Westmorland, but his mind occupies the world of print culture; his concern is not with oxen and asses but with the ‘public’, whom he calls ‘a well-known character, particularly disagreeable, though slightly respectable, and notorious for affecting the chief seats in synagogues’.7 The reference here is to Matthew 23.6 in which Jesus warns his disciples against behaving like the self-serving scribes and Pharisees who ‘love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues’. Sometimes the humour is more biting. In Confessions, De Quincey says that the children of bishops ‘carry about with them an austere and repulsive air, indicative of claims not generally acknowledged, a sort of noli me tangere manner’.8 Here the ‘noli me tangere’— ‘touch me not’ (Jesus’s words to Mary Magdalen after returning from death)—are drawn from the Latin Vulgate (John 20.17). It is another of those phrases that has an active life independent of, though not disconnected from, its biblical origin (it can be seen at play, for example, in Thomas Wyatt’s ‘Whoso List to Hunt’). Deployed here, as a put-down of those with holier-than-thou attitudes, it reconnects to its biblical source, making De Quincey’s targets into effete stuck-up parodies of the incarnate God their fathers profess to serve. Throughout his writings, De Quincey is keen to stage narratives (such as the encounter with the Malay in Confessions) that foreground his linguistic facility. Such passages interleave mock scholarship and ostentatious erudition, and he plays the same game with the Bible. When in Confessions he mentions borrowing from a Jewish moneylender at over 17 per cent, ‘by way of annuity on all the money furnished’, he vents his feelings of having been stung by adding the mock-scholarly note ‘for what services, to whom rendered, and when, whether at the siege of Jerusalem—at the building of the Second Temple—or on some earlier occasion, I have not yet been able to discover’.9 Later in Confessions he recounts an anecdote of a boy describing the ability to summon visions before the eye: ‘I can tell them to go, and they go; but sometimes they come, when I don’t tell them to come’ the child says; this is De Quincey’s cue to tell the boy that he has ‘almost as unlimited a command over apparitions as a Roman centurion over his soldiers’.10 De Quincey’s bon mot is possible because the child, presumably unwittingly, has spoken in the language of Matthew 8.9 and his learned interlocutor has been able to unmask the allusion by extending it.11 De Quincey does not, to my knowledge, satirize the Bible itself, though he can be less than pious about it as a linguistic entity. Bragging (again)

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about his ability in classical languages in Suspiria, he looks back on his foolish youth when he could ‘barely construe books so easy as the Greek Testament’. He quickly consoles himself, however, with an allusion to the Hebrew testament, recalling that once his ‘talent for Latin verses’ became known among his schoolfellows, he ‘was honoured as never was man or boy since Mordecai the Jew’.12 The humour here is in the extravagance, and typifies a strain of cheerful biblical pastiche running throughout his works. ‘Thou art the man!’ he proclaims of David Ricardo, utilizing 2 Samuel 12.7, a sort of alternative to the Vulgate’s more widely deployed ecce homo (‘Behold the man!’, John 19.5).13 Elsewhere, ‘Let there be light’, the divine fiat of Genesis 1.3, provides the imperative to the reader who is to envision De Quincey’s Lakeland home according to the author’s commandments: ‘Let there be a cottage, standing in a valley, 18 miles from any town . . . Let the mountains be real mountains . . . let it be, in fact (for I must abide by the actual scene), a white cottage, embowered with flowering shrubs [my emphasis]’.14 Here, as elsewhere, the pastiche delivers more than just humour—in this case, perhaps, an intimation that Westmorland for De Quincey, as for Wordsworth before him, constitutes a type of Eden. In the London scenes of Confessions, biblical allusion contributes to a quite different tone as De Quincey draws a phrase from Psalms 68.13 to make a wistful nocturne still more evocative: ‘I look up the streets that run northwards from Oxford-street, upon moonlit nights, and recollect my youthful ejaculation of anguish . . . “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove” . . . “that way I would fly for comfort.”’15 Alongside such tonal effects, De Quincey’s muted biblical allusions sometimes serve as a commentary on, or illumination of, the foreground narrative. Take the famous passage in Confessions when a Malay traveller arrives unannounced at De Quincey’s cottage: The servant who opened the door to him [the Malay] was a young girl born and bred amongst the mountains, who had never seen an Asiatic dress of any sort: his turban, therefore, confounded her not a little: and, as it turned out, that his attainments in English were exactly of the same extent as hers in the Malay, there seemed to be an impassable gulf fixed between all communication of ideas. . . 16 The ‘impassable gulf fixed’ comes from the narrative of the rich man (traditionally named ‘Dives’) and the beggar Lazarus, recounted in Luke 16. In that story, the once affluent Dives (now roasting slowly in Hell) pleads that the formerly impoverished Lazarus (now blissfully in the bosom of Abraham) might dip the tip of his finger in water to cool Dives’s poor


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tongue. Alas, not possible, Abraham explains, for ‘between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us that would come from thence [my emphasis]’.17 Is De Quincey’s allusion to the great gulf here no more than a poeticism for an unbridgeable gap? Or perhaps the allusion may be working to identify the poor cottage girl with Lazarus (perhaps, like De Quincey’s other girls, sleeping in his Abrahamesque bosom at night), and the Malay (derogated as ‘a sort of demon’) is therefore to be identified with the wicked Dives. If personal history, here, forms the unconquerable divide, De Quincey also uses the Bible in an attempt to account for lost periods in individual time and experience. In Confessions, he describes (by analogy with a man in ‘the mortal languor of a relaxing disease’) the state of torpor attained by the opium addict. The addict ‘curses the spells which chain him down from motion; he would lay down his life if he might but get up and walk; but he is powerless as an infant, and cannot even attempt to rise’.18 This description fuses two discrete biblical verses—John 15.13 (‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’) and John 5.8 (‘Jesus saith unto him [the impotent man], Rise, take up thy bed, and walk’)—in a way that makes an internal sense in Confessions but that is not apparent in the Bible itself. The Bible provides De Quincey with plenty of analogues for the impoverished life of the physically afflicted opium addict and it also provides him with the means to describe his own state of mind. He recounts his first ingestion of opium as follows: I took it:—and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes:—this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me—in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed.19 This biblical characterization of the psyche (the ‘apocalypse of the world within’) leads De Quincey later in Confessions, Suspiria and The English MailCoach to speculate—as had some of his Romantic contemporaries—that parts of the Bible might constitute allegories of the mind. De Quincey’s influences are not difficult to trace here. He suggests that the ocean, ‘in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm’ might not ‘unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it’.20 In this multiple allusive statement, he combines the opening of Paradise

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Lost (the Spirit that ‘Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss’) and the passage from Genesis on which it draws (‘the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters’).21 He also invokes the Wordsworthian sentiments of the Snowdon episode of The Prelude, in which the natural scene before the poet appears as the ‘perfect image of a mighty mind’.22 Amplifying the theme of cognitive vastness, the mind becomes an apocalyptic repository in a Suspiria anecdote concerning a woman who, as a child, almost died by drowning. Falling into a deep pool, she ‘descended within the abyss of death, and looked into its secrets’.23 De Quincey’s narrative goes on: At a certain stage of this descent, a blow seemed to strike her— phosphoric radiance sprang forth from her eyeballs; and immediately a mighty theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, every act—every design of her past life lived again—arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence.24 The ‘twinkling of an eye’ echoes 1 Corinthians 15.52, another Pauline passage about apocalypse and resurrection.25 De Quincey goes on to figure the experience as a type of the conversion of Saul: Such a light fell upon the whole path of her life backwards into the shades of infancy, as the light perhaps which wrapt the destined apostle on his road to Damascus. Yet that light blinded for a season; but hers poured celestial vision upon the brain, so that her consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite review.26 Here, as in many passages exploring darker themes, De Quincey feels at liberty to redeploy biblical narratives in new and surprising contexts.

*** Private apocalypses are everywhere in De Quincey’s writing. In an opium dream vision recounted in Confessions, for example, he foregrounds the destructive turmoil of the end of the world in a story in which he awakens to find that the ‘morning was come of a mighty day—a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity’.27 In The English Mail-Coach, he is a passenger on the coach which itself has become the dread agent of the apocalypse and in Suspiria, he presents a weird kind of post-apocalyptic peacefulness in his strange vision of Savannah-la-Mar, the Jamaican port destroyed by a hurricane in 1780 and engulfed by the ocean until the storm


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abated.28 De Quincey imagines the town to be perfectly preserved in a glass sea such that he and his counterpart the ‘dark Interpreter’ might ‘cleave the watery veil that divided us from her streets’, look ‘into the belfries’, and search ‘the silent nurseries, where the children were all asleep, and had been asleep through five generations’.29 De Quincey imagines God’s actions and motivations at Savannah-la-Mar in another biblical pastiche: God smote Savannah-la-Mar, and in one night, by earthquake, removed her, with all her towers standing and population sleeping, from the steadfast foundations of the shore to the coral floors of ocean. And God said— ‘Pompeii did I bury and conceal from men through seventeen centuries: this city I will bury, but not conceal’.30 Not all of De Quincey’s apocalyptic tableaux are scenes of past or present violence. Occasionally, they are characterized by utter stillness and peace. In Confessions, for example, he discusses yielding to his ‘natural inclination for a solitary life’: [A]t that time, I often fell into . . . reveries upon taking opium; and more than once it has happened to me, on a summer-night, when I have been at an open window, in a room from which I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could command a view of the great town of L[iverpool], at about the same distance, that I have sate, from sun-set to sun-rise, motionless, and without wishing to move . . . The town of L[iverpool] represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten.31 The apocalyptic element might not be immediately obvious here, but this deathless, sorrowless earth echoes Revelation 21, in which a new heaven and a new earth are established. The biblical space is one where ‘God shall wipe away all tears . . . and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away’.32

*** The material I have covered so far has shown something of the range of De Quincey’s biblical usages, yet with the exception of one or two characteristically De Quincean images, analogues for much of this material could be found in other writers. This is not the case, however, with certain key biblical images which are at the centre of De Quincey’s psychological life, and which exert a gravitational pull on all else around them. Such images

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are what De Quincey calls ‘involutes’, that is, ‘perplexed combinations of concrete objects’, or ‘compound experiences incapable of being disentangled’ through which ‘our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us’.33 It is significant that his first instance of an involute, given in the lines immediately succeeding the explanation above, concerns the Bible itself, and is another recollection of De Quincey’s early childhood: It . . . happened that amongst our nursery collection of books was the Bible illustrated with many pictures. And in long dark evenings, as my three sisters with myself sate by the firelight round the guard of our nursery, no book was so much in request amongst us. It ruled us and swayed us as mysteriously as music. One young nurse, whom we all loved, before any candle was lighted, would often strain her eyes to read it for us; and sometimes, according to her simple powers, would endeavour to explain what we found obscure. We, the children, were all constitutionally touched with pensiveness; the fitful gloom and sudden lambencies of the room by firelight suited our evening state of feelings, and they suited also the divine revelations of power and mysterious beauty which awed us. Above all, the story of a just man [Jesus],—man and yet not man, real above all things and yet shadowy above all things, who had suffered the passion of death in Palestine, slept upon our minds like early dawn upon the waters.34 De Quincey’s purpose in delivering this anecdote is to explain the deep association in his mind between death and summer, and his reason for making that connection is in order to explain his responses to the untimely death of his sister Elizabeth. Her loss was not just any bereavement to Thomas: he identifies it as the defining moment of his psychobiography, claiming that ‘the night which, for me, gathered upon that event, ran after my steps far into life; and perhaps at this day I resemble little for good or for ill that which else I should have been’.35 Later in Suspiria he refers to the death as ‘a remembrance so affecting and revolutionary for my own mind, and one which (if any earthly remembrance) will survive for me in the hour of death’.36 The facts of the death, in so far as we have them from De Quincey, are these: Elizabeth, aged nine, two years old than Thomas, contracted what he calls ‘hydrocephalus’. She suffered for a short time then died. De Quincey saw her corpse once before surgeons came and opened the skull to ascertain the cause of death. He attempted to again enter the bedroom where the body lay but the door was locked against him. The death and burial of Elizabeth, along with De Quincey’s responses to those events, are recounted


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at length in ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, the longest section of the first part of Suspiria.37 It is in the middle of narrating these events that he interrupts his own account with his postulation of the involute, and the nursery Bible memory recounted above. He returns to the narrative of Elizabeth’s death as follows: Out of this digression, which was almost necessary for the purpose of showing how inextricably my feelings and images of death were entangled with those of summer, I return to the bedchamber of my sister. From the gorgeous sunlight I turned round to the corpse.38 The concept of the involute is, then, unfolded amid the recollections of Elizabeth’s death, and the remainder of this chapter focuses on how biblical images accrue in an involute that shapes De Quincey’s processes of remembering, understanding and mourning the loss of Elizabeth. My approach will be to trace this involute in reverse order from the after-effects of Elizabeth’s death on Thomas, to the funeral, to the death itself and thence to its ghastly presence in the dream visions. The preface, as it were, to this involute is grounded in De Quincey’s linguistic prowess, and the event in a bookshop that turned the schoolboy Thomas’s early study of Latin from ‘drudgery’ to delight: One day the bookseller took down a Beza’s Latin Testament; and, opening it, asked me to translate for him the chapter which he pointed to. I was struck by perceiving that it was the great chapter of St Paul on the grave and resurrection … which in English I had read again and again with so passionate a sense of its grandeur … And it is remarkable, that from this moment, when the deep memory of the English words had forced me into seeing the precise correspondence of the two concurrent streams—Latin and English—never again did any difficulty arise to check the velocity of my progress in this particular language. At less than eleven years of age, when as yet I was a very indifferent Grecian, I had become a brilliant master of Latinity . . . and the whole occasion of a change so memorable to a boy, was this casual summons to translate a composition with which my heart was filled [my emphasis].39 De Quincey goes out of his way to make explicit how much this biblical passage meant to him as a child, and there is good reason for this. The chapter in question was 1 Corinthians 15, which is at the heart of the Anglican burial service, and De Quincey’s early familiarity with certain passages from Paul’s

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epistles and from Revelation derives from their conjunction in the service for ‘The Burial of the Dead’ in the (1662) Book of Common Prayer. De Quincey experienced significant bereavement of siblings in his childhood, and the texts read at these funerals became a focus of personal study and linguistic interest to him in their own right. For example, the burial service provides the occasion for De Quincey to give an account of the character of his memory and his visualization of words. He begins with the interior experience of words, a topic, significantly, introduced by the attempt to prevent the memory of Elizabeth’s face from dissolving: Said but once, said but softly, not marked at all, words revive before me in darkness and solitude; and they arrange themselves gradually into sentences, but through an effort sometimes of a distressing kind, to which I am in a manner forced to become a party. This being so, it was no great instance of that power—that three separate passages in the funeral service, all of which but one had escaped my notice at the time, . . . restored themselves perfectly when I was lying awake in bed; and though struck by their beauty, I was also incensed by what seemed to me the harsh sentiment expressed in two of these passages.40 In an unusual (for De Quincey) extended analysis of the liturgy itself, he then quotes from the burial service, discussing its aesthetic power and rights and wrongs in the light of Elizabeth’s burial and the associated fraught emotions and anxieties of his childhood. These feelings are rooted in his responses to the funeral, at which he recalls rebelling against the passage in Paul’s writing that suggests the dead will be transformed: During that part of the service which passed within the church, I made an effort to attend, but I sank back continually into my own solitary darkness, and I heard little consciously, except some fugitive strains from the sublime chapter of St Paul, which in England is always read at burials . . . When I heard those dreadful words—for dreadful they were to me—‘It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory;’ such was the recoil of my feelings, that I could even have shrieked out a protesting—‘Oh, no, no!’ if I had not been restrained by the publicity of the occasion.41 Up to this point, everything is fairly sane, analytical and anecdotal; De Quincey’s lengthy discussion of the liturgy remains quite prosaic until towards its conclusion when he begins to give his imagery freer rein:


