CGR Vol. 23, No. 3 (Fall 2005)

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles | Book Reviews

The Flooded Text: Finding Dry Land in The Wings of the Dove

Jacob Jost

And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove, which returned not unto him any more. – Genesis 8:12, KJV

The sense was constant for her that their relation might have been afloat, like some island of the south, in a great warm sea that represented, for every conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere, of general emotion, and the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. – The Wings of the Dove, 142

The Wings of the Dove, published in 1902, is one of Henry James’s last novels. In its ten “Books,” it tells the story of a wealthy but terminally ill American heiress, Milly Theale, who travels to Europe with a companion, Susan Stringham. In England they encounter a friend of Milly’s, a poor journalist named Merton Densher who is engaged to an intelligent woman named Kate Croy. Though its ending is typically Jamesian in its inconclusiveness, the novel is essentially about the attempt made by Merton, led on by Kate, to make advances to the wealthy Milly in order to get access to her money. Like all of James’s novels, it has attracted a great deal of critical attention. In this paper, I will attempt to draw out the implications of a single symbol that runs in various forms throughout the novel: the story of the Flood and Noah’s Ark.

The action takes place on the ark. For nearly all the novel, James restricts the cast of characters to Milly Theale, Susan Stringham, Maud Lowder, Kate Croy, Merton Densher, Sir Luke Strett, and Lord Mark. Though a man short, this number roughly tracks the original passenger list of Noah, Ham, Shem, Japeth, and their wives (Gen. 7:7).¹ When other characters appear, generally en masse, James tends to describe them in animal terms, as though they were below deck, as when he calls London socialites a “foolish flock” and a “huddled herd.” Over the course of the novel, the cramped vessel containing James’s small cast peregrinates through America, Switzerland, England, and Italy, floating over the canals of Venice and the parks of London. Only when Milly Theale, the dove, dies, and returns to her companions no more (“For a flight, I trust, to some happiness greater – !”), do Kate and Merton come to rest on the solid ground of Mt. Ararat, from whence they can take their solitary way, leaving the ark empty behind them.

“Attention of perusal”: James’s use of metaphor

James’s use of metaphor and allusion is an integral component of the often remarked-upon “complexity” of particularly his late style. Images, un- or halfarticulated symbols, and puns all reveal things in the late novels that his characters are unable or unwilling to say: the recurrent imagery of immersion and “touching bottom” in The Ambassadors anticipates the riverside location of Strether’s epiphanic sighting, just as the eponymous golden bowl symbolizes the rifts within the circle of relationships in James’s final novel. As Virginia Fowler says,

We are obliged to allow the repetition of images and metaphors in different contexts to create within our minds the associative meanings that both clarify and complicate the text for us (181).

One source of this complication is the number of metaphorical systems that James intertwines in his novels; as Fowler points out, Milly is variously interpreted as “American Girl, princess, dove” by the narrator and the characters around her. A reader explicating patterns in the novel derived from the third of these interpretations cannot expect complete metaphorical consistency with passages using the language, for example, of Milly as “princess.” Little is dovelike, though much is regal, about the Bronzino portrait said to resemble her that she sees in Book V. Likewise, chronological imperfections are unavoidable when intertextual correspondences are drawn from imagery and metaphor in addition to plot. The curse of Ham only descends long after Noah and his family has left the ark, but the abuse Merton heaps on Lord Mark through the final two books (“idiot of idiots”, “ass”, giver of a “dastardly stroke”, “scoundrel” etc.) anticipate it.

Biblical criticism offers a relevant precedent for this sort of interpretive multiplicity and achronicity: the fourfold hermeneutic first developed in the Middle Ages that reads sacred text literally, allegorically (typologically), tropologically (morally), and anagogically (eschatologically). Gabrielle Botta suggests that James’s Christological representation of Milly Theale is intended to make readers aware of this fourfold interpretive schema. Botta finds ample biographical and textual evidence to support the suggestion. Henry James, Sr. gave his children a liberal but extensive religious education, and James himself expressed great admiration for the technique of Hawthorne, for whose Puritan subjects fourfold interpretation remained a viable Biblical hermeneutic and who was capable of drawing on religious concepts for artistic purposes: "The sense of sin in Hawthorne’s mind [. . .] seems to exist there merely for an artistic or literary purpose" (quoted in Botta, 142).

The multiple interpretations James’s characters bring to bear on Milly represent the different kinds of Biblical hermeneutic, though Christian dogma is replaced by a pluralistic worldview in which different interpretations compete rather than form a harmonious whole (Botta, 146).

