Biblical Intertextuality: Criticism, Commentary, and Interpretation

Session Coordinator: Ori Weisberg
Dept. of English, University of Michigan
1403 Packard #1, Ann Arbor, MI 48104
oweisber@umich.edu

Pastoral Fratricide: Bible and Biography in Milton’s Lycidas

Samuel Johnson’s in/famously claim with regard to Lycidas, that “[w]here there is leisure for fiction there is little grief,” is a signal moment in the long running debate over the sincerity of Milton’s head note: “In this Monody the Author bewails a learned Friend.” Yet fictions provide images that are instrumental in assimilating loss and facilitating memorial and the construction of memory. These fictive images, drawn together from a range of sources, resonate with each other, intensifying their multi-valence. Critics have focused on Milton’s employment of the classical shepherd of the pastoral tradition. I focus on the specter of biblical shepherds, which I contend are inseparable from their classical counterparts in this context. These other shepherds complicate an already complex central conceit of the pastoral – the kinship between the speaker and the object of his grief – accentuating aspects of rivalry and violence, for the first shepherd in the Bible is its first figure to die, and his only kin is his murderer Cain.

This paper references biographical scholarship that establishes the poem’s historical context and formal analyses that link its poetics to biblical literature. I then discuss qualities of kinship, rivalry, and violence evoked by attending to the biblical resonances. Ultimately, my contention is that the particular mix of classical and biblical conventions, read in the context of the historical-biographical conditions of the poem’s emergence, articulates a complex poetic grief not reducible to a simple question of sincerity. Finally, though Dr. Johnson connects fiction with leisure, I argue that Milton’s poem reveals the employment of fictions to be crucial, perhaps even necessary, to the assimilation and expression of loss.

Ori Weisberg
University of Michigan
oweisber@umich.edu

Justifying the Ways of Christ-as-Imagination to Man: Albion’s Doubled Psyche

William Blake held one of the most extreme beliefs that can be conceived about the nature of imagination and Being: the imagination is “the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus” ( Milton 3:3; Jerusalem 5:58; Laocoon). For Blake, whatever is, is the Imagination; and everything that is, is Christ: “Man is all Imagination. God is Man & exists in us & we in him” (On Berkeley)—and “Imagination is Eternity” (Ghost of Abel 1:3). This Christ-Imagination has suffered and died, however. Its destruction, indeed crucifixion, within Albion (Blake’s figure for both soul and nation) is at the very heart of Blake’s poetic argument. The poet rails against the imbalanced excesses of reason born from Newton and Locke: the Spectre of Urizen, with its imposition of the law, separates Albion from Imagination, provoking a warring psyche/nation as it divides them from Christ.

In this paper I examine the Hebrew Scriptures to question the doctrinal foundation for Blake’s “theology of imagination,” this most radical aspect of his mysticism and poetic project. Blake firmly held to the inspired and eternal value of Biblical Scripture: “The Hebrew Bible & the Gospel of Jesus are not Allegory, but Eternal Vision or Imagination of All that Exists” (Vision of the Last Judgment). Scholars have long debated whether Blake employed published Hebrew etymologies to develop the names of his Zoas and Emanations. Given Blake’s poetic allusions to Hebrew prophetic texts and his reported knowledge of the Hebrew language, we may assume that Blake had a least a layman’s awareness of how the term imagination was used in the King James Version and the term’s Hebrew etymologies. Sheila A. Spector in “Blake as an Eighteenth-Century Hebraist,” notes that: “Even though there was only one English-Hebrew lexicon available to him (David Levi’s Lingua Sacra) . . . it is possible to infer that Blake knew more Hebrew than he has been given credit for.”

What is most problematic about the use of imagination in the King James Bible is its context: almost without exception, every Hebrew term translated as imagination is found within a context of wickedness and evil, including yêtser, sh erîyrūwth, machăshâbâh, châshab, hâgâh and hâthath. There is no instance in which these terms are used to encourage or approve of a creative act or placed within the context of a blessing. They are never employed to describe a Divine gift or faculty, nor mentioned as an aspect of prophetic vision or voice—the only exceptions being David’s use of the term in supplications to his son Solomon and in prayers to the Lord.