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If, for a moment, I and so many others, wallowing in the dust of affliction, could yet rise up suddenly like the dry corpse which stood upright in the glory of life when touched by the bones of the prophet[;] if in those vast choral anthems, heard by my childish ear, the voice of God wrapt itself as in a cloud of music, saying—‘Child, that sorrowest, I command thee to rise up and ascend for a season into my heaven of heavens’—then it was plain that despair, that the anguish of darkness, was not essential to such sorrow, but might come and go even as light comes and goes upon our troubled earth. Yes! the light may come and go; grief may wax and wane; grief may sink; and grief again may rise, as in impassioned minds oftentimes it does, even to the heaven of heavens; but there is a necessity—that, if too much left to itself in solitude, finally it will descend into a depth from which there is no re-ascent; into a disease which seems no disease; into a languishing which, from its very sweetness, perplexes the mind, and is fancied to be very health.42 As De Quincey begins to close in on his deepest thoughts and feelings, so the ‘perplexed combination of concrete objects’, or rather, biblical images that characterize the involute of Elizabeth’s death begin to accumulate: corpses (here 2 Kings 13.20–1), resurrection, light and darkness, disease and health, rising and falling, ascending into heaven and descending into the depths. This passage indicates the density of imagery surrounding the bereavement of Elizabeth. De Quincey’s extraordinary account of the death itself is still more complex in imagery and emotion. Here the biblical imagery becomes so dense that every aspect of the death becomes mythologized. He writes of Elizabeth succumbing to disease in this way: ‘It was upon a Sunday evening, or so people fancied, that the spark of fatal fire fell upon that train of predispositions to a brain-complaint which had hitherto slumbered within her’.43 There are many biblical instances of fire coming from heaven (usually as a divine punishment), but only one in which fire falls from heaven. This occurs at the onset of the disasters that afflict Job—a series of messengers arrive to tell him of the events that have beset him and one announces: ‘The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee’.44 The allusion enables De Quincey to associate Elizabeth with Job, the righteous innocent sufferer. But the lines are complex, as the spark of fire suggests another biblical passage too:

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And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.45 So, Elizabeth’s disease also seems to be figured as a misplaced or inverted Pentecost, which sanctifies her, but which—unlike Acts—stops her from speaking (her only utterance in Suspiria is to moan). The Pentecostal connection is confirmed by the sound ‘as of a rushing mighty wind’ that ‘filled all the house’; De Quincey, likewise, is standing inside the house by the corpse when ‘a solemn wind began to blow … a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries’.46 Dark inversions of biblical paradigms are central to the Elizabeth involute, and De Quincey can be seen fluctuating between paradigm and inverted paradigm in his apostrophe to her: ‘Pillar of fire, that didst go before me to guide and to quicken—pillar of darkness, when thy countenance was turned away to God, that didst too truly shed the shadow of death over my young heart’.47 As a ‘pillar of fire’, Elizabeth occupies the place of God leading the Israelites through the wilderness; but she also represents something not present in the Bible: a ‘pillar of darkness’.48 Such is the symbolic plenitude of Elizabeth, she becomes not only the God who leads De Quincey through the wilderness of this world, but also constitutes the Eden from which he has been expelled: the ‘lamp lighted in Paradise was kindled for me which shone so steadily in thee’.49 That banishment (which itself occupies the final lines of Confessions) is again evident after the surgeons have done their work, and Thomas returns to the corpse: ‘Some hours after the strangers had withdrawn, I crept again to the room, but the door was now locked—the key was taken away—and I was shut out for ever’.50 Leaving her room for the last time had meant a transition to the worlds of adulthood, mortality, and experience: ‘passing forever from my sister’s room. The worm was at my heart; and, confining myself to that state of life, I may say—the worm that could not die’; the biblical allusion here suggests, moreover, that leaving Elizabeth is tantamount to entering hell.51 This vortex of biblical signs will not be confined to the account of Elizabeth’s death and funeral, but sweeps through the dreams and visions that haunt so much of Confessions, Suspiria and The English Mail-Coach. John Barrell and others have demonstrated the astonishing proportion of De Quincey’s narratives that are bound up with seeking to recover a version of that childhood relationship with Elizabeth through surrogates who


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usually come to a bad end: the three-year old Catherine Wordsworth with whom De Quincey slept (‘we lay awake all the middle of the night—and talked oh how tenderly together: When we fell asleep, she was lying in my arms’); the ten-year old girl in the solicitor’s house with whom he slept (‘The poor child crept close to me for warmth . . . I took her into my arms, so that in general she was tolerably warm, and often slept when I could not’); Ann, the sixteen-year old prostitute with whom he probably had sexual relations; and Margaret Simpson, his ‘domestic child-bride’.52 In writing about these and other surrogates, the dark biblical involute is a constant presence. Recounting the long-lost Ann’s kindness to him, he suddenly bursts into an apostrophe to her that speculates on her eventual fate: Oh! youthful benefactress! . . . how often have I wished that, as in ancient times the curse of a father was believed to have a supernatural power, and to pursue its object with a fatal necessity of self-fulfilment,—even so the benediction of a heart oppressed with gratitude, might have a like prerogative; might have power given to it from above to chace—to haunt—to way-lay—to overtake—to pursue thee into the central darkness of a London brothel, or (if it were possible) into the darkness of the grave— there to awaken thee with an authentic message of peace and forgiveness, and of final reconciliation!53 What he wants here—a supernatural power ‘from above’ to deliver to Ann ‘an authentic message of peace and forgiveness’—is a type of annunciation that has its precedents in the gospel messages to Mary and to the shepherds, but which, like the other dark components of this involute, is inverted.54 This is not a parody of the annunciation, but a sort of funereal version of it, where the annunciation melds into a hypothetical resurrection (‘to awaken thee’) that both narrator and reader know will never take place. Resurrection lies at the heart of the Elizabeth involute, and forms, for example, the narrative backdrop to De Quincey’s description of his return to look at his sister’s body, a passage which recalls the biblical accounts of the women visiting Jesus’s tomb to find it empty.55 In De Quincey’s writings, however, unlike the Bible, resurrection always and inevitably fails.56 There is no final ascension or resurrection in De Quincey, there is only a nightmarish stasis figured through endless images of sinking and rising, heights and depths. I noted these briefly earlier in the conclusion to De Quincey’s discussion of the burial service—burial is always ‘down’ and resurrection is ‘up’; depression is down (evident from the title Suspiria de Profundis, ‘Sighs from the Depths’), but memories, spirits, and ghosts ‘rise up’, and ‘that

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final experience in my sister’s bedroom, or some other in which her innocence was concerned, will rise again for me to illuminate the hour of death [my emphasis]’.57 The language of rising and resurrection is central to the concept of the Parousia—Christ’s Second coming—found, for example, in the Nicene Creed (‘He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead’), and De Quincey deploys this language to describe his childhood puzzlement over his sister Jane’s death: ‘I was sad for Jane’s absence. But still in my heart I trusted that she would come again. Summer and winter came again— crocuses and roses; why not little Jane?’58 In Suspiria, De Quincey uses the language of resurrection to describe his attempts to break with opium: ‘Twice I sank—twice I rose again. A third time I sank’.59 The language of life and death here draws again on passages describing Christ such as 1 Corinthians 15.5 (‘he was buried, and . . . he rose again the third day according to the scriptures’), a message of universal hope inverted in De Quincey’s ‘[a] third time I sank’, leaving him stranded in yet another reworking of the banishment from Eden: ‘I saw through vast avenues of gloom those towering gates of ingress which hitherto had always seemed to stand open, now at last barred against my retreat, and hung with funeral crape’.60 Later in Suspiria, the ‘Ladies of Sorrow’ of whom he dreams curse De Quincey such that ‘he see[s] the things that ought not to be seen—sights that are abominable, and secrets that are unutterable . . . So shall he rise again before he dies’.61 De Quincey encounters the Ladies of Sorrow—nightmare refigurings of the ‘three innocent little sisters’ with whom he grew up—in his dreams at Oxford, and he is still caught up in increasingly complex and intense figurations of rising and falling in The English Mail-Coach, published 57 years after Elizabeth’s death. In brief, The English Mail-Coach recounts De Quincey’s love, as an undergraduate, of riding seated on top of the coach next to the driver. Throughout the work he presents the coach as the herald of Empire, the harbinger of British military victories, and (consequently) as an apocalyptic force. The narrative becomes increasingly surreal as it progresses, and it concludes with a section entitled ‘The Vision of Sudden Death’, followed by a five-part ‘Dream-Fugue on the above theme of sudden death’. The ‘sudden death’ in question relates to a lengthy anecdote that De Quincey tells of riding out on the mail-coach after midnight from Manchester post office to Kendal, a nocturnal journey of about 80 miles. At the commencement of the narrative, De Quincey, who has not eaten since breakfast, takes a dose of laudanum, and the trip begins. In due course, the already-exhausted driver falls dead asleep at the reins, but the


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horses know the road, and the coach races on. All is well until De Quincey sees a young couple seated in a small gig in the road ahead. Incapacitated by fear and opium, De Quincey is unable to act as the mail-coach hurtles towards the frail carriage. The couple have almost no warning of the apocalyptic fury approaching them, and when finally they notice, the young man in the gig attempts evasive action before resorting to prayer, while the young woman looks certain to be destroyed by this incarnation of the horsemen of the apocalypse: From the silence and deep peace of this saintly summer night,—from the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight,—from the manly tenderness of this flattering, whispering, murmuring love,— suddenly as from the woods and fields,—suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in revelation,—suddenly as from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon her, with the flashing of cataracts, Death the crownèd phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice.62 The mail-coach does indeed smash the smaller carriage, and as his vehicle charges on, De Quincey is just able to catch a backward glance of the woman standing with her arms raised in terror: the couple have survived, but this image will forever haunt De Quincey, and is sucked into the Elizabeth involute. The five-part movement of the dream fugue which follows repeatedly returns to this scene, and the young woman becomes, inevitably, a type of Elizabeth, another in the long line of innocent women of uncertain fate, for whom De Quincey is in some way responsible. The scene is verbally linked to Elizabeth’s death by the ‘dreadful rattle’ of the horses’ harness which echoes the sounds of Elizabeth’s funeral: ‘earth to earth, and the dread rattle ascends to the lid of the coffin’.63 The five-part dream fugue which follows unfolds nightmarish scenes which repeatedly culminate in the probable death of an innocent ‘lady’—crushed under the bows of De Quincey’s three-decker warship; stranded high in the shrouds of a vessel being swept off towards eternity; sinking alive submerged in quicksands; left at the mercy of a ‘dreadful being’ attempting to ‘baptise her with the baptism of death’.64 Each of these apocalyptic scenes reworks that backward glance at the young woman in the gig in the ‘sudden death’ narrative: ‘But the lady—! Oh heavens! will that spectacle ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon her seat, sank and rose, threw up her arms wildly to heaven’.65 When she reappears in part two of the fugue she stands ‘with hair dishevelled, one hand clutched amongst the

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tackling—rising, sinking, fluttering, trembling, praying’.66 Then, in part three, she is sinking into quicksands while her arm is rising out of them. The narrator arrives on the scene, ‘but only to see the treacherous sands gathering above her head’: Already her person was buried; only the fair young head and the diadem of white roses around it were still visible to the pitying heavens; and, last of all, was visible one marble arm. I saw by the early twilight this fair young head, as it was sinking down to darkness—saw this marble arm, as it rose above her head and her treacherous grave, tossing, faltering, rising.67 In each case, the woman’s face is not visible—unsurprisingly as in Suspiria Thomas had ‘sought [his] sister’s face, [b]ut the bed had been moved’ and he thinks of her countenance ‘turned away to God’.68 The endless images of rising and falling, of ascending and descending, of the ‘pitying heavens’, return the reader to De Quincey, as a child, in church on Sundays in the wake of his sister’s death, looking through the stained glass windows and imagining the clouds carrying ‘dying children, that were tossing in anguish, and weeping clamorously for death’ up to heaven. As the beds ‘rise slowly through the clouds’, ‘slowly, also, [God’s] arms descended from the heavens’.69

*** De Quincey’s importance as a writer on religion and as a rewriter of the Bible lies in the unique perspective his work offers on the operational meaning of biblical time within an individual life. De Quincey is quite distinct from his Romantic contemporaries in this regard. Blake and Wordsworth, for example, have long been associated with a mystical tradition that valorizes the transcendence of chronological time—seeing ‘Eternity in an hour’ in Blake’s words—but for De Quincey such a mode of time constitutes an infinite horror from which only the Bible offers a way out. Eternity is a dreadful abyss in his writings, and he provides his reader with a powerful experience of jarring conflict between the chronological linearity of the Bible and the atemporality of mystical experience.70 The significance of this becomes apparent in relation to the Elizabeth involute. De Quincey writes of the dreams he had of her more than a decade after her death: Again, I was in the chamber with my sister’s corpse—again the pomps of life rose up in silence, the glory of summer, the frost of death. Dream


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formed itself mysteriously within dream; within these Oxford dreams remoulded itself continuously the trance in my sister’s chamber … Once more I, that wallowed, became he that rose up to the clouds.71 The Elizabeth involute is a vortex from which there is no escape. It makes nonsense of attempts to give De Quincey’s grief a chronological order because it has no before and no after. In this respect, Confessions, Suspiria and The English Mail-Coach are of a piece, each demonstrating that ultimately there is no way out of the bereavement scene re-enacted above. De Quincey is, of course, quite aware of this, and the dissolution of time caused by opium is a perennial theme in his work. It is unsurprising then that he is attracted to those parts of the Bible which represent definitive beginnings or ends: Genesis (particularly the Creation and the expulsion from Eden); the resurrection of Jesus (a second Adam, inaugurating a new age); and Revelation, the ultimate ending (but also a new Creation—a new heaven and a new earth). These passages offer De Quincey what Frank Kermode calls ‘the sense of an ending’—a temporary respite from grief to an individual for whom time has collapsed. There’s a sort of salvation in this, albeit textual and temporary. It may not tally with traditional notions of individual salvation, but such models are not relevant in this context because we do not know De Quincey as a living soul, but only as a series of texts. To put it another way, in so far as we can experience his suffering, we do so textually, and it is textually that we can share his salvation too. Endlessly mediated through visions, nightmares and childhood memories, the Elizabeth involute lets the reader experience the horror of time that has no chronological direction; but having taken us into the depths it also allows us to taste salvation by counterpointing this material with the redemptive chronology of the Bible, the great historical sweep of the Judaeo-Christian myth from Genesis through to Revelation.

Chapter 11

Re-imagining Biblical Exegesis Christopher Rowland

For the last eight years I have been involved with the genesis of a new commentary series published by Blackwell.1 Whereas most biblical commentaries tend to privilege historical–critical exegesis, in an attempt to recover the original meaning of the text, the Blackwell Bible Commentary series focuses on the history of effects, foregrounding the different ways in which the Bible has been read and heard in history, through music, literature and art. The result is methodologically complex, not least because of the peculiarity of the history of interpretation of different books, and the series marks a major collaborative attempt to reimagine biblical exegesis and rethink the work of interpreting sacred texts. There have been no obvious role models for those editing individual volumes, and one of the major challenges has been to find ways of organizing a diffuse body of material. The introduction to each volume in the series has played an important role as a lens through which the different interpretations in the commentary as a whole are examined, and the effects of some of these insights can be seen in the discussion that follows. While we started off hoping that a verse-by-verse commentary would be normative, we soon recognized that this does not suit every text. No book in the Bible raises the question of the nature of the exegetical task more acutely than the Apocalypse. The assumption that a detailed, verse-by-verse, explanation of a biblical text is what is required and expected already weights the project of interpretation in a particular direction. It quickly became apparent that to use the typical form of the modern commentary would skew the presentation in one direction and marginalize the visionaries, poets and artists whose relationship with the text is more oblique. As the history of the arts has made clear, the biblical text is a springboard for other revelations or a creative frame of reference for understanding the world. If we view exegesis as a particular form of textual close reading then

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it is difficult to count the contributions of the arts as exegesis. But such a view of the nature of exegesis needs to be rethought, for several reasons. To take just one, the question arises whether the Apocalypse is a text to be interpreted and deciphered or a text to be used and actualized. An exposition of the Apocalypse that concentrates exclusively on the question ‘what did this verse mean?’ may miss the distinctive insight offered by later visionaries, who are inspired by the text to new imaginative insights or prophetic pronouncements. The visionary, artistic and musical appropriations of the Apocalypse texts go beyond the historical, literal meaning, to essential points of the message which is then recast and represented in another genre. I have become convinced that what we have in many works of art is an attempt to present in another medium the total meaning of the text, thereby offering a reading in which the essential subject matter is re-presented in visual form. It is thus a different kind of exegesis, not just loosely related to the text; this new kind of exegesis is an expression of a textual meaning that cannot be described in words alone. Later artists saw the Apocalypse as an inspiration for their own art as they sought to represent in their own artistic works its prophetic images. Depictions inspired by the Apocalypse often illustrate the way in which artistic interpretations exemplify the differing exegetical approaches to the Apocalypse. For example, artistic depictions offer the opportunity to present the visions synchronically, in a way that is difficult in a text. In addition, the artistic representations of the Apocalypse convey the emotive power of the imagination and offer something that extends what is available in literary interpretations. What I am describing here might be thought about within the sphere of Wirkungsgeschichte (‘history of effects’ or ‘history of influence’), a term that refers to the account of the ‘effects’ of texts on hearers or readers and the way the meaning may be communicated in words, art or music. It is often identified with the ‘history of interpretation’ and reception history, and all three have one thing in common: they all stress the importance of reading and interpreting texts at particular times and places for the process of exegesis. Some of us would go further and say that such readings and interpretations are a crucial part of exegesis: we cannot understand what the text meant (either at the time of writing or during its earliest reception) without having some understanding of what it means. The emphasis on reception of the text by readers involves a significant departure from modern biblical exegesis, which, for the most part, continues to seek after the original meaning of the text without substantive consideration of what the text means for later readers.