This analysis has two further implications for my argument. First, finding Biblical allegory in James’s works is not inconsistent with readings stressing the plurality and indeterminacy of his language: just the opposite. Second, interpretations seeing Milly as Noah’s dove, the dove of Psalm 55, the dove of the Holy Spirit, and as Christ himself, are not by their nature competitive. Each dove should be read as the type of the others; in Jamesian terms, there are multiple figures in the carpet.

At the same time Christian theologians were developing the technique of the fourfold hermeneutic to read their bi-testamental text, their Kabbalistic colleagues were creating their own commentary on the dove. I quote from the novel The Island of the Day Before by semioticist Umberto Eco:

Psalm 68 mentions the wings of a dove covered with silver and her feathers with yellow gold [. . .] why, in Proverbs, does a similar image recur when “a word fitly spoken” is likened to “apples of gold in settings of silver”? And why in the Song of Solomon, addressing the girl “who has doves’ eyes,” does the speaker say to her, “O my love, we will make thee circlets of gold with studs of silver”? . . . . The Jews commented that the gold here is scripture and the silver refers to the blank spaces between the letters and the words [. . .]. in every sentence of Scripture [. . .] there are two faces, the evident face and the hidden face, and the evident one is silver, but the hidden one is more precious because it is of gold [. . .] Having the eyes of a dove means not stopping at the literal meaning of the words but knowing how to penetrate their mystical sense. (353-54)

James clearly places such “golden meanings” in the omissions threatening to overwhelm what is actually said in his novel. The dove, in addition to all its other typological significances, symbolizes the quintessentially Jamesian search for hidden meaning itself.

It is necessary to make these points because The Wings of a Dove is not a crudely allegorical text. It has "multiplicity, contraries which are not reconciled, but challenge and supersede each other; different approaches are tried and abandoned"

and not all of it can be read in terms of the metaphors of ark and deluge (Bradbury, 73). In his preface to the novel, James offers a complex metaphor for reading his books:

Attention of perusal [. . .] is what I at every point [. . .] absolutely invoke and take for granted; . . . The enjoyment of a work of art, the acceptance of an irresistible illusion, constituting, to my sense, our highest experience of ‘luxury’, the luxury is not greatest, by my consequent measure, when the work asks for as little attention as possible. It is greatest [. . .] when we feel the surface, like the thick ice of the skater’s pond, bear without cracking the strongest pressure we throw on it. The sound of the crack one may recognize, but surely never to call it luxury.

A work of art thus supports us, as we try to break through it by means of close reading and discover what lies beneath the surface. The greater the work of art, however, the harder we must press or hammer in order to break it open. And the most luxurious works never crack at all. Like Joyce and Nabokov² after him, James subscribes to an aesthetic of making reading difficult, asking us to look for things that are not actually there. To mix metaphors, the ark is below the ice. Nevertheless, the plot and imagery of the Deluge are a powerful undercurrent running through the whole novel.

“Small floating island”: space in The Wings of the Dove

On the ark, space is at a premium. Wherever James’s characters travel, they almost always find themselves enclosed in rooms as if actually upon a ship, whether in Chirk St., Lancaster Gate, Brook St., the Palazzo Laporelli, or Densher’s “shabby but friendly” Venetian lodgings, where Kate finally “comes” to him.³ Admittedly, Milly and Merton occasionally walk the deck, and Merton and Kate even sit on deck-chairs in Kensington Gardens, but such breaths of fresh air are unusual. James is attuned to the different settings in which his characters operate and establishes the architectural qualities of their various rooms carefully. On the first page, for example, we sibilate our way through chez Croy, seeing the “shabby sofa” giving “the sense of the slippery and the sticky” and the “sallow prints on the walls.” When we meet Kate again at Lancaster Gate, she is sitting by the upstairs fire, where the sofa is small and silk-covered, excruciatingly aware of her aunt, a lioness below decks: "Sitting far downstairs Aunt Maud was yet a presence" (20-21)

When establishing Susan Stringham’s bona fides as an author of fiction, James, writing with unusual levity, seems to conceive of the writer’s art in terms of the choice of room in which the action of a story occurs: "She wrote short stories,⁴ and she fondly believed she had her ‘note’, the art of showing New England without showing it wholly in the kitchen" (76)

And when the reader learns second-hand that Milly dies when she learns that Merton and Kate are in love, it is in terms that place Milly in relation to her sick-room rather than the people in it: "She has turned her face to the wall" (410)

With the exception of when they take walks, even the characters’ travels are in enclosed spaces, rooms, cabins. Merton and Kate meet for the second time in a carriage of the underground railroad rather than on the street. Mrs. Lowder travels in a solid, enclosed carriage. Even the gondola carrying Sir Luke Strett to his waiting patient after Merton meets him at the Venice train station is equipped with a felze, which, Peter Brooks notes in the Oxford edition, is “the covered and curtained passenger’s compartment in a gondola.”