That Scripture positions imagination solely as the vehicle for evil and mischief begs the question of how Blake identifies the imagination with Christ. The answer may be found in the root derivatives of these Hebrew terms—not those cited directly within the Scriptures but aspects shadowing the terms from behind or within: doubling the doctrine of imagination’s vanity, assault and evil—within the deeper Hebrew etymologies—are emanations of esteeming, fashioning and fabricating the artist’s frame, the visionary impulse. These include such acts as forming, molding and fashioning (yâtser); weaving, fabricating, valuing and forecasting (châshab); meditating, speaking and murmuring with pleasure (hâgâh); as well as conception, purpose and frame (yêtser); and device, texture and good intention (machăshâbâh or machăshebeth).Chârash, for example, is translated as imagination in Proverbs 12:20: “Deceit is in the heart of them that imagine evil.” Chârash, however, doubles as both imagine and engrave, or work in metals. From a primitive root meaning to scratch, chârash is also translated, by extention, plow (13 times) and plowman (twice)—both seminal terms within Blake’s Zoa-system (Urizen-as-plowman) and his own engraving practice. Whether Blake the metal engraver knew that imagination, engraving and plowman derived from the same Hebrew root is compelling in the extreme. This doubling of the Hebrew terms for imagination with other terms directly related to the physical and artistic activities of the Zoas and their Emanations occurs in many significant aspects of Albion’s psyche, including, for example, the weaving and looms (châshab) of Enitharmon. This paper surveys some of the most common occurences of these “doubled” Hebrew terms as they relate to Blake’s Zoas and Emanations.

Anna Stepanek
Wheaton College
Anna.Stepanek@wheaton.edu

Fiction and Prophecy in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: An Intertextual Jeremiad

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) is a book which makes continual use of pastiche and other forms of intertextuality to stage a multitude of conflicting discourses about America’s history and national identity. The novel establishes a polemic interchange between XVIIth, XVIIIth and XIXth-century American historians (such as Edward Johnson, Cotton Mather, Thomas Hutchinson, and George Bancroft), and between the discourse of fiction, that of history, and those of hagiography and prophecy, which permeate the Puritan histories of colonial New England, and constitute an underlying link with Bancroft’s vision of America’s “manifest destiny”. (This process has been in part discussed by critics like Michael Colacurcio, Sacvan Bercovitch and Lauren Berlant: my own analysis will partly reexamine their work.)

In the midst of these intertextual references, Scripture is a central presence, both indirectly, through the narrator’s representation of Puritan discourse, with its recurring Scriptural frame of reference, and more directly, in the form of specific allusions to the original text of the Bible. In both cases, the Biblical text becomes the key to an ironic subversion of the millenarian and typological language used by the Puritans to express their sense of collective identity (a language which reappears in Bancroft’s almost equally messianic vision of the American past—and future). Again, Hawthorne represents this language both directly, through the Puritan characters’ own speech, and figuratively, in the plot and characters of his story: the most obvious examples are the Biblical themes of adultery and its corollary, idolatry (embodied in the relationship between the Puritan congregation and their preacher). Both themes allow the author to embody in his fictional characters the back-sliding concealed behind his third-generation colonists’ rather complacent view of themselves. At the same time, certain key scenes in the novel (in particular the second scaffold scene, in chapter XII) can be read as quotations (in the case of chapter XII we can speak of an allegorical reenactment) of important eschatological passages in the prophetic books of the Old Testament, and in the Gospel of Matthew and the book of Revelation. In a way, Hawthorne’s narrator is adopting the Puritans’ own motto, Sola Scriptura, and going back to the original text to set himself up as a rival prophet and a more faithful Jeremiah than his fictional preacher (who is himself less a faithful depiction of the original Puritan preachers than a projection of Bancroftian optimism onto America’s past). Biblical intertextuality thus becomes in Hawthorne’s novel an instrument for representing and criticizing a complex process of identity-building, covering three centuries of American history; at the same time it contributes to reaffirm the dignity of the fiction-writer—identified as a legitimate heir of the Biblical prophets and Puritan preachers—and to support his/her claim to play a role in the formulation of an American identity.

Patricia Simonson
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
patr_simonson@yahoo.fr

Perfecting Flesh: St. Paul and Galway Kinnell on the Body in Glory and War

In his 1971 anti-war poem, “The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible,” the American poet, Galway Kinnell, offers a radical re-reading of St. Paul’s doctrine of the resurrection of the dead into glory. Quoting 1 Cor. 15.51, Kinnell links Paul’s notion of the “perfecting body” to the empty promises of postmodern consumerism, the profiteering attempts of “the advertising man/the anti-prostitute” to model flesh as the ever-needy site of corruption. Kinnell’s re-reading of Paul’s doctrine can be understood as a kind of materialist aesthetic of the body, that is, a way of construing human flesh that takes for granted the absence of the transcendental, the impossibility of the divine referent, the perfecting end. Where Paul argues for the reality of the transcendental after (and instead of) death, Kinnell takes for granted the primacy of impermanency and offers us a means of resisting the destruction of war despite the futility of our desire for permanency. The common site, the controlling cipher for both these texts is the image of the “perfecting body.” Paul perfects the body transcendentally, reaching for hope beyond death; Kinnell perfects it immanently, surrendering to consumption in death, at last.

Rev. David Philip N. Powell, O.P., Ph.D.
University of Houston
neripowell@yahoo.com