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The distinction between the meaning of the text and the meaning of the text for us has always been a very difficult one to maintain. There is a limit, after all, to how much one can say about the meaning of a text without reading into it things from elsewhere, whether they be insights from other texts, contemporary with the biblical text, antecedents of the text in earlier Scripture, or later traditions of interpretation which may guide our reading. The assumption underlying the distinction is that how the text has been interpreted and how it has affected later interpreters is somehow secondary to what the text meant. In the famous Evangelische-Katholische Kommentar (EKK) series, which pioneered Wirkungsgeschichte as part of the commentary genre, the history of interpretation is seen as something that is secondary to detailed exegesis of the original meaning of the text.2 Although it is easy to sympathize with this position—no one would want to play down the centrality of those basic exegetical tasks that Augustine outlined in De Doctrina Christiana—one should not overestimate the extent of the task that awaits interpreters once those basic steps have been taken. Augustine explains: It is therefore necessary above all else to be moved by the fear of God towards learning his will: what it is that he instructs us to seek or avoid . . . After that it is necessary, through holiness, to become docile, and not contradict holy scripture—whether we understand it (as when it hits at some of our vices) or fail to understand it (as when we feel that we could by ourselves gain better knowledge or give better instruction)—but rather ponder and believe that what is written there, even if obscure, is better and truer than any insights that we may gain by our own efforts. After these two stages of fear and holiness comes the third stage, that of knowledge . . . This is the area in which every student of the divine scripture exerts himself, and what he will find in them is quite simply that he must love God for himself, and his neighbour for God’s sake . . . It is vital that the reader first learns from the scriptures that he is entangled in a love of this present age . . . It is at this point that the fear which makes him ponder the judgement of God, and the holiness which makes it impossible for him not to admit and submit to the authority of the holy books, compel him to deplore his condition . . . When he beholds this light . . . he strenuously occupies himself with the love of his neighbour and becomes perfect in it.3 While Wirkungsgeschichte might initially appear more concerned with the history of effects than the alleged source of those effects, that history


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includes the text rather than leaving it behind. Following Hans-Georg Gadamer, text and interpreter can be seen as co-participants in a conversation that constitutes meaning rather than that being secondary to some sort of prior, original meaning: ‘Everything we have said characterizing the situation of two people coming to an understanding in conversation has a genuine application to hermeneutics, which is concerned with understanding texts’.4 Gadamer’s work raises for us the question of whether or not there is something about texts that triggers particular interpretations, whether the text therefore has some control on what counts as a legitimate interpretation. I have some sympathy with those who think that the text exerts an influence, although I would want to acknowledge the complexity of determining what that influence is and how it makes itself felt: it is quite possible that an interpretation—whether in words or pictures—which does not attend to the detail of the meaning of words (the characteristic of most modern commentaries) might get at the meaning of a text better than historical-critical exegesis. Indeed, it is not too difficult to find examples of historical-critical exegesis that appear to rely on the text but actually transform ‘living’ words into a lifeless peg on which pre-existing ideas are then hung. From the perspective of Wirkungsgeschichte, the different kinds of later interpretation of the Book of Revelation—whether ‘decoding’ (that is offering an interpretation of what the different images mean: e.g. the Whore is Rome and the Beast from the land represents supporters of the Roman Empire in Asia), using the apocalyptic imagery to help one understand one’s own context, or the visionary appropriation—can all claim to be rooted in the Apocalypse itself. There are very occasional examples of ‘decoding’ in the text itself (e.g. Rev. 17.9) and later visionaries saw John’s visionary experience as a licence for their own visionary inspiration. They did not see a text like this as excluding their privilege to share the lot of John as one of the prophets. So, other moments might occur when ‘the spirit came on the Lord’s Day’ (as it did, for example, to Joachim of Fiore), to enable further visionary insight of which this book formed the basis (just as Ezekiel’s vision had been a crucial catalyst for John’s own vision). If what we have in John’s Apocalypse (as I believe to be the case) is the written account of a vision or visions which came to John, even at different times, it becomes very difficult to describe any intention of the author, other than at most the ordering of the visions and their dissemination. John did not set out to write a literary work in an apocalyptic genre. Whatever the origin of the Book’s various components may have been, their function and juxtaposition go much further than the visionary’s conscious intention,

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even if we could find a way of ascertaining precisely what that intention was. And if the focus of interpretation is shifted away from the intention of the author, then reception history turns out to have particular importance, for then John’s place is similar to that of the one who receives his visionary text. Both visionary and reader are in the position of interpreters. Thus the ‘afterlife’ of the text, its reception by those who found in this visionary text an inspiration for their own visions or who have pored over it, seeking to use their interpretative skills to unlock its mysteries, is an integral part of its exegesis, as important as what the recipient of the vision and the original hearers may have understood it to mean. Perhaps appropriately given the role that tradition plays in interpretation, there has been a gradual recognition that the history of effects has a crucial part to play in the understanding of the biblical exegesis undertaken by the Christianity community. The modern preoccupation with the original setting of the biblical text should be seen within the context of past interpretations, which affect the present form of interpretation. Among other things, this helps to expand our view of what historical interpretations might mean. A glance at most modern historical interpretation of biblical texts reveals how narrowly focused the attention to history actually is. Little attention is given to either the pre-Enlightenment interpretation of these texts or the wider cultural appropriation of the texts in literature and other media, which are less obviously conscious interpretations but exhibit an influence whose importance for exegesis should not be neglected because of the insight which the subtle mix of tradition and imagination offers. Wirkungsgeschichte is, I believe, a plea to appreciate the history of texts through time as a key to their interpretation and, what is most important, to see that exegesis should not be confined to written explication of texts or to the views of a few academic exegetes but should attend to other media of exegesis also. Openness to the varieties of effects of biblical texts puts exegesis in touch with wider intellectual currents in the humanities, so that literature, art and music become part of the modes of exegesis, taking their place alongside conventional explanatory writings of biblical texts within Christian theology. Unfortunately, the modern period witnessed a significant compression in the scope of interpretation with the rise of the historical method at the end of the eighteenth century. Without wishing to describe a complex set of events too crudely, post-Enlightenment hermeneutics can be seen as replacing a tradition of interpretation based on the received wisdom of the Christian tradition through time with a form of interpretation which either sat loose to that tradition of interpretation or rejected it altogether. In its


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place there emerged a school of interpretation in which the exegesis of biblical texts was based on the relationship with texts that were contemporaneous with them rather than on the history of the way those texts had been interpreted through history (largely within faith communities). Historical criticism restricted itself to contextualization of biblical texts with other, contemporaneous (ancient), texts, rather than with either an interpretative tradition determined by the rules of interpretation practised by the Christian Church or with the way in which the text impacts on modern readers. With hindsight we can see that what was happening at the Enlightenment was a challenge to the power of tradition, a painful articulation of ways of reading authoritative texts independent of received wisdom. It is important to appreciate the reasons for and benefits of this paradigm shift: my plea for attention to the history of interpretation, to how biblical texts have been interpreted down the centuries, is not an appeal to return to the authoritative received wisdom of the Christian (or Jewish) tradition as maintained by its orthodox exponents. Anyone involved in the history of interpretation of biblical texts will soon be aware that the received wisdom of what may be termed a Great Tradition (the ‘Fathers’, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, the German theological tradition, the Roman Catholic magisterium) is just a tiny (and far from harmonious) part of a much broader Christian tradition, which would also include voices as diverse as Valentinus, the Montanists, the Anabaptists, feminist theologians and the voices identified with the more famous exponents of liberation theology. Such voices have long fascinated me, and their rehabilitation within the tradition of Christian theology is long overdue.5 Far from being a return to church tradition by the back door, Wirkungsgeschichte opens us to other understandings of what constitutes the traditum, enabling a richer theological understanding of the interpretative communities that have not always been heard by the dominant theological tradition. Not only is this theologically appropriate; it is necessary for the intellectual health of theology as a discipline as it looks ahead and reflects on its place within the academy and the broader culture. With the future in mind, let me consider two aspects of the history of interpretation that deserve to be given more prominence. First, we need to appreciate the holistic reading of the biblical text offered by Wirkungsgeschichte rather than seeing the history of effects as an optional extra for biblical studies. The danger of the latter is evident in the otherwise admirable survey of modern biblical scholarship produced by the Pontifical Biblical Commission just over a decade ago.6 In this document, historical

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scholarship is equated with the quest for the literal sense of Scripture and Wirkungsgeschichte is seen as a laudable complement to this fundamental task. At the same time, running throughout the document there is a clear view that explaining the text is not enough and that an exegesis which stops at ancient history has missed the point of the exegetical task: Access to a proper understanding of biblical texts is only granted to the person who has an affinity with what that text is saying on the basis of life experience . . . This dynamic pattern [holding together modern scientific culture, and the religious tradition emanating from Israel and from the early Christian community] corresponds to the requirement that there be a lived affinity [my italics] between the interpreter and the object, an affinity which constitutes, in fact, one of the conditions that makes the entire exegetical enterprise possible . . . They [the Catholic exegetes] arrive at the true goal of their work only when they have explained the meaning of the biblical text as God’s word for today.7 This is similar to what Karl Barth says in his famous commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.8 Barth bids us engage with the text and respond humbly in the context in which it is read. What he urges is a commentary on the text which ‘means that I am driven on till I stand with nothing before me but the enigma of the matter [of the text]; till the document seems hardly to exist as a document; till I have almost forgotten that I am not its author; till I know the author so well that I allow him to speak in my name and am even able to speak in his name myself’.9 Reflecting on the work of Calvin, Barth describes the task of wrestling with the text, so, as he put it, ‘the walls that separate the sixteenth [or twentieth or even the twenty-first] century from the first century become transparent’, and the ‘actual meaning’ is thereby ‘disclosed’.10 As a result the neat divide between the original meaning and the meaning for us is pulled down. It is this task of comprehending what the text is really about that artists, poets and those who have been affected by the text understand better than the historical exegetes. As I have suggested in relation to the Apocalypse, the more oblique construal of a text in songs, poems and pictures can get at what Barth calls the matter (die Sache) of the text in a way that communicates what it is about and thereby does the job of interpretation more effectively. Detailed, verse-by-verse explanation of a biblical text may seem to be more faithful to the biblical text as compared with the poetic and imaginative appropriations of it, but, as we have seen, there are reasons for thinking that this assumption is highly questionable.


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An exposition that concentrates exclusively on the question ‘what did this verse mean?’ may miss the distinctive insight offered by interpreters in media other than words, who can aim at something which is more holistic, more at one with the underlying direction of the text than the patient explanation of the meaning of words and their possible original historical context. This is why Wirkungsgeschichte is central to exegesis and not an optional extra: it enables one to become aware of ‘the inner dynamic’ of the text. In the words and pictures of Botticelli, Blake and Wordsworth, to return to Barth, ‘the walls which separate’ their time from the one in which the biblical text was written ‘become transparent’ and the ‘actual meaning’ is ‘disclosed’. Second, the pattern of Wirkungsgeschichte hitherto—which has been mainly descriptive of different representations of interpretations of biblical passages in various media—urgently needs to be supplemented by attention to the social, as well as theological, context which conditioned the interpretation. Any one reading a modern biblical commentary will find discussions of possible ancient contexts and parallels for the passage in question and the various opinions with regard to the meaning of the text that have been offered by modern commentators. Yet the assumption is that these commentators are engaged in a task that examines the meaning of the text itself, not what people have made of it. The task of contextualizing the exegetes is long overdue. It is not that it has never been done but somehow historical critical study of the Bible has been abstracted from the history of interpretation. An important step towards rectifying this gap was taken by a little known work by the late John O’Neill, who was Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at the University of Edinburgh. O’Neill examined the exegetical work of some of the founding fathers of modern exegesis in the light of their historical and philosophical context.11 Not only is his study very illuminating, it also reminds us that historical criticism is part of the long story of the history of the interpretation of the Bible and that exegetes themselves and their interpretative preferences reflect the wisdom of the age in which they work. Instead of supposing that biblical exegetes are only telling us what the text means, we need to acknowledge that this is a narrowly focused task that is, at best, periphrastic. As soon as one starts to hypothesize about likely contexts and parallels, the interpretation has entered an altogether different realm; the literal sense of the text has been left behind and we embark upon a new world of imaginative reconstruction that opens up the nature of the historical-critical enterprise. It is important to stress imagination in interpretation as it is frequently assumed that historical criticism merely sets out the literal meaning of the

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text. That is not the same, however, as the quest for what the text originally meant: the latter requires other skills of imaginative reconstruction, taking the interpreter far beyond the literal sense. It is that move, unexceptionable in itself, which is so characteristic of the historical preoccupations of modern exegesis. There is nothing wrong with this imaginative turn if one recognizes that this is what one is doing when the original meaning is reconstructed, but in an age dominated by history, its reconstruction and the quest for the origins of received wisdom, it is easy to think of the historicalcritical enterprise in a naïve and restricted sense. In seeking to reimagine the historical work of biblical criticism, it is revealing to consider an important letter from William Blake to a learned enquirer who asked about Blake’s art. When Dr Trusler demanded an explanation of that which was obscure and allusive, Blake gave him the following reply: You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients consider’d what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouzes the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato. Later in the letter, Blake continued: I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of imagination and Vision. I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule and Deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly Mistake, when you say that Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, and I feel Flatter’d when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of Art? Why is the Bible more Entertaining and Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, and but mediately to the Understanding or Reason?