James thus keeps his characters cooped up, even as they move around the world. It is like they are in a ship, and both the dove and the lion are kept in their cages. One effect of this strategy is to heighten the sense of conscious artistry in the novel. James’s intentional use of “scene” and “picture” relate his fiction to theater and painting, two genres which must deal with spatial limitations; the former restricted to a stage and a set, the latter within its frames.⁵ Baggy monstrosities like War and Peace or The Newcomes can introduce vast spaces like the burning city of Moscow into the novel, but renouncing open space relates the novel to the theater, where vast spaces cannot be readily depicted, and directs attention to smaller actions (the pouring of tea, the receiving of an iced coffee, the contemplation of a window view) and dialogue, much like a modern chamber film.

Likewise, the limited number of “speaking parts” in The Wings of the Dove, fixed above at roughly eight, gives it a theatrical economy, as if James were putting it on as a play and could only afford a medium-sized cast.⁶ A stage is small, but a picture is even smaller; when Milly is compared in Book V to a Bronzino portrait, she is contained within a very narrow frame indeed. This frame expands a bit to encompass a bridegroom and guests at a soiree later that is compared to Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, but ultimately constricts again to an ark-like coffin when the heroine is "dead, dead, dead" (157)

James’s oeuvre is saturated with a strong concept of place. One of his favorite plot techniques is defining his characters in respect of their place of origin and then setting them in a foreign environment and watching them try to adjust.⁷ In The Wings of the Dove, the recurring chambers keep the characters close together; even when Milly is on the other side of the European continent from Merton, Kate, and the narrator in Book X, her presence is felt, almost suffocatingly. Just as Aunt Maud as a caged lion “remains a presence” even when in a different room of the house, Milly as a dead dove remains inescapably present even after she has died in a different room in a different house. Kate conceives of the dove’s wings as close, tangible, keeping Merton and herself framed and enclosed: "Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to that they reached. They cover us" (508)

This physical proximity, almost intimacy, was associated with the dove metaphor from Kate’s very first use of it at Lancaster Gate: "Poor Milly hereby enjoyed one of her views of how people, wincing oddly, were often touched by her. ‘Because you’re a dove.’ [Kate says.] With which she felt herself ever so delicately, so considerately, embraced" (201-02)

At the end, Kate’s “embrace” of Milly becomes Milly’s “cover”- ing of Kate and Merton. All James’s characters are in the same boat, and very close to each other indeed.

There are suggestions in the book’s initial phase that this physical proximity corresponds to genuine communication, that Kate and Merton, at least, can “think whatever they like” and furthermore “say it” (47). James’s ark is the only place where the couple can be real: "nothing could have served more to launch them [. . .] on their small floating island than such an assumption that they were only making believe everywhere else" (ibid.)

This ideal communication, qualified at the time as based on an assumption, quickly proves illusory. The silences, omissions, and taboos characterizing both the characters’ interaction with each other and James’s narrator’s treatment of the whole, threaten to overwhelm the information that is given. The closeness of space on James’s ark becomes an ironic commentary on the mental distances its passengers keep from each other.

“Forty days and forty nights”: time and waiting

The novel’s use of time, in contrast to its tactile, almost claustrophobic sense of space, shares an emphasis on abstract, ritualistic time quantities with the Biblical story. Merton spends the book’s entire duration waiting; he waits in the Gardens for Kate Croy, waits fifteen minutes in the drawing room before his interview with Mrs. Lowder, and, much later, can still be found waiting (three days, no less⁸) for news of Milly after Lord Mark’s visit, waiting for Sir Luke Strett at the railroad station,⁹ waiting a fortnight before calling on Kate and Mrs. Lowder, and then waiting two months for the New York lawyers’ letter containing Milly’s will and testament. All the time, Densher is waiting to marry his secret fiancée, a wait Kate extends into the eternal when first contracting herself: “‘I engage myself to you for ever’” implies with a sort of verbal irony that a wedding will never come (68). Merton’s passivity is like that of Noah, who, patiently awaiting the will of God, endures “forty days and forty nights” of rain, followed by “an hundred and fifty days” of flood, then another “forty days,” then “yet other seven days,” and “yet other seven days” (Gen. 7:12-8:12). The olive branch that Milly sends him and Kate burns, arrives on Christmas Eve and is thus integrated into the sacred calendar, equated with a gift from the Divine. In both stories time periods accumulate, prolonging a period of sequestration and self-denial.¹⁰