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But I am happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who can Elucidate My Visions, and Particularly they have been Elucidated by Children, who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped. Neither Youth nor Childhood is Folly or Incapacity. Some Children are Fools and so are some Old Men. But There is a vast Majority on the side of Imagination or Spiritual Sensation.12 In this response Blake sets out his hermeneutical priorities, and, I believe, challenges those of us involved in the study of reception history to expand our horizons. Many biblical texts are allusive, to be set alongside similarly tantalizingly opaque texts from antiquity. That is their peculiar glory. Those wishing for precision, order and system in their exposition can run the risk of reducing those allusive texts to something they were never intended to be. In this letter Blake sets out a case for the central importance of the ‘effective’ history of texts, like the Bible, which have prompted various insights as consequences of their impact on the interpreters because of their capacious allusiveness. Blake bids us to embrace within the meaning of exegesis not only that attention to the letter which seeks to place the text in the context of historical processes, and the sense which has been expressed directly by the authors, but also their imaginative effects. One important function of ‘exegesis’ is the exposition of that which is enigmatic and capable of various meanings. Allusive texts which cannot be easily pinned down, where there is room for difference within the ‘play’ of the text, require a different kind of exegetical method, one that is open to difference and facilitates the full use of the space offered by the text. Most of the biblical writings are collections, whose discrete elements have been able to ‘rouze the faculties to act’ in ways which are without parallel in Western civilization. The kaleidoscopic effects of this process demand a central place in exegesis rather than as an occasional fanciful appendix once the exegetical task is done. A new diachronic perspective would give as much attention to the whole gamut of the effects through history, in different media, and in non-dominant sources, in order better to appreciate the remarkably diverse forms of exegesis which are too often neglected by the modern theological academy.13

Chapter 12

Saving Literary Criticism Mark Knight and Emma Mason

I Can one speak of saving literary criticism without slipping into naivety or arrogance? At best, the promise of salvation sounds unlikely, at worst, it threatens an exclusive, purifying and totalizing intervention that brings with it more harm than good. Faced with these possibilities, the safest option for literary critics intent on using a redemptive religious vocabulary in their work is to pursue a different definition. Matthew Arnold’s positioning of literature as a substitute for religious belief, for example, offers one way of softening the talk of salvation, locating it within a more familiar discourse which, initially at least, appears more inclusive. Alternatively, we might speak of ‘saving’ in the sense of ‘remembering’: a commitment to the past is a familiar feature of a range of criticism, from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) to the historical reading of literature that dominates so much recent scholarship. The problem with remembrance, however, is that it is not the only purpose of literary criticism. We expect scholarship to be oriented to the future as much as it is to the past. Aware that the choice between the unknown and the known is a binary that can be deconstructed, Jacques Derrida plays with the word ‘save’ in his essay on negative theology, ‘Sauf le Nom’ (1993), neither mechanically repeating the theological tradition nor dismissing it altogether.1 Critics remain split over what to make of Derrida’s relationship to religion, but their interpretative options are less polarized than some commentators suggest. As Arthur Bradley explains: ‘Derrida’s attempt to “save” negative theology is neither the theological recuperation of an unlikely born-again Christian, nor a secular appropriation or demolition job on the via negativa by a polemical atheist or nihilist but an attempt to repeat it differently.’2 Like philosophy, we argue, literary studies too might free itself from a tendency to exhume the

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text for meaning by using religious ideas to enable a different kind of thinking. With Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman is a member of the Yale School of Deconstruction who finds ways of repeating salvation differently. Although Hartman insists in his recent intellectual memoir that he ‘was never a boa-deconstructor’, his admiration for Derrida is evident throughout Saving the Text (1981), a textual commentary on Derrida’s Glas (1974).3 Hartman’s book is more than a repetition-with-difference of Derrida’s creative reading of Hegel and Genet, however: Saving the Text explores the nature of commentary and asks vital questions about what it is that we do as literary critics. This essay maintains that we think Hartman has a great deal to offer the current generation of literary scholars and we return to his work throughout, while at the same time avoiding the temptation to turn Hartman into some sort of critical Messiah. Indeed, Hartman warns against messianic answers in the opening pages of Saving the Text: ‘By calling this book Saving the Text I do not imply a religious effort in the ordinary sense: the allusion is to the well-known concept of ‘saving the appearances’ (sozein ta phainomena), and my title suggests that we are still endeavouring to convert thinking to the fact that texts exist.’4 Religious salvation, Hartman seems to suggest, is not something that need worry those who write about the nature of literary criticism. But is this what Hartman is really saying? On closer reading, the religious meanings pour out of the pages of Hartman’s work, saving his work from the confines of a contained secularity. To read him this way is not to read against the grain, for perhaps more than any other critic we can think of, Hartman writes with an attentiveness to the verbal echoes of his linguistic choices. What remains, for Hartman, are words with a religious remnant, even though he is fond of insisting that god-talk is better suited to the liberal arts than it is to dogmatic theology. The religious disclaimer that accompanies Hartman’s commentary on his title turns out to be less secular than one might initially think: the verb ‘imply’ opts for a lack of certitude; the reference to the ‘ordinary sense’ of ‘religious effort’ confirms the queer impossibilities that John Schad has encouraged us to associate with the religious imagination; and the mention of conversion defies an entrenched secular determination of the sentence.5 Religious traces are ever-present in Hartman’s work, and his interest in theo-poetics is a useful starting point for our discussion here. Before saying anything more about the ways in which religion might point to a form of salvation for literary criticism, we want to say something about what is wrong with the discipline of literary criticism. Our confessional turn needs some explanation given that the amount of criticism

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produced in recent years would seem to indicate health rather than sickness; indeed, confession may be ill suited to a body of work that has often benefited from the confusion over its identity. Yet literary critics have a long history of anxiety about what it is that they do (the root of the words ‘crisis’ and ‘criticism’ is the same), and this sometimes manifests itself in crises of literary or disciplinary faith. Such crises tend to be recurring, subjective and amorphous; we are well aware that mapping them onto a trajectory of the rise and fall of literary studies can be misleading. Instead of trying to represent accurately the historic concerns of literary critics, we will comment briefly on two areas of personal concern—the marginalization of the literary text and the decline of critical argument—before focussing on the ways in which the religious imagination might help save literary criticism. Expressing concern at the lack of attention given to the literary text may sound suspiciously like a rallying cry for formalism. The ascendency of cultural materialism in late-twentieth century criticism was always likely to result in a critical backlash, and books such as Isobel Armstrong’s The Radical Aesthetic (2000) have helped articulate a sense that formalism, or at least elements common to it, are due a critical revival. Surveying some of the most recent work in this area, Marjorie Levinson’s essay, ‘What is New Formalism?’ (2007), distinguishes between two trends: ‘About a quarter of the studies trace the discipline’s neglect of form to new historicism’s alleged denunciation of form as an ideological mystification. The remaining studies see the eclipse of form as an unfortunate by-product of the institutional authority enjoyed by the historical turn.’6 Levinson goes on to challenge the distinction between form and history, noting that a great deal of historical criticism is alert to formal matters, and insisting that form cannot be separated from history. The absence of a clear distinction between form and history has stopped us from using this terminology to convey our first point of concern, but the question of form is closely related to what we have already described as the marginalization of the literary text. In a number of circles, literature is now seen as just another cultural text. Why privilege the literary, the argument goes, if sermons, recipes and journalism are forms of cultural production that also tell us something about the period in question? For some, the aesthetic differences between, say, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) and nineteenth-century advertisements are merely the inventions of our own conservative assumptions, inventions that make no difference to our historical understanding. On our reading, however, aesthetics remains a legitimate and important area, even though it is a category shaped by other cultural forces and permeated by external


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interests. Although Levinson is not as quick as some historically inclined critics to jettison the distinctiveness of the literary text, her work nevertheless subordinates aesthetics to history. She critiques New Formalism for offering no new interpretative method, yet fails to acknowledge the normative status this accords to historical criticism—it is worth remembering that the New Historicism with which she is associated has also been charged with repeating the critical methodology of those who went before. We are not suggesting that the realm of aesthetics is the sole (or soul) work of literary criticism. We do think, however, that aesthetics is at the heart of literary criticism in a way that history is not. Unlike history, aesthetics helps critics see the literary text as distinct (though not discrete) from other cultural forms, and respecting this distinctiveness is more likely to mean that one keeps the literary text closely in view. This is not to demonize history or to try and exorcize it from the work of criticism—it is the dominance of history that is at fault rather than history per se. We respect that reading historically is a productive and beneficial activity; and yet still wish to argue that historical analysis is not a synonym for literary criticism. The latter yields a different type of reading than historical enquiry, one that, among other things, places greater emphasis on critical argument. While the formalist tradition is not immune to point-less discussions, historical enquiry is particularly susceptible to presenting material without significant interpretative comment. There are multiple reasons for this susceptibility: a postmodern cautiousness about the truth claims of narrative; a level of specialization that prefers minute details over general theses; a professional nervousness about committing oneself to anything too controversial; and the vestiges of an older belief that the objective neutrality of facts is the holy grail of the historian. But the drift of literary criticism into historical and cultural investigation has left some scholars as mere cultural tour guides, offering little more than passing comments on the historic oddities that surface in literary texts. Our own position is that philosophical and political argument is central to the work of the literary critic. Insisting on this does not mean that we are seeking to collapse the indeterminacy of the literary text or subject the imagination to extravagant claims and highly polemical readings; it simply means that we see one of the roles of the literary critic as saying something that might change the way other people think. Interjections into the nature of thought lead us into the realms of theology and philosophy. There is a danger that moving towards these disciplines will result in another variation on literature’s subordination to other subjects. Yet the distinctiveness of literature tends to be brought out

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by the disciplines of theology and philosophy instead of being suppressed by them. The power of words to formulate and embody the world of ideas enables the literary critic to say something that the theologian or philosopher might not, and the indeterminacy of the literary text offers an invaluable defence against the tendency of abstract philosophical reflection towards dogma and absolutism. With religion, literature makes space for feeling, emotion, and the communities of readers who experience life and thought in particular ways; with philosophy, literature shares a determination to question received wisdom and pursue new modes of thought. Of course, none of these disciplinary descriptions are rigid: literature, philosophy and religion coincide, conflict and converse at every turn, collectively forming a rich inter-disciplinary trinity that encourages us to explore the possibilities of theo-philosophical literary criticism. Such talk sounds grandiose, even idealistic, but the religious and literary imagination helps save our thinking from dangerous pretensions, bringing abstract vocabulary down to earth by insisting that words have flesh and an earthly history. In the final chapter of Saving the Text Hartman tells us that ‘words are always armed and capable of wounding’ and that, as a result, our transaction with others ‘consists of exchanging words for words as well as sounding out the words in words’.7 His own movements, here and elsewhere, between evocative close readings and the ideas of thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Buber, reveal the great potential of a theo-philosophical tradition of literary criticism. Freed from the oppressiveness of historical determination and the limitations of biographical study, theo-philosophical literary criticism has the ability to renew our reading; it points the way to saving literary criticism without claiming to know fully the hope that it professes.

II While the panoply of thinkers that turn up in Hartman’s writing signals the diverse and open-ended possibilities of theo-philosophical reading, the body of knowledge that he draws upon can, in the wrong hands, find itself resembling a lifeless corpse rather than a living corpus. Contemporary efforts to resurrect a theo-philosophical tradition of literary criticism have to allow for those who do not recognize the biblical, doctrinal and philosophical allusions seemingly familiar to scholars from Hartman’s generation, and reading within the religious and philosophical tradition should not be reduced to a fact-spotting game that one either wins or loses.


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Like any other sourcing of the past, religious and philosophical history brings with it real difficulties that can easily become real dangers: one must know what one is looking for to find the Calvinist underpinnings of John Donne’s writing or the Catholic leanings of Oscar Wilde’s. Although this kind of research can be valuable, and although it is an activity in which we have both individually engaged, there is something more vital to theophilosophical reading than the archaeological search for meaning. We are less concerned with the utilitarian meaning-making-machine historicism sometimes becomes, than with the less easily translatable experience of discerning a text. The word ‘discerning’ is used by the philosopher Teresa Brennan to mean ‘living attention’, a process of affective understanding that, she argues, enables the individual to detect the feelings of others and become aware of the way feelings move between people. She describes affects as radio waves or ‘pheromones’ that move from our bodies into the atmosphere to be absorbed by others; we are in turn infected by the affects others have transmitted.8 Yet the modern self—closed, bounded and anchored in the mind—is unable to receive or transmit emotion, and so becomes entirely reliant on the ego, focused so much on ‘its own ends and judgemental structure’ that it ‘cannot attend’ in a ‘receptive way’ to the body in which it lives. We thus defensively assess our world, our community and literary texts in terms of how they speak to our own egoic needs, rather than by sensing or attending to meaning. While the ego demands we identify with it over our feelings—reading a text, for example, to make it signify in a certain way regardless of what we might feel about it—the discerner overrules the ego to privilege deduction and explication, reading through the senses and learning to appreciate, in Christopher Smart’s words, a ‘language of flowers’ that has ‘great virtues for all the senses’.9 This is not an easy way of reading, and our discussion of ego might well invite the kind of response with which J. D. Salinger’s Zooey Glass confronts his religiously obsessed sister Franny towards the end of the novella Franny and Zooey (1961). Driven half-mad by Franny’s pious disgust for a pompous university professor, Zooey implores her to refrain from ‘screaming about egos in general’. He yells: ‘In my opinion, if you really want to know, half the nastiness in the world is stirred up by people who aren’t using their true egos. Take your Professor Tupper. From what you say about him, anyway, I’d lay almost any odds that this thing he’s using, the thing you think is his ego, isn’t his ego at all but some other, much dirtier, much less basic faculty. My God, you’ve been around schools long enough to know the score.’10 Certainly academic research has an egoic element, as does most literature worth reading, but our point here is to suggest that this element encourage

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the kind of self-reflection that prepares one to be open to all kinds of interpretation, even those which seem initially mistaken, in order to maintain a shared dialogue that is more exegetical than explanatory. A theophilosophical approach claims that the reader will learn something subjective through his or her repeated readings, but will not necessarily seek to rematerialize this as a master-narrative. As John Cox argues, new historicism in particular often lacks charity or hospitality in its assessment of texts, using them to uncover history and to create a space in which the critic might exhibit his or her interpretative power.11 We suggest that the text provides a space, not for egoic reading, but for shared and elicitive readings that are hospitable to one another rather than set apart by competition. The feelings one undergoes when reading may well be uncomfortable, distanciative and defamiliarizing, but they make sense through reciprocal discussion and individual reflection that ultimately attracts the reader back to the literary text rather than to an unknown and effectively private archive. Repeated reading, like Brennan’s idea of discerning the text, has a devotional quality, and like prayer, has the capacity to enable emotional transformation and actualization, connecting readers back with feelings now lost. As Frank Burch Brown argues: ‘when we love art, we focus on it attentively and aesthetically. That is to say, we attend closely to the look and sound and feel of things—the formal and expressive qualities of the medium—and to the imaginative weaving of stories that capture and enrapture selves and communities . . . What we relish (or not) in attending to art is an outgrowth and transformation of all that makes us human.’12 The literary text is not a ‘clothing’ for the meanings of critics, then, but an ‘incarnation’ of our thoughts: language, ‘if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve’.13 This well-known passage from Wordsworth’s Essays on Epitaphs lays bare the urgency of attending to words, a case his own poetry invites us to consider, as his narrators build in moment after moment of suspension, silence and hiatus in order that we reflect rather than hold forth. In ‘There was a Boy’ (1800), for example, Wordsworth’s boy of Winander hears more in the silence he meets while in the valley than he does in those sounds—the peals and halloos of the owls—that precede it: . . . And, when it chanced That pauses of deep silence mock’d his skill, Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung


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Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents, or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven receiv’d Into the bosom of the steady lake.14 The scene invites a theo-philosophical approach, in part because it addresses that moment of epiphany or awareness that results from the willingness to submit to uncertainty when faced with unexpected silence. As Wordsworth recalled to Thomas De Quincey, moments of prolonged discernment gather a kind of energy that propels sense experience ‘to the heart with a power not known under other circumstances’, inducing the individual to privilege feeling over a more clinical type of questioning.15 The act of reading too carries this force, but only when released from the dictate to find an answer: as the poem intimates, revelation comes like a slight almost undetectable shock that promotes a way of thinking capable of breaking through what is obvious, normal or reasonable. As Amos Wilder argues in his book on theo-poetics, interpretation freed from definite and measurable goals encourages an ‘openness to all dimensions of human need and all inherited wisdoms’, rendering reflection a politicized, as well as aesthetic, practice.16 For Wilder, this enables the ‘visionary capacity’ of all readers, one that he finds exemplified in the behaviour of the apostles. The ‘imaginative repertoire’ that compelled the apostles’ conduct, he states, was accessed not through some supernatural activity or mystical might but ‘because they were at home in the dreams and hungers, psychological and political, the mysteries and mythologies, of the Hellenistic world’.17 ‘There was a Boy’ ends with the narrator’s attempt to free himself from the strictures of limited meaning, and he ends the poem without declaring, or perhaps even deciding, whether the boy, now buried in the local churchyard, is a projection of an early self or a focus for the transformative work of mourning. What the reader is witness to, however, is the narrator’s summerevening visits to the grave, in which he stands ‘Mute’, a ‘full’ (or ‘long’ in later versions of the poem) ‘half-hour together’ creating a meditative pause in which to contemplate and reflect.18 This ‘long’ half hour, like the ‘full half hour’ in which the narrator of Wordsworth’s later poem, ‘To a Butterfly’ (1807) stands gazing at his garden, seems unbound by time or measure, privileging the subjective experience of the narrator over logical analysis.19 It is easy for materialist readings to miss the experience Wordsworth

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attempts to communicate, seemingly embarrassed by the emotive content of his work. Marjorie Levinson’s historicist attack on the poet’s reluctance to discuss the homeless population of Tintern in a poem about affective being is the most infamous example of this line of thought. While her reading has been contested by numerous readers, most notably Thomas McFarland, many critics still seem set on yoking the details of Wordsworth’s poetry to external anchors rather than getting inside of them to slowly look around.20 ‘The Solitary Reaper’ (1807), for example, may be neatly accounted for through various accounts of William and Dorothy’s trip to the Scottish Highlands, suggested, Wordsworth writes in a note to the poem, by a line in Thomas Wilkinson’s Tours to the British Mountains (1824): ‘Passed by a Female who was reaping alone, she sung in Erse Highland Gaelic as she bended over her sickle, the sweetest human voice I ever heard. Her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious long after they were heard no more.’21 Along with Dorothy’s Recollections of the tour, in which she remembers seeing lonely reapers busy with the autumn harvest, Wordsworth’s note sends many readers running to shelves of contemporary Scottish ballads in an attempt to source the reaper’s song and retrospectively inform the poet of ‘what she sings’.22 Yet as Wordsworth reminded his readers, his poetry only works when ‘comprehended as a study’, practising our senses to see and hear the world in a way that brings us both closer to it and those within it.23 The significance of Dorothy’s commentary on her trip to Scotland with her brother is not that it ‘explains’ the poem, but that it testifies to the communal experience the two of them shared. More important than her prose sketch of the reapers is her letter to the Wordsworths’ close friend, Margaret Beaumont, in which she describes hearing ‘The Solitary Reaper’ for the first time and finding herself mesmerized by the final couplet of the first stanza, ‘O listen! for the Vale profound / Is overflowing with the sound’: ‘There is something inexpressibly soothing to me in the sound of those two Lines’, Dorothy confessed, ‘I often catch myself repeating them in disconnection with any thought’.24 It is this disconnection from the egoic mind that enables Dorothy’s and our sensual engagement with literature. To teach us how to listen sensually, then, Wordsworth sets up the narrator of his poem as a model discerner, vigilantly engaged as he is in the song he hears: Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary Highland Lass! Reaping and singing by herself;


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Stop here, or gently pass! Alone she cuts, and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain; O listen! for the Vale profound Is overflowing with the sound.25 Evidently the poem does speak to the harsh social conditions in which a lone highland girl labours in a field, presumably because she has been forced to by the demands of penury, singing sorrowfully to herself to give her arduous work some rhythm. Yet the overflow of her song immerses the narrator, who, while blocked from its meaning by linguistic and vernacular boundaries, still hears the melody at an interior and emotional level. He is affectively hypnotized by the sub-textual rhythms of the song, or what J. H. Prynne calls its implied ‘word elements, as in whistling or humming or keening’.26 The narrator is not compelled to ‘Stop here’ and listen!’ because of the meaning of the girl’s songs, then, but by the somatic patterns her body and voice make, which Wordsworth connects both aurally—‘I saw her singing at her work, / And o’er the sickle bending’—and also rhythmically, her singing and bending melismatically tuning us into its emotive content.27 Wordsworth’s use of melisma also intimates the way the poem seeks to achieve a layering of aesthetic experiences, the girl’s melody carrying both the sound the narrator hears and the poem that emerges from his reaction to it.28 The overflow of the song rebounds in the poem’s repetitions (‘listen’, ‘heard’; ‘motionless’, ‘silence’, ‘still’; ‘solitary’, ‘single’, ‘by herself’, ‘alone’; ‘sorrow’, ‘loss’, ‘pain’), which grant the poem an echoing resonance that ripples outwards, only to be drawn back in by the contracted fourth line of each stanza. As Hartman notes, the poem contains a number of ‘“fluidifying” doublings’, such as ‘“Reaping and singing”, “cuts and binds”, “Things, and battles”, “Perhaps . . . or”’, that create a feeling of emotional release, both for the narrator and reader.29 Only a way of reading able to account for its experiential aspect can then account for much of its detail, notably Wordsworth’s sense that ‘the Maiden sang / As if her song could have no ending’.30 As Kerry McSweeny argues, it is as if the song becomes ‘detached from its temporal setting’ and becomes ‘part of psychic time for the listener’, its melody haunting the reader in the same way it remains within the narrator’s heart ‘Long after it was heard no more’.31 Prynne tells us that Wordsworth is not implying that he has memorized the girl’s melodic sequences but that he can remember the shape and feel of her song as if it had formed a ‘heart-memory’ inside him.32 Historicist readings tend to flounder before the effect created by the poem, claiming that Wordsworth

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fantasized the whole event, or that, even if he did see a singing highland girl, he is obliged to textually reproduce his feelings in limited linguistic terms. And yet the narrator makes clear that he is bound by something beyond mere semantics. He invites readers to find their own echoes in the poem, both through metre and rhyme, but also by biblical allusion. The overlay of Psalm 126.5 (‘they that sow in tears shall reap in joy’) on the ballad suggests that the girl’s song is redemptive, both for herself and for those who stop and think as they listen. Wordsworth makes sure that nothing intrudes into readers’ aural experience, so that no nightingales or cuckoos might curb the ‘thrilling’ impact of her voice. Temporarily spellbound, we are separated enough from our immediate environments to begin to imagine what we, like Wordsworth, cannot understand but readily feel as a form of habitual emotion embedded in the repeated lyric. We argue that the emotional immediacy of the reaper’s song remains with us as individuals, but also pushes us to articulate our particular experience of these reverberations with others. The poem engenders communal reflection, not just because Wordsworth’s voice harmonizes with the reaper but also because Dorothy is with him: their shared listening continually reincarnates the song and poem so that neither dissolves or dissipates. For modern readers, this means that interpretation can become a way of deepening personal understanding of the text, but also of deepening the self and the community in which the self functions.

III Describing the communal and dynamic experience that he sees at the heart of all interpretative acts, Hans-Georg Gadamer introduces a section of Truth and Method (1960) called ‘language as the medium of hermeneutic experience’ with the following observation: ‘the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation . . .’33 The analogy of a conversation that is not under the full control of an individual will offers a useful way of theorizing some of the ideas that we have been proposing in this essay, yet it is Gadamer’s positive reading of a ‘fall’ into conversation that prompts the note on which we wish to conclude. Although the Christian tradition has sometimes viewed the Fall as the moment at which the work of salvation begins, a large number of theologians have argued otherwise, insisting that, somehow or other, the saving work of God


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pre-exists the Fall and encompasses human participation in the created order rather than simply patching it up.34 Our purpose here is not to enter late into a long and involved theological debate. We are more interested in the thought that literary criticism might benefit from a fall, one that at once takes seriously the possibilities and problems of the ‘fallen letter’ while also displacing the idea that texts can be solved through individual, egoic interpretation.35 However much we might want to orientate this discussion towards the act of reading and the role that literary criticism plays in that reading, we are aware of the ways in which we keep falling back on theological ideas and vocabulary. Having already likened Brennan’s notion of ‘discerning’ reading to prayer, it seems appropriate to finish our proposal for a theophilosophical literary criticism by saying a little more about this analogy. In an essay on the possibility of experiencing God and the question of what such an experience might mean, Kevin Hart considers Simone Weil’s claim that ‘Attention, taken to its highest degree is the same thing as prayer . . . It presupposes faith and love’.36 As Hart argues, ‘attending’ to God is ‘a rich notion, if one will allow it to be so’.37 Something similar might be said about the attention that literary critics can pay to the text: reading involves an experiential dimension that touches the religious realm, challenging our individual egos and urging us to attend to the ‘other’ as we interpret what is meant. Our experience, or ‘counter-experience’ of meeting the ‘other’ through prayer, or through reading, involves an act of faith, one that, as the Reformers insisted, is central to the Christian understanding of salvation. The object or subject of prayer is, in Hart’s words, ‘a disturbance that opens our ways of being, doing, and thinking to quite other perspectives and that cannot be positively identified by introspection’.38 Although Hart’s words lead him to think of the divine love at the centre of the Christian concept of a God who is triune, they also have a more earthly resonance, one that brings us back to the idea of the human and his or her relationship with God. This relationship, creative, elaborative and idiosyncratic, is at once equivalent to art and prayer alike, genres that encourage careful thought that enables the self as it allows for reflection on the saving work of literary criticism.

Notes

Chapter 1 1

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3

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Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 247. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed., David McEllan (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1992), p. 2; John Schad, Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004), chapter 2. George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), p. 15. Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 124. Geoffrey Hartman, A Critic’s Journey, 1958–1998 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 264. ‘The U.S. Poet Laureate’, The West Wing: the Complete Series 3, DVD, created by Aaron Sorkin (Warner Home Video, 2004). Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 206. See Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Ibid., pp. 6–7. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p, 17. Ian McEwan, ‘Only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against their murderers’, The Guardian, 15 September 2001. Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), p. xii. Brian Horne, Imagining Evil (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1996), p. xii.

Chapter 2 1

2 3

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plates 12–13, in Blake’s Poetry and Designs, eds. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant (New York: Norton, 1979). Ibid., plate 12. William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, lines 109–10, in Blake’s Poetry and Designs.

Notes 4 5

6 7 8

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10 11 12 13

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15 16 17

18 19 20

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Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 11. See William Blake’s advice to the ‘Spectator’ in the Catalogue for 1810 of his pictures of the Last Judgement. ‘Additions to Blake’s Catalogue of Pictures etc’ in the Rossetti Manuscript (1810), in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), p. 560. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 12. Ibid., plate 12. For ‘sacred parody’ see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s Harlot: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), especially the ‘Preface’ and chapter 9 on Blake. William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, plate 2, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ibid., plate 3. Ibid., plate 3. Ibid., plate 4. William Blake, ‘All Religions are One’, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 1. William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, plate 96, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 14. Ibid., plate 14. William Blake, ‘A Vision of the Last Judgement’, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 563. Ibid., p. 560. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 11. Mark Rose, Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 125–7. Rose discusses there The Man in the High Castle, a counterfactual history novel of 1962. ‘Prier, c’est élaborer Dieu’. Quoted by Jane Harrison in her Ancient Art and Ritual (1913, repr. Bradford-On-Avon: Moonraker Press, 1978), p. 124. Dick talks of ‘trash in the gutter’, or trite channels (like alphabet soup, parodying the I Ching) by which a sentient universe is made to communicate with us. See Philip K. Dick, Vintage PKD (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), p. 160. Philip Dick, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, ed., Lawrence Sutin (Novato: Underwood-Miller, 1991). Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion (1981; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 238. Philip K. Dick, ‘The Ten Major Principles of Gnostic Revelation’, cited in Lawrence Sutin, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1995), p. 332. Woody Allen, ‘Without Feathers’, The Complete Prose of Woody Allen (London: Picador, 1992), p. 10. Philip K. Dick, The Golden Man (New York: Berkeley, 1980), Introduction. Philip K. Dick, ‘The Tagore Letter’, cited in Sutin, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, p. 314. What this image suggests is a merging of the doctrine of Atonement based on Christ’s sacrifice understood as at-onement with a sinful world, and that of the merciful Redemption of mankind. But whereas in Blake

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30

31

32

33 34

35

36 37

38

39 40

Notes

that shift is total, in Dick the demanding, avenging and wrathful aspect of Atonement remains latent. On the consistent theological and moral shift from Atonement to Redemption culminating in Smart and Blake, see Paulson, Hogarth’s Harlot: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England, ‘Preface’, pp. xvi–xvii, 2–4 and Chapter 9. Wallace Stevens, ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1980), p. 381. The diary Dick named ‘Exegesis’ was written over eight years, from 1974 to the year of his death in 1982. See, especially, Dick, In Pursuit of Valis. Strangely enough, Dick thinks of this child-god in Judaic terms. The Divine Invasion starts out with the child born again, the child Sophia. The resolution is not in terms of the occult; it’s not even in terms of Christianity. It’s resolved in terms of Judaism’. See John Boonstra, ‘Horselover Fat and The New Messiah’, Hartford Advocate, 22 April 1981, p. 24. Dick, ‘Exegesis’, In Pursuit of Valis, pp. 136–7. One of the most forceful descriptions of this (merciful) mimicry is a PKD letter on what he calls the Valis/Zebra Project, which resulted in his novel Valis (1981) just preceding The Divine Invasion and more valued by Dick. See the letter to Mark Hurst of 6 March 1977, in Dick, Vintage PKD, pp. 163–7. Ibid., p. 165. Dick’s main creative period happens to coincide with what is often called the Fourth Great Awakening in the United States, circa 1960–1980. ‘Studying our evolving reality, the Urgrund more and more adequately comprehends itself. It must allow the reality-projecting artifact to continue to project an evolving reality no matter how defective and malshaped that reality is (during its stages) until finally that reality is a correct analog, truly, of the Urgrund itself, at which point the disparity between the Urgrund and the projected reality is abolished—whereupon an astonishing event will occur: the artifact or demiurge will be destroyed and the Urgrund will assimilate the projected reality, transmuting it into something ontologically real—and also making the living creatures in it immortal. This moment could come at any time, this entrance of the Urgrund into our otherwise spurious projected framework’. From Sutin, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, p. 281. Dick, The Divine Invasion, p. 163. In ‘Exegesis’, In Pursuit of Valis, pp. 257–78. One of Dick’s novels is called Lies, Inc. (1964). Lawrence Sutin, in his ‘Preface’ to In Pursuit of Valis, describes Valis as ‘a brilliant novel on the impossible quest for mystical truth in the pop-trash wonderland of modern-day America’. Surely PKD owes a debt to Nathaniel West? (Blake’s juvenilia, ‘An Island in the Moon’, shows its ‘British’ affinity as a merciless farce or farrago, taking down philosophic pretensions with Swiftian gusto.) See ‘Exegesis’, In Pursuit of Valis, p. 201. Dick can take this ‘spirit’ very seriously, as in the following comment: ‘It hasn’t spoken a word to me since I wrote the sequel to VALIS, which is called The Divine Invasion . . . The voice that speaks to me, my priest I’m an Episcopalian—is identified as ruah, which is the word that appears in the Old Testament for the Spirit of God. It speaks in the feminine voice and tends to express statements regarding the Messianic expectation. It guided me for awhile. It has spoken to me sporadi-

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44 45 46

47

48

49

50

cally since I was in high school. But I haven’t heard from it since the sequel. I expect, though, that if a crisis arises it will say something again. It is very economical in what it says. It limits itself to a few very terse, succinct sentences. I only hear the voice of the spirit when I’m falling asleep or waking up. I have to be very receptive to hear it. It’s extremely faint. It sounds as though it’s coming from millions of miles away’. See John Boonstra, ‘Horselover Fat and The New Messiah’. Sutin, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, p. 94. Dick, The Divine Invasion, p. 11. See Rose, Alien Encounters, p. 193, on the ‘magical permeability of the boundary between the self and the other’, where the other is a strange and only quasihuman being. Dick, The Divine Invasion, p. 228. Ibid., p. 238. The phrase comes, as is well known, from St Paul. Dick’s essay ‘Cosmogony and Cosmology’ (1978) provides clues to the metaphysical backdrop of the novel. God Himself, it seems, needs a mirror to reflect back His creation and achieve a perfect all-knowing consciousness. See Sutin, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, pp. 281–313. On ‘play’, see also the author’s ‘In Memoriam’ note at the end of A Scanner Darkly (1977). Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (New York: Timescape Books, 1982), pp. 71–2. See ‘Man, Android, and Machine’ (1976) in Sutin, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, pp. 211–32. The German culture critic Günther Anders also wrote about this ‘obsolescence of the Human’, which comes about in good part because of a ‘Promethean shame’ that displaces human pride and befalls us on realizing the efficiency of the machines our own hands have manufactured. That efficiency, with the advent of weapons of mass destruction, psychotropic drugs and an increasingly robotic mentality, has become ominous—a self-inflicted offence against human dignity. The relation between mankind and its products turns ‘asynchronic’. The new Promethean shame and alienation are relevant to Dick’s fear-fantasies. Anders talks of ‘The metamorphosis of the soul in the Second Industrial Revolution’, anticipating by that designation the era of AI, electronics and limitless mimetic reproducibility. Even so, to some extent, as Blake already realized and Paul Celan emphasized, art remains a work of and in our hands, a ‘Handwerk’. See Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Munich: Beck, 1956). W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Collier Books, 1966), p. 24. He says even more explicitly and dubiously: ‘Muses resemble women who creep out at night and give themselves to unknown sailors and return to talk of Chinese porcelain . . . ’!

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Mary Webb, Gone to Earth (1917; repr. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), p. 13. Ibid., pp. 15, 63. Ibid., p. 68.