“The Lord shut him in”: Setting, Immurement, and Reification in James’s Ark As the hard rain begins to fall, Noah and his seven companions enter the ark and are sealed off from view: “and the Lord shut him in” (Gen. 7:16). The Biblical narrator honors the privacy of this divine sequestration, making no mention of Noah’s activities other than confirming his survival, until Noah opens “the window of the ark” after nearly a year (8:6). While the text describes the progress of the waters outside and the death of all living things on the earth, the interior of the ark remains a cipher. Until he curses Ham, Noah maintains a complete silence throughout the narrative.¹¹ This narrationby- omission will be familiar to any reader of James’s late style. In assuming a selective third-person voice, James describes the progress of the waters outside his character without choosing to empathically show the processes going on inside. Milly in particular is “sealed up” inside herself by the narrator, whose depiction of her, after her ominous interview with Lord Mark at the end of Book VII, becomes completely elliptical.¹² In setting up scenes, recording conversations, and indicating gesture, tone, and facial expression, James intentionally depicts all his characters, even those whose mental processes the narrator is ostensibly following, from the outside; as things, not people.

This reificatory process, of which the Lord’s immurement of Noah is a type, is a key component of James’s style in the novel.¹³ Both people and their mental abstractions are reduced metaphorically to concrete objects, often in complex relationships. The process begins in the Preface, where James makes his work a bridge whose stylistic piers are ephemeral but whose loadbearing capacity is real. The piers “were an illusion, for their necessary hour” but the span seems to be “a reality” (xxxix). William Stowe argues that these reificatory figures cannot ultimately be traced back to their abstract sources: "the current phase of Densher’s relationship with Aunt Maud [. . .] is characterized in such a contradictory fashion as to constitute on the literal level a moment of indecipherable non-meaning."

He goes on to identify some interpretive possibilities for this perplexing double figure, but concludes that James’s figures are "nodes of unreduced plurality – islands, perhaps, of deviant [Barthesian] bliss in a rising tide of [Barthesian] pleasure (197)."¹⁴

I would make them Milly’s “floating island[s],” sealed arks whose contents are not accessible but whose physical exteriors remain buoyant.¹⁵

Metaphors often equate an abstraction with a concrete object, but the complexity of James’s figurative language takes this process to new levels. A particularly beautiful example of metaphor as a reificatory tool occurs when Maud becomes a weaver and her plots a tapestry:

[Lord Mark] was personally the note of the blue – like a suspended skein of silk within reach of the broiderer’s hand. Aunt Maud’s free-moving shuttle took a length of him at rhythmic intervals; and one of the accessory truths that flickered across to Milly was that he ever so consentingly knew he was being worked in (152).

Aunt Maud, like the short-story writer Susan Stringham, creates a work of art, weaving her own text that is concrete rather than merely semiotic. The abstract “truth” of her process moves across the loom to Milly like a concrete shuttle. Maud’s marriage plans for Kate become both a physical object and a work of art, and the truths and perceptions forming it become the physical frame upon which it is woven.¹⁶

James’s use of setting provides another way to transform the abstract into the concrete, enclosing an idea within a physical ark. Michiel Hayns argues that the novel’s various settings together constitute a Saussurian langue, of which each individual setting is a parole (117). Thus Densher can read "the message of [Mrs. Lowder’s] massive florid furniture, the immense expression of her signs and symbols."

Signifiers become physical objects, allowing Mrs. Lowder to communicate with Densher even when she is not in the room, just as Milly’s indisposition and the three days of sepulchral silence will allow the “court” and “outer staircase” of her “piano nobile” to communicate a different message to him seven books later. Both women are immured within the enclosed spaces of their own respective houses.

Even James’s puns (and he indulges in punning to an unusual extent here) have this reificatory effect. A pun draws attention away from the referent, the physical object, by playing with relationships existing only on the level of the signifier. But James’s puns turn abstract concepts into physical objects, as when Susan Stringham’s connection to the Milly’s brilliance becomes a torch made of pitch: “her own light was too abjectly borrowed and that it was as a link alone, fortunately not missing, that she was valued” (188). Likewise, the communication when Merton and Kate “meet” becomes the former’s physical meat:"‘Meet, my dear man,’ she expressly echoed; ‘does it strike you that we get . . . so very much out of our meetings?’ ‘On the contrary – they’re starvation diet.’" (351).

Three pages later, after placing Kate and Merton “in the middle of the Piazza San Marco,” the narrator informs us that Milly’s absence “had made a mark, all round.” Milly’s absence creates the real presence of St. Mark’s Cathedral.

Perhaps the most radical of these Jamesian objectifications comes in the portrait scene. As Elissa Greenwald points out, Milly’s English adventure is highly romantic up to the day of the Matcham party. Through Milly’s eyes we see "bright lights, careful arrangement, and people who talk like characters in a play" (182-83).

But when Milly comes face to face with her Doppelgänger, she not only sees herself reduced to the physical object of a canvas, as ephemeral as Aunt Maud’s tapestry, she also sees through the opacity of James’s uncrackable ice into the real world. "The image resembles that of Minny Temple in James’s memory, as described