166 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

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16 17 18

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Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 254. Ibid., pp. 215–16 Ibid., p. 287. Ibid., p. 313. Ibid., p. 296. Ibid., p. 320. Geoffrey Hill, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 5. In For the Unfallen (London: André Deutsch, 1959) and later editions of his poetry, Hill dropped the subtitle of ‘Genesis’ and the reference to Blake in ‘Holy Thursday’. Hill did not reprint ‘To William Dunbar’ and ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’. See also Geoffrey Hill, Geoffrey Hill (Oxford: Fantasy Press, 1952). See, for example, Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), essays 14, 25, 26. Geoffrey Hill, ‘The Poetry of Allen Tate’, Geste 3.3 (1958), p. 11. See Geoffrey Hill, ‘Richard Eberhart’, The Isis, 25 November 1953, p. 31. Allen Tate, ‘The Man of Letters in the Modern World’, The Man of Letters in the Modern World: Selected Essays: 1928–1955 (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), p. 20, cited in Hill, ‘The Poetry of Allen Tate’, p. 8. Hill, Geoffrey Hill, p. 4. See also Saint Basil of Caeserea, Exegetic Homilies, trans. Agnes Clare Way, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 46 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963); Saint Ambrose, Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, trans. John J. Savage, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 42 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1961); and Saint Bonaventure, Collations on the Six Days, in The Works of Bonaventure: Cardinal, Seraphic Doctor, and Saint (Paterson: St Anthony Guild, 1970), V. In choosing, for convenience, to call the speaker ‘Hill’ one should be aware that the ‘I’ of the early poems is not encumbered with personal details. A remark from one of Hill’s early pieces of criticism is worth quoting: ‘When a writer seeks to create a work of art he must, indeed, have modesty and “keep himself in the background”. That is the true modesty of the artist. . . ’ Geoffrey Hill, ‘A Writer’s Craft’, The Isis, 17 February 1954, p. 14. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2005), p. 32. See Rudolf Bultmann, The New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 1–43. The details of the new division between Course I, II, and III may be found in the Handbook to the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), p. 157. See John Haffenden, William Empson: Against the Christians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chapter 14. William Empson, ‘Letter To Frank McMahon’, Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 571. Empson’s letter is dated 21 August 1973. His fury with Neo-Christianity reached a height in his memorable Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961). However, also see ‘Literary Criticism and the Christian Revival’ (1966) in Argufying: Essays on

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Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (London: The Hogarth Press, 1988), pp. 632–7. See Empson, ‘The Satisfaction of the Father’ (c. 1972) in Argufying, p. 622. Tertullian uses the word satisfacere but not in the sense of ‘vicarious sacrifice’. See Robert Roberts, The Theology of Tertullian (London: Epworth Press, 1924), p. 180. Tertullian evokes the fires of hell in his Apology, bound with De Spectaculis, trans. T. R. Glover, and Minucius Felix, Octavius, trans. W. C. A. Kerr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), XLVIII, pp. 13–15. See Martin Luther, ‘Lectures on Galatians’, Luther’s Works, 55 vols, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Walter A. Hansen (St Louis: Concordia, 1963), vol. XXVI, p. 280; and John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), vol. I, Book II, chapter 16, section 1. As Empson indicates, his main source for his understanding of the Atonement is part of an article in The Catholic Encyclopedia. He seems not to have read the Fathers on the topic of the Atonement, and bases much of his idea of the Atonement on Milton’s sense of it. I should add that Empson was not an unreserved admirer of Hill’s poetry, which he felt, rightly, could be ‘artificial’ and could ‘harden into mere mannerism’. See Empson, ‘Letter To Christopher Ricks’, 30 June 1978, Selected Letters of William Empson, pp. 645–6. Similarly, Hill expresses reservations about Empson’s poetry in his review of the special number of The Review, devoted to Empson. See Hill, ‘The Dream of Reason’, Essays in Criticism, 14.1 (1964), pp. 91–101. See William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951). See Hill, ‘The Art of Poetry’, interview with Carl Phillips, The Paris Review 154 (2000), p. 281. See Hill’s remarks on the ‘uneasy thunder’ of the ‘Divine Voice’ in his review of Blake’s Jerusalem. Geoffrey Hill, The Isis, 4 March 1953, p. 22. Hill changed the line in his Collected Poems (London: Penguin, 1985) to read, ‘And yet the sky was riven’ (p. 17). Following this edition, William Logan bases his interpretation of ‘God’s Little Kingdom’ on ‘riven’ rather than ‘cloven’, and thereby misses part of the theological point of the poem. See Logan, ‘The Absolute Unreasonableness of Geoffrey Hill’, in James McCorkle, ed., Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), pp. 43–4. It should at least be mentioned that the goat can be valued affirmatively in the Christian tradition. Gregory of Nyssa observes, in his fifteenth homily on the Song of Songs: ‘A goat is honored because its thick coat provides an image of beauty for the bride. Another reason for praise is that a goat can pass over rocks with a sure foot, agilely turn on mountain peaks, courageously pass through difficult, rough places, and can go safely on the road to virtue’. Commentary on the Song of Songs, trans. Casimir McCambley (Brookline: Hellenic College Press, 1987), p. 269. The image of the cloven hoof, however, surely overrides this positive image of the goat. Shekalim, 13b. See Rabbi Isaac the Blind of Provence, ‘The Mystical Torah—Kabbalistic Creation’, in The Early Kabbalah, ed. Joseph Dan and trans. Ronald C. Kiener (New York: The Paulist Press, 1986), p. 74.

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See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Geoffrey Hill, ‘Letter from Oxford’, London Magazine, 1.4 (1954), p. 72. Anthony Thwaite calls Hill a ‘runic visionary’ in his essay ‘Geoffrey Hill’, The Isis, 18 November 1953, p. 17. Isaiah 41.16; Jeremiah 15.7. 2 Corinthians 12.4. Exodus 19.18. Exodus. 19.20. Exodus 33.23. Sotah 5a. Quoted from www.come-and-hear.com/sotah/sotah_5.html [accessed 8 September 2008]. See Midrash Tanhuma, trans. John T. Townsend (Hoboken: KTAV Publishing House, 1997), II, p. 108. Also see ‘Tractate Bahodesh’, Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, trans. and ed. Jacob Z. Lauterbach (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1933), II, p. 224. Midrash Tanhuma, p. 224. See Eugenio Montale, ‘Siria’, Collected Poems 1920–1954, trans. Jonathan Galassi (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 344. See John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Coim Luibheid and Norman Russell (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), and Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks: A Letter on the Contemplative Life and Twelve Manifestations , trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1978). It should be noted that Hill is not a Zarathustra, either: this prophet descends the mountain with his hard words, and does not fall from it. See Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 40. Wallace Stevens, ‘Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz’, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), p. 100. Ibid., p. 51. In ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’ Stevens is a visionary of a certain sort, although one would hesitate to generalize in all his poems, even in Harmonium, that he is a visionary. ‘The Snow Man’, to name just one lyric, is as bleak a poem in terms of religious vision as one can imagine. T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 201. Also see Hill, ‘Dividing Legacies’, Collected Critical Writings, pp. 377–8. Hill, ‘The Bidden Guest’, For the Unfallen, p. 22. Hill, ‘Lachrimae’ Tenebrae (London: André Deutsch, 1978), pp. 16, 19. I discuss these matters in greater detail in my essay ‘Transcendence in Tears’. See Keith Putt, ed., Gazing Through a Prism Darkly (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

Chapter 4 1

I am very grateful to the careful editing of Mark Knight and Louise Lee, and for conversations on some of these matters with Shahidha Bari and Ortwin de Graef, neither of whom share my views.

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‘Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism’ (1796) in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 186–7. The editor comments that while ‘the manuscript is in Hegel’s handwriting, the ideas expressed in it are closer to those of Schelling and Hölderlin . . . It is most plausible to regard the fragment as the result of an exchange of ideas amongst the three friends’ (p. 185). Reprinted in Judy Giles and Tim Middleton, eds, Writing Englishness 1900–1950 (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 159. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 3. Timothy Clark The Poetics of Singularity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 9. Ibid., p. 17. Peter de Bolla, Art Matters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 31. See (in relation to literature specifically) Robert Eaglestone, ‘Critical knowledge, scientific knowledge and the truth of literature’ in The New Aestheticism, eds. John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 151–66. For a related discussion that focuses on historical works and testimony, see Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes in Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 16. J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art (London: Polity, 1992), p. 5. Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: the Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 76. Many scholars, for example, have traced religious themes in Heidegger’s work, with Jacques Derrida pointing out that Heidegger wrote ‘with and without the word “being”, a theology with and without God’. See Jacques Derrida, ‘How to avoid speaking: denials’, Psyche: Inventions of the Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 192. See also, Laurence Paul Hemming, Heidegger’s Atheism: the Refusal of a Theological Voice (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (London: Continuum, 2008), p. x. Ibid., p. x. Ibid, pp. x–xi. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., pp. 43–4. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 58. Cited in Williams, Dostoevsky, p. 58. Ibid., p 59.

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Ibid., p. 61. Bernard Stiegler Technics and Time, 1: the Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 206. See, for example, Grace Jantzen’s groundbreaking study, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). I am grateful to Danielle Sands for drawing this book to my attention. Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 140. Ibid., p. 140. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973) p. 375.

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This chapter was originally delivered as a paper at the conference Sacred Wor(l)ds: Religion, Literature and the Imagination, which was held at Roehampton University in 2007. I am very grateful to Mark Knight and Louise Lee, the conference organizers, for the invitation to speak. Jean-Luc Nancy, La Déclosion: Déconstruction du christianisme 1 (Paris: Editions de Galilée, 2005). All translations are mine. Ibid., p. 209. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 59–60, 220. The number of occasions where Derrida draws a parallel between Heidegger’s destruktion and Luther’s destructio are almost too numerous to mention. In many ways, of course, Derrida’s line of argument is merely the latest example of a theological contextualization of Heidegger that dates back to the work of Rudolf Bultmann. See the latter’s The New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). Derrida, On Touching, p. 60. Nancy, La Déclosion, pp. 208–9. Derrida, On Touching, p. 220. Ibid., p. 60. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 244. Derrida, On Touching, p. 345n26. Ibid., p. 160. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Le main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II)’ in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Editions de Galilée, 1987), pp. 46–7. See Derrida, On Touching, pp. 166–7. Ibid., p. 154. Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse (Paris: Minuit, 1992). Dominique Janicaud et al, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Paris: L’Eclat, 1991). Derrida, On Touching, p. 154.

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Ibid., p. 230. Ibid., pp. 345n26, 362n34. André Leroi-Gouhran, Le Geste et la parole: la mémoire et les rythmes (Paris: Albin Michel. 1964). Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 127. See, for example, W. C. McGrew, Chimpanzee Material Culture: Implications for Human Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) for a fascinating survey of the larger implications of primate tool use. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 218–19. See Jan Assman, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Régis Debray, God: An Itinerary, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Verso: 2004); Bernard Stiegler, ‘Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith’, trans. Richard Beardsworth, in Tom Conley, ed., Jacques Derrida and the Future of the Humanities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 238–70. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” within the Limits of Reason Alone’, trans. Samuel Weber, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds, Religion (London: Polity, 1998), pp. 1–78. See Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France (1978–1979) (Paris: Broché, 2004); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) and Jacques Derrida, Voyous: deux essays sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003). To be sure, Agamben would reject any charge of naturalism within bare life— bare life is precisely the politicization of natural life by sovereign power (Homo Sacer, p. 88)—but what is problematic here is, of course, the assumption that natural life is in itself a politics-free zone before the arrival of the sovereign, or, to put it another way, that there is such a thing as natural life in the first place. In one of the very few references to Agamben anywhere in his work, Derrida argues that the opposition between zo¾ and bios that operationalizes Agamben’s theory of biopolitics represents a deeply reductive reading of the Aristotelian concept of life (Voyous, p. 46). See Arthur Bradley, ‘Derrida’s god: A Genealogy of the Theological Turn’, Paragraph, 29.3 (2006), pp. 21–42, for a first tentative attempt to address this question. Derrida, On Touching, p. 262.

Chapter 6 1

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Nicholas Bentley, ed., Russell’s Dispatches from the Crimea (London: Andre Deutsch, 1966), pp. 127–8. For an account of Tennyson’s reaction, see Christopher Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longman, 1969), p. 1034. John Leech, ‘Enthusiasm of Paterfamilias on Reading the Report of the Grand Charge of the British Calvary on the 25th’, Punch 27 (1854): 213.

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Russell was certainly not the only war correspondent at the Crimean, as Phillip Knightley points out in The First Casualty: the War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam (London: Deutsch, 1975), pp. 1–17. Stefanie Markovits, ‘Rushing Into Print: “Participatory Journalism” During the Crimean War’, Victorian Studies vol. 50, no 4 (Summer, 2008), p. 562. Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000), p. 33. Cited in J. A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (University of London: The Athlone Press, 1976), pp. 117–18. Bentley, Russell’s Dispatches, p. 86. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 81. Esther Milne, ‘Email and Epistolary Technologies: Presence, Intimacy and Disembodiment’, Fibreculture 2 (2003) at www.journal.fibreculture.org/issue2/ issue2_milne.html [accessed January 2009]. This was particularly encouraged by the liberal-minded editor of The Times, John Delane, who edited the paper during 1841–1877. Bentley, Russell’s Dispatches, pp. 90–1. Ibid., p. 86. Ernest Hemingway, ‘Voyage to Victory’ in William White, ed., By-Line: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades (London: Grafton Books, 1968), p. 363. See also Matthew Rubery, ‘Joseph Conrad’s “Wild Story of a Journalist”’ in ELH vol. 71 no. 3 (2004), pp. 751–74. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 35–6. Olive Anderson, ‘The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain’, English Historical Review, vol. 86 no. 338 (1971), p. 40. See Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers, pp.117–32. J. M. I. Klaver suggests that Kingsley had actually been planning the novel since 1853: see The Apostle of the Flesh A Critical Life of Charles Kingsley (Leiden: Brill, 2006), p. 370. Charles Kingsley, Charles Kingsley His Letters & Memories of His Life Edited By His Wife (London: Henry S. King, 1877), vol. 1, p. 433. Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk (New York: Mason/Charter, 1975), p. 117. Kingsley, Charles Kingsley His Letters & Memories of His Life, vol. 1, p. 226. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 227. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 439. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 433. Cited in Knightley, The First Casualty, p. 4. Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago (London: Ward & Lock Ltd [n.d]), p. 476. Rubery, ‘Joseph Conrad’s “Wild Story of a Journalist”’, p. 752. Charles Kingsley, Yeast, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1994), p. 191. Kingsley, Charles Kingsley His Letters & Memories of His Life, vol. 1, p. 433. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (London: Modern Library Classics, 1979), p. 330.

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Kingsley, Charles Kingsley His Letters & Memories of His Life, vol. 1, p. 433. See Thomas Hughes, ‘A Prefatory Memoir’, in Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet An Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1876), p. 20. Kingsley, Charles Kingsley His Letters & Memories of His Life, vol. 1, p. 433. Kingsley, Two Years Ago, p. 459. Ibid., p. 433. Bennett wrote: ‘To the Reverend Charles Kingsley, these songs are dedicated in admiration of the beauty and power of the too few lyrics with which he has enriched our literature’. June 1855. Cited in Robert B. Martin, The Dust of Combat: A Life of Charles Kingsley (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 173. Kingsley, Charles Kingsley His Letters & Memories of His Life, vol. 1, p. 434. Ibid., p. 434. A young Leo Tolstoy was one of the very few novelists in the Crimean and also G. A. Henty, who later became a writer of adventure stories. No canonical writer attempted a major work on the Crimean between 1854 and 1856, or indeed after. Bulwer Lytton the Younger, better known as Owen Meredith, brings his roller coaster novel Lucille (1860) to rest in the nursing tents of Inkerman. Meanwhile, a short story by Charlotte M. Yonge, called Leonard the Lionheart, first published in 1856, begins with a reference to Sebastopol. Interestingly, Yonge’s brother, whose regiment was sent to the Crimea, told her that many of the young officers had brought copies of her best-selling novel, The Heir of Radclyffe, with them. Other minor novels included Edward Bruce Hamley, Lady Lee’s Widowhood (1854); Captain Michael Rafter, The Rifleman; or the Adventures of Percy Blake (1855) and Captain Hawley Smart, Breezie Langton: A Story of Fifty-two to Fifty-five (1869). See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso Classics, 1983). See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Polity Press, 1993), pp. 64–71. ‘The Storyteller’ in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 93–4. Charles Kingsley, ‘Heroism’, in Health & Education (London: Macmillan & Co, 1882), p. 137. Cited in Caroline Cawthorn, ‘The Soldier as Hero: Images of the Military in the Novel 1815–1860’ (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Linacre College, Oxford University, 2006), p. 189. As Markovits details, the letter-culture that grew up in the newspapers (between soldiers and readers at home), aided by an increasingly literate population, combined to make it a ‘real’ public sphere, not just a public sphere by ‘appearance only’ as Jürgen Habermas has argued. See also Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 171. Markovits, ‘Rushing into Print’, p. 560. See Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir By His Son (London: Macmillan, 1897), pp. 386–7. Ibid., p. 386. Kingsley, Charles Kingsley His Letters & Memories of His Life, vol. 1, p. 434.

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Ibid., p. 434. Ibid., p. 439. George Pattison, Thinking about God in an Age of Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 34. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), See also Sam Halliday’s highly suggestive recent study, Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity (New York: Palgrave, 2007). Charles Kingsley, Brave Words for Brave Soldiers and Sailors (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855), p. 2. Ibid., p. 11. John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of The Idea of Communication (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 177. Kingsley, Charles Kingsley His Letters & Memories of His Life, vol. 1, p. 439. James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 366–7. John Durham Peters made this comment at the Media Matters: Friedrich Kittler and Technoculture Symposium at the Tate Modern, June 2008. C. Kegan Paul, Memories [1899] (Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1971), p. 162. In 1855 he wrote to Thomas Hughes: ‘There is a great deal of “personal” religion in the army . . . and personal religion may help men to endure . . . but the soldier wants more.’ Chitty, The Beast and the Monk, p. 300. Charles Kingsley, Alexandria and Her Schools: Four Lectures Delivered at the Philosophical Institution, Edinburgh (Cambridge: Macmillan and Co, 1854), p. xxiii. Cited in Charles E. Raven, Christian Socialism 1848–1854 (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 99.

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I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust, AHRC and Research Councils UK for their invaluable support at different stages through my long-simmering interest in Israel Zangwill. See Jonathan Sacks, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (London: Continuum, 2007), Chapter 3. Eugene C. Black describes Zangwill as ‘Anglo-Jewry’s leading litterateur’ and Edna Nahshon refers to him as ‘England’s pre-eminent Jewish writer’. See Eugene C. Black, ‘A Typological Study of English Zionists’, Jewish Social Studies 9.3 (2003), p. 24; Edna Nahshon, ed., From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), p. 1. Sacks, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society, p. 25. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 26; David Biale, ‘The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity’, in David Biale, Michael Galchinsky and Susannah Heshel, eds., Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 21–2.

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David Feldman. ‘Jews and the British Empire c. 1900’, History Workshop Journal 63 (2007), p. 81. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963), p. 290. Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), p. 6. Biale, ‘The Melting Pot and Beyond’, pp. 18–19. Nahshon, ed., From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays, p. 235. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot: Drama in Four Acts (1932; repr. North Stratford: Ayer Co. Pub., 2005), p. 185. Philip Gleason, ‘The Melting Pot: Symbol of Fusion or Confusion?’ American Quarterly 16.1 (Spring 1964), p. 35. Israel Zangwill, ‘America—“The Melting Pot”’, Chicago Inter Ocean, 6 December 1908, cited in Gleason, ‘The Melting Pot: Symbol of Fusion or Confusion?’, p. 25. Zangwill, The Melting Pot, p. 95. Ibid., p. 96. Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (London: Macmillan and Co, 1895; repr. Cambridge: Black Apollo Press), p. 20. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 167. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 173. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 79. Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto, p. 167. Ibid., p. 337. Ibid., p. 127. Zangwill, The Melting Pot, p. 128. Ibid., p. 129. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 141 John H. Dietrich, The melting pot; a plea for the unborn children of America. A sermon delivered in the St. Mark’s Memorial Reformed Church, Pittsburg MA, Sunday May 8, 1910 (Pittsburg: Published by members of the congregation, [1910]), p. 7. Ibid., pp. 5, 10. See, for example, Stuart Hall’s highly influential essay ‘New Ethnicities’, in J. Donald and A. Rattansi, eds., ‘Race’, Culture and Difference (London: Sage, 1992). Tariq Modood, ‘Anti-Essentialism, Multiculturalism and the “Recognition” of Religious Groups’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 6.4 (1998), p. 379. Nasar Meer, in his writing on Muslim British identity, undermines this dualistic understanding of identity through reference to Butler, but does so by questioning the involuntary nature of race, asserting that ‘race’ should be ‘understood as a social construction that nevertheless serves as a potential vehicle for subjective and attributed identifications’. See Nasar Meer, ‘The Politics of Voluntary and

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Involuntary Identities: Are Muslims in Britain an Ethnic, Racial or Religious Minority?’ Patterns of Prejudice 42.1 (2008), p. 62. Although Meer questions the involuntariness of religious identity, stating that ‘the element of choice is not a total one’ (p. 67), his emphasis (evident in his analysis of the ways in which the incitement to religious hatred is often racialized) is upon the limitations that external pressures place upon self-identification: ‘The identity we are assigned can be a powerful force in shaping our own self-concept. Accordingly, while our self-consciousness is subjective it does not free us from the impact of what others say and do’ (p. 67). Polly Toynbee, ‘My Right to Offend a Fool’, cited in Meer, ‘The Politics of voluntary and Involuntary Identities’, p. 67; Hansard (HC), col. 676, 21 June 2005, Meer, ‘The Politics of Voluntary and Involuntary Identities’, p. 67; Hansard (HC), col. 686, 21 June 2005, cited in Meer, ‘The Politics of Voluntary and Involuntary Identities’, p. 67. Zangwill, The Melting Pot, p. 31. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 96.

Chapter 8 1

Rather than encumbering the text with endnotes for every quotation used, I have left off all endnote indicators yet included, below, a detailed set of references, in the order that they appear in my text. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 255. Ibid., p. 61. West Herts and Watford Observer, 29 June 1951. West Herts and Watford Observer, 6 July 1951. Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edward Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979), p. 49. Ibid., p.48. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 254. Ibid., p. 12. West Herts and Watford Observer, 6 July 1951. West Herts and Watford Observer, 27 July 1951. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 199. Ibid., p.249. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 132. Rose McNamara-Wright, A Giant on their Doorstep (n.d), p. 11. Estate News, 1.2, August–September 1949, in Local Studies Archive, South Oxhey Library, South Oxhey. ‘By the end of 1958, altogether 1,831 tenants had left South Oxhey, that is some 30 per cent of all the tenants who been housed there since the establishment of the estate’, Margot Jeffreys, ‘Londoners in Hertfordshire: The South Oxhey Estate’, in Ruth Glass et al, London: Aspects of Change (London: Maggibbon and Kee, 1964), p. 234.

Notes

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Report of Hertfordshire County Council Education Committee, 1951, quoted in Lloyd Rodwin, The British New Towns Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 134. Estate News, 1.2, August–September, 1949. David Reidy, letter to the author, July 2008. McNamara-Wright, A Giant on the Doorstep, p. 12. On 13 January 1951 Mr. Leslie Earl Newell was fined £2 plus £1.1s as costs for committing damage to tree; Mr Newell claimed that his wife was ill and that they had run short of fuel, West Herts and Watford Observer, 23 February 1951. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960). H. F. Brotherstone and S. P. W. Chave with A. Clewyn-Davies, A. S. Hunter, D. A. Lindsay, A. Scott, C. B. Thomas and E. J. Trimmer, ‘General Practice on a New Housing Estate’, British Journal of Preventive and Social Medicine 10 (1956), pp. 200–7. Ibid., p. 202. Ann Cartwright, ‘The Families and Individuals Who Did Not Cooperate on a Sample Survey’, The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 37 (1959), pp. 347–68. I will confess that one or two of these afflictions are imported from other medical studies of the estate: ‘Personality disorders’ comes from F. M. Martin, J. H. F Brotherston and S. P. W. Chave, ‘Incidence of Neurosis on a New Housing Estate’, British Journal of Preventive and Social Medicine 11 (1957), p. 199; ‘Running ears’ comes from Ann Cartwright’s ‘Some Problems in the Collection and Analysis of Morbidity Data Obtained from Sample Surveys’, The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 37 (1959), p. 36. Benjamin, One Way Street, p. 90. Cartwright, ‘The Families . . .’. Benjamin, One Way Street, p. 61. Cartwright, ‘The Families . . .’, pp. 194, 348, 351, 362. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 84. Ibid., p. 247. Benjamin, One Way Street, p. 91. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 249. Mr Fred Angel lived at 250 Muirfield Road—see Kelly’s Directory of Watford, 1952. See Minutes of LCC Housing Committee, 1957 (LCC/CL/HSG/2/66), London Metropolitan Archives. West Herts and Watford Observer, 21 November 1952. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 249. See J. H. Forshaw and P. Abercombie, County of London Plan (London: Macmillan and Co., 1943). See Andrew Saint, ‘“Spread the People”: The LCC’s Dispersal Policy, 1889–1965’ in Andrew Saint, ed., Politics and the People of London (London: Hambledon Press, 1989); County of London Plan, p. 12. ‘London thought it spilled people; there is no spillage with God, he collects’— Rev Douglas W. Thompson, Minister of Carpenders Park and South Methodist Church, 1948–1953, quoted in The Golden Anniversary of Carpender’s Park and South Oxhey Methodist Church (2003), p. 3. West Herts and Watford Observer, 8 April 1949.

178

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Saint, p. 216; West Herts and Watford Observer, 20 June 1952; the Community Association was said to be ‘agitating for a clinic on the estate . . .’, in West Herts and Watford Observer, 23 September 1949. H. G. Maule, ‘Social and Psychological Aspects of Re-Housing’, The Advancement of Science XIII (1956), p. 452. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932–1940, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefebvre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 70. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 249. Frederick Lack, James Burnham and Robert Hooper, dirs, Came The Day, Three Rivers Museum of Local History. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), vol. 2.1, p. 310. The marching-band is, I believe, an American forces band, probably from the NATO Headquarters, which is located at nearby Northwood. Benjamin, One Way Street, p. 155. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 3, p. 25. Walter Ruttmann, dir., Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). Ruttman’s famous film was a model for a Walter Benjamin in his own attempt to represent the city of Berlin—see Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin (London: Reaktion, 2008), p. 28. The film was shown by the Watford Film Society in February 1951—see West Herts and Watford Observer, 16 February 1951. Benjamin, One Way Street, p. 89. The evangelist was called Graham Joyce and I must confess that the film was called ‘We Too Receive’—however, this film was followed up with an address entitled ‘The Four Horses of The Apocalypse . . . etc’; it was this address which was billed as ‘a delightful evening’s entertainment’—see West Herts and Watford Observer, 15 October 1948. The mute golfer was Mr Harry Tillett, 105 Muirfield Road. Benjamin, One Way Street, p.178. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4. p. 170. ‘And the sun stood still . . . until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies’ Joshua 10.12–13. Adorno and Benjamin Correspondence, p. 140. When Benjamin died as a refugee on the French–Spanish border in 1940 there was a mix-up that led to his death certificate bearing the name ‘Dr Benjamin Walter’—see Ingrid and Konrad Scheurman, For Walter Benjamin, trans. Timothy Nevill (Bonn: AsKI, 1993), pp. 266–8.

Chapter 9 1 2

Douglas Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 164. For a detailed overview of postmodern endings in relation to theology see, for example, Paul Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

Notes 3

4

5 6

7

8

9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

179

Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Fiction: Western Descent Narratives since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 1. Graham Holderness, ‘“The Undiscovered Country”: Philip Pullman and the “Land of the Dead”’, Literature and Theology 21.3 (2007): pp. 276–92. Holderness also acknowledges Millicent Lenz’s essay on Pullman that discerns a blend of Christian and Classical sources. See Millicent Lenz, ‘Philip Pullman’, in Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz, eds., Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 122–69. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London: Scholastic, 2001), p. 548. Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, eds., Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 307. Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2007), p. 6. Robert Hughes, Heaven and Hell in Western Art (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), p. 7. Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead, p. 60. Fiddes, The Promised End, p. 6. Wright, Surprised by Hope, p. 6. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1992), p. 377. Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (London: Picador, 1990), p. 242. Ibid., p. 246. Ibid., p. 244. Ibid., p. 236. Ibid., p. 309. Ibid., p. 125. Vanessa Guignery, The Fiction of Julian Barnes: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 62. Matthew Pateman, Julian Barnes (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2002), p. 45. Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, p. 29. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 301. Ibid., p. 302. Ibid., p. 294. Ibid., p. 295. Ibid., p. 302. Ibid., p. 301. Ibid., p. 306. Ibid., p. 309. Pateman, Julian Barnes, p. 47. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 47. Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, p. 309. Alister E. McGrath, A Brief History of Heaven (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) p. 165. Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, p. 309.

180 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59

60

61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74

Notes

Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones (London: Picador, 2003), p. 5. Ibid., p. 16. McGrath, A Brief History of Heaven, p. 42. Sebold, The Lovely Bones, p. 16. Ibid., p. 17. Isaiah 25.8. Sebold, The Lovely Bones, p. 19. Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 325. Ibid., p. 35. McDannell and Lang, Heaven: A History, p. 303. Sebold, The Lovely Bones, p. 100. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 83. McDannell and Lang, Heaven: A History, p. 303 Sebold, The Lovely Bones, p. 3. Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 29. Sebold, The Lovely Bones, p. 327. Ibid., p. 320. Ibid., p. 48. See Andrew Tate, ‘“Now—Here is My Secret”: Ritual and Epiphany in Douglas Coupland’s Fiction,’ Literature and Theology 16.3 (2002): pp. 326–38 for a further discussion of the motif of epiphany. I also discuss Coupland’s representation of apocalypse in Andrew Tate, Contemporary Fiction and Christianity (London: Continuum, 2008). Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (London: Abacus, 1992), p. 170. Andrew Tate, Douglas Coupland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 130–61. Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead, p. 164. Ibid., p. 164. Douglas Coupland, Life After God (London: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 97. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., p. 127. Mark Forshaw, ‘Douglas Coupland: In and Out of “Ironic Hell”’ Critical Survey 12. 3 (2000): pp. 39–54; Robert McGill, ‘The Sublime Simulacrum: Vancouver in Douglas Coupland’s Geography of Apocalypse’, Essays on Canadian Writing 70 (2000): pp. 252–76; Tate, Contemporary Fiction and Christianity. Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma (London: Flamingo, 1998), p. 230. Ibid., p. 237. (See also Acts 9.4–9.) Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma, p. 4. Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., p. 277. (See also Ezekiel 37.) Forshaw, ‘Douglas Coupland: In and Out of “Ironic Hell”’, pp. 39–54.

Notes 75 76 77 78 79

80

181

Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma, p. 271. Ibid., pp. 261, 270. Coupland, Life after God, p. 273. Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma, p. 279. Gerard Loughlin, ‘Living in Christ: Story, Resurrection and Salvation’, in Gavin D’Costa, ed., Resurrection Reconsidered (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1996), p. 118. Apologies to Hans-Robert Jauss.

Chapter 10 1

2

3

4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

I have treated The Vision of Sudden Death as part of The English Mail-Coach in this chapter though they are treated as discrete entities in Works. See R. Morrison’s editorial notes for more details. In Thomas De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey [The English Mail-Coach], ed. R. Morrison (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), pp. 402–03. Key critical works on the subject include J. H. Miller’s The Disappearance of God, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963); Vincent De Luca’s ‘Satanic Fall and Hebraic Exodus: An Interpretation of De Quincey’s “Revolt of the Tartars”’ Studies in Romanticism 8 (1969), pp. 95–108; ‘De Quincey’s Icons of Apocalypse: Some Romantic Analogues’ in R. L. Snyder, ed., Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), pp. 3–19; M. E. Holstein’s, ‘“An apocalypse of the world within”: Autobiographical exegesis in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822)’ Prose Studies 2.2 (1979), pp. 88–102; and C. J. Rzepka’s Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). Chapter 3 of Rzepka’s book—‘The Christology of the Confessions’ (pp. 67–102)—is essential reading for anyone interested in De Quincey’s biblical usages and major biblical tableaux. More recently, D. S. Roberts has considered ‘“Mix(ing) a Little with Alien Natures”: Biblical Orientalism in De Quincey’ in R. Morrison and D. S. Roberts, eds., Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 19–43. Thomas De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey [Suspiria de Profundis], ed. F. Burwick (London: Pickering and Chatto 2003), p. 138. Thomas De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey [Confessions of an English Opium-Eater], ed. G. Lindop (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), chapter 24. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p.178n. ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house . . . nor his ox, nor his ass’. Exodus 20.17. De Quincey, The English Mail Coach, p. 412. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 18. Ibid., p. 28n. Ibid., p. 66. Matthew 8.5–10. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, pp. 192–3. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 64.

182 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23 24 25

26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44

Notes

Ibid., pp. 58–9. Ibid., p. 41. The phrase from Psalms 68.13 is: ‘Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold’. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 56. Luke 16.24. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 65. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 51. John Milton, Paradise Lost, eds., Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2004), I.21; Genesis 1.2. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, eds., J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and S. C. Gill ( New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978), 1805, XIII, p. 69. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p. 175. Ibid., p. 176. ‘In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed’. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p. 176. The biblical allusion is: ‘And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest . . . And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink’. Acts 9.3–9. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 73. De Quincey, The English Mail-Coach, p. 442. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p. 186. Ibid., p. 185 De Quincey, Confessions, pp. 50–1. Revelation 21.4. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p. 142. Ibid., pp. 142–3. Ibid., pp. 139–40. I use ‘Thomas’ to refer to De Quincey when a child. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., p. 136ff. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., pp. 152–3. Ibid., p. 146. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. 1 Corinthians 15.42–4. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p. 155. Ibid., p. 141. Job 1.6.

Notes 45 46 47 48

49 50 51

52

53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71

183

Acts 2.2–4. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p. 144. Ibid., p. 140. ‘And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night’. Exodus 13.21. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p. 141. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., p. 145. The biblical reference is: ‘And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched’. Mark 9.43–4. J. Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); T. Jordan, De Quincey to Wordsworth: A Biography of a Relationship with the Letters of Thomas De Quincey to the Wordsworth Family (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), p. 265; De Quincey, Confessions, p. 22. See also, C. J. Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 139–49. De Quincey, Confessions, p. 26. See Luke 1 and 2. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p. 142; Luke 24.3 and passim. J. Hillis Miller has a rather more optimistic view of this topic. See The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p. 145. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 182. De Quincey, The English Mail-Coach, p. 442. Ibid., p. 441 and De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p. 147. De Quincey, The English Mail-Coach, p. 448. Ibid, p. 442. Ibid., p. 444. Ibid., p. 445. Suspiria de Profundis, pp. 140, 142. Ibid., p. 149. See, for example, F. C. Happold, Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology (London: Penguin, 1970); E. Underhill, Mysticism A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (London: Methuen and Co., 1911). De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p. 170.

Chapter 11 1

Judith Kovacs and Christopher Rowland, Revelation: the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

184 2

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5

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7 8

9 10 11 12

13

Notes

The great commentary in the EKK series is that by Ulrich Luz on the Gospel of Matthew. He reflects on the implications of his work on Matthew and the importance of Wirkungsgeschichte for biblical interpretation in his book Studies in Matthew, trans. Rosemary Selle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), ii.16–21 (pp. 63–5). Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 387. See Andrew Bradstock and Christopher Rowland, eds., Radical Christian Writings: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). See J. L. Houlden, ed., The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (London: SPCK, 1995). Ibid., pp. 50, 58, 73. See Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, English trans. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), p. 11. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 7. See John C. O’Neill, The Bible’s Authority (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991). Letter to Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799, in Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Letters of William Blake (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968), pp. 29–30. See Christopher Rowland, ‘Blake and the Bible: Biblical Exegesis in the Work of William Blake’, in John. M. Court, ed., Biblical Interpretation: The Meanings of Scripture—Past and Present (London: T&T Clark, 2004), pp. 168–84.

Chapter 12 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

See ‘Sauf le Nom (Post Scriptum)’ in Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. John P. Leavey Jr., ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Arthur Bradley, Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 11. Geoffrey Hartman, A Scholar’s Tale (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 73. Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. xv. John Schad, Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004). Marjorie Levinson, ‘What is New Formalism?’ PMLA 122.2 (March 2007), p. 559. Hartman, Saving the Text, pp. 123, 137. See also Geoffrey Hartman, Scars of the Spirit (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 68–71. Christopher Smart, in Karina Williamson, ed., The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, I: Jubilate Agno (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), section B, ll. 503, 498. In quoting Smart, we acknowledge our debt to Hartman’s reading of the poet. J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961; repr. London: Penguin, 1994), p. 109.

Notes 11

12

13

14

15

16

17 18 19

20

21 22

23 24

25 26

27 28

29

30 31

32 33

34

185

John D. Cox, ‘New Historicism’, in Clarence Walhout and Leland Ryken, eds., Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Appraisal (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 252–70. Frank Burch Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 96. William Wordsworth, Essays on Epitaphs, in W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington, eds., The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), vol. 2, p. 85. William Wordsworth, ‘There was a Boy, ye knew him well, ye cliffs’, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, in Two Volumes (1800), in Jared Curtis, ed., The Poems of William Wordsworth: Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell Wordsworth, 3 vols. (Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, 2009), vol. 1, p. 383. Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and Lake Poets (London: Penguin, 1970), pp. 160–1. Amos Niven Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), p. 23. Ibid., p. 26. Wordsworth, ‘There was a Boy’, lines 31–2. Wordsworth, ‘To a Butterfly’, line 1, in Poems in Two Volumes (1807), in Curtis, ed., Poems of William Wordsworth, vol. 1, p. 675. See Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Thomas McFarland, William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Thomas Wilkinson, Tours of the British Mountains (London. 1824), p. 12. William Wordsworth, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, line 17, in Poems in Two Volumes (1807), in Curtis, ed., Poems of William Wordsworth, vol. 1, p. 656. Owen and Worthington, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 3, p. 62. Ernest de Selincourt, ed., The Collected Letters of the Wordsworths (InteLex database, 2002), 29 November 1805. Wordsworth, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, lines 1–8. J. H. Prynne, Field Notes: ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and Others (Cambridge: Barque Press, 2007), pp. 12–13. Wordsworth, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, lines 27–28. The poem’s use of ‘reciprocal scansion’ to enable communication and dialogue is explored in Emma Mason and Rhian Williams, ‘Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth’s “There Was a Boy”’, Literature Compass, 6.2 (2009), 10.1111/ j.1741-4113.2008.00614.x, pp. 515–23. Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 9. Wordsworth, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, lines 25–6. Kerry McSweeny, ‘Performing “The Solitary Reaper” and “Tears, Idle Tears”’, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 38.2 (1996), pp. 281–302. Prynne, Field Notes: ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and Others, p. 95. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 385. See, for example, Walter Lowe, ‘Christ and Salvation’, in Kevin Vanhoozer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chapter 14.

186 35

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37 38

Notes

The quotation is taken from Valentine Cunningham in the context of his discussion of James Joyce. See Cunningham’s essay in Andrew Haas, David Jasper and Elisabeth Jay, eds., The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 519. Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 2 vols, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), cited in Kevin Hart, ‘The Experience of God’, in Kevin Hart and Barbara Wall, eds., The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 80. Hart, ‘The Experience of God’, p. 80. Ibid., p. 81.

Index

Adorno, Theodor 4, 37–9, 40, 44, 46 Agamben, Giorgio 55, 171n26 Allen, Woody 14 Anders, Günther 165n49 Anderson, Benedict 61 Anderson, Olive 62 Anselm, St 29 Armstrong, Isobel 152 Assman, Jan 55 Atonement 27–9, 132, 163n28, 167n28 Augustine, St 142, 145 Badiou, Alain 56 Barnes, Julian 6, 106 A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters 109–14, 122 Barrell, John 134 Barth, Karl 146–7 Benhabib, Selya 43 Benjamin, Walter 67–8, 87–105, 154, 178 Bennett, William Cox 66 Bernstein, Jay 39–40 Biale, David 76, 77 Bible, The 10, 31, 73, 123–39, 140–9 Genesis 10, 110–11, 114, 124, 126, 128, 139 Exodus 32, 124–5, 2 Samuel 126 2 Kings 133 Job 133 Psalms 126 Song of Songs 167n33 Isaiah 8, 9, 31, 114 Jeremiah 31 Ezekiel 8, 117, 121, 143, 180n73 Matthew 125, 184n2 Luke 126, 135

John 125–7 Acts 134, 180n70, 182n26 1 Corinthians 128, 131, 136 2 Corinthians 168n39 Ephesians 117 1 Peter 27 Revelation 85, 110–11, 114, 118, 129, 139, 143 Black, Eugene C. 174n3 Blackwell Bible Commentary Series 140–1 Blake, William 2, 8–12, 17, 21, 22, 25, 35, 138, 148–9 ‘A Vision of the Last Judgement’ 11–12 ‘All Religions are One’ 10 ‘Auguries of Innocence’ 8 The First Book of Urizen 9–10 Jerusalem 10, 20, 22 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 8, 9, 10–11, 12 ‘The Tyger’ 16 Blanchot, Maurice 44 Bloom, Harold 31 Book of Common Prayer 132 Bourdieu, Pierre 68, 81 Bowie, Andrew 39 Bradley, Arthur 4, 150, 171n27 Brennan, Teresa 155–6, 161 Brown, Frank Burch 156 Buber, Martin 154 Bultmann, Rudolf 27–8, 170n4 Butler, Judith 81, 175n35 Calvin, John 29, 145, 146 Campbell, Joseph 17 Carruthers, Jo 5 Chitty, Susan 63, 174n64

188

Index

Chrétien, Jean-Louis 49, 51 Clark, Timothy 38 Climacus, John 33 Coetzee, J. M. 44 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 9, 21, 29 Coupland, Douglas 117–22 Generation X 117–18 Girlfriend in a Coma 120–2 Hey Nostradamus! 118 JPod 118 Life After God 118–20, 122 Microserfs 118 Polaroids from the Dead 106, 108 Shampoo Planet 118 Cox, John 156 Creation 9–11, 13, 17–18, 26–7, 139 Crimean War 4, 57–74 Cunningham, Valentine 185n35

Empson, William 4, 29–30 Enlightenment 5, 47, 81–6, 144–5 eschatology 5, 12, 106–22

De Bolla, Peter 39 De Luca, Vincent 123 De Man, Paul 38 De Quincey, Thomas 2, 7, 123–39, 157 Confessions of an English Opium Eater 123–9, 134–5, 139 The English Mail-Coach 123, 125, 127, 128–9, 136–9 Suspiria de Profundis 123–39 Debray, Regis 55 deconstruction of Christianity 4, 47–56 Derrida, Jacques 4–5, 41, 47–56, 150–1 Dick, Philip K. 2–3, 5, 6, 11–22 The Divine Invasion 5, 13–20 163n24 A Scanner Darkly 20–1 The Transmigration of Timothy Archer 22 Valis 14 Dickens, Charles 65, 152 Dietrich, Rev John H. 83–4 Donne, John 29, 155 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 42–5

Habermas, Jurgen 173n47 Haffenden, John 165n24 Hall, Stuart 84 hand of God 4, 47–56 Harrison, Jane 163n21 Hart, Kevin 3–4, 161 Hartman, Geoffrey 2–3, 7, 151, 154, 159 heaven 2–3, 5–6, 12, 19, 30, 74, 85, 106–22, 129, 133, 139 Heidegger, Martin 39–41, 47–50, 56 hell 9–11, 29–30, 106–8, 111, 115, 126, 134 Hemingway, Ernest 60–1 Hill, Geoffrey 3–4, 23–36 ‘The Art of Poetry’ 167n31 ‘The Bidden Guest’ 35 ‘Genesis’ 26–30, 36 ‘God’s Little Mountain’ 24–36 ‘Letter from Oxford’ 31 Tenebrae 30, 35 Hoffman, E. T. A. 19 Holderness, Graham 106–7 Holstein, Michael 123 Hopkins, Robert 123 Horne, Brian 6 Houlden, J. L. 184n6

Eaglestone, Robert 4 Eagleton, Terry 37 Eliot, T. S. 21, 34, 35, 109, 150

Falconer, Rachel 106 Feldman, David 76 Fiddes, Paul 108, 178n2 Forshaw, Mark 121 Foucault, Michel 55 Franck, Didier 49, 50, 53 Freud, Sigmund 1–3, 13, 154 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 143, 154, 160 Glazer, Nathan 76 Gleason, Philip 77 Gnostic 9, 14, 17, 18, 20, 114 Gregory of Nyssa 167n33 Guignery, Vanessa 110

Index Hughes, Robert 108 Hughes, Thomas 66–7, 70, 174n63 Husserl, Edmund 49–52 Huxley, Aldous 43, 107 involutes 130–9 James, Henry 18 James, William 13 Jameson, Frederic 61 Janicaud, Dominique 51–2 Jantzen, Grace 170n28 Joachim of Fiore 143 Kabbalah 15, 17, 31 Kafka, Franz 15 Kant, Immanuel 39 Keats, John 20 Kegan Paul, Charles 63, 73 Kermode, Frank 43, 139 Kingsley, Charles 4–5, 57–74 Brave Words for Brave Soldiers and Sailors 70–2 Two Years Ago 57, 64, 66 Westward Ho! 62, 64–7, 70 Yeast 64 Klaver, J. M. I. 172n19 Knight, Mark 7 Knightley, Phillip 172n4 Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillippe 40 Lang, Bernhard 107–8, 115 Law 32–3, 80 Lee, Louise 4–5 Leroi-Gouhran, Andre 53–4 Levinas, Emmanuel 56 Levine, George 2 Levinson, Marjorie 152–3, 158 Logan, William 167n33 London County Council 89, 98 Loughlin, Gerard 122 Lowe, Walter 185n34 Lukacs, Georg 43 Luther, Martin 29, 48–9, 145 Luz, Ulrich 184n2 Lyotard, Jean-François 49

Markovits, Stefanie 59, 69 Marshall-Andrews, Bob 85 Marx, Karl 1–2, 47 Mason, Emma 7, 185n28 Maurice, F. D. 63–6 McDannell, Colleen 107–8, 115 McEwan, Ian 6 McFarland, Thomas 158 McGill, Robert 180n68 McGrath, Alister E. 112–13 McGrew, W. C. 171n22 McSweeny, Kerry 159 Meer, Nasar 84–5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 49–50, 52 Merrill, James 20 Miller, J. Hillis 123, 183n56 Milne, Esther 60 Milton, John 35, 98, 124, 148, 167n28 Paradise Lost 106, 124, 127–8 Modood, Tariq 84 Montale, Eugenio 33 Morris, William 113 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 76 Mt Sinai 3, 32–3 muscular Christianity 5, 57–74 Nahshon, Edna 76, 174n3 Nancy, Jean-Luc 47–50, 52 Nature 9, 11, 13, 24, 148 New Aestheticism 4, 37–46 New Formalism 152–3 Nietzsche, Friedrich 47, 168n47 Nussbaum, Martha 40 O’Neill, John C. 147 Paris, Michael 59 Pascal, Blaise 19, 27 Pateman, Matthew 110, 112 Pattison, George 174n54 Paul, St 32, 117, 121, 131–2, 165n46 Paulson, Ronald 163n8, 164n28 Peters, John Durham 73, 174n58 Plato 41, 148

189

190

Index

prophets 5, 8–9, 31–4, 65, 83, 108, 133, 141, 143 Pullman, Philip 106–7, 115 Prynne, J. H. 159 Raven, Charles E. 174n65 religious experience 1, 5–6, 12–15, 22, 29–30, 33, 41, 45–6, 121, 128, 161 Ricks, Christopher 167n29, 171n2 Roberts, Jonathan 7 Rose, Mark 12 Rowland, Christopher 7 Rushdie, Salman 109 Russell, William H. 58–62, 64, 68, Sacks, Jonathan 75–6 Salinger, J. D. 155 satire 9, 11 Schad, John 2, 5, 6, 151 science fiction 4, 12–15, 18–20 Sebold, Alice 6, 113–17 Secord, James A. 72–3 Smart, Christopher 21, 25, 155 164n28 Sterne, Jonathan 5 Stevens, Wallace 20, 34 ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’ 15 ‘Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz’ 33 ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’ 33–4 Stiegler, Bernard 4, 45, 49, 54, 55 Superman 20 Sutherland, J. A. 172n7, 172n19 Sutin, Lawrence 6, 164n38 synagogue 78–80, 82 Tate, Andrew 6 technology 4–6, 14, 19, 49, 54–6, 57, 71–3, 118, 121 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 58, 69–70 Tennyson, Hallam 69 Tertullian 29, 109

Thackeray, William M. 65 Tolkien, J. R. 28 Torah 17, 31 touch 4–5, 49–55, 60, 161 Toynbee, Polly 84–5 Trusler, John 148 Udelson, Joseph 76 visceral religion 5, 75–86 voices 1–4, 6, 7, 23–4, 52, 72–4, 119, 157–60 war see Crimean War Warhol, Andy 3, 8 Webb, Mary 23–6 Weil, Simone 161 West Wing, The 3 Wilde, Oscar 155 Wilder, Amos 157 Wilkinson, Thomas 158 Williams, Rhian 185n28 Williams, Rowan 4, 42–6 Wirkungsgeschichte 141–7 Wordsworth, William 138, 147, 157–60 Essays on Epitaphs 156 The Prelude 128 ‘The Solitary Reaper’ 158–60 ‘There was a Boy’ 156–7 ‘Tintern Abbey’ 38, 158, ‘To a Butterfly’ 157 Wright, Tom 107–8 Wuthnow, Robert 116 Yeats, W. B. 8, 12, 13, 20, 22 Zangwill, Israel 5, 75–86 Children of the Ghetto 75, 77–83 The Melting Pot 75–8, 82–6 Zizek, Slavoj 56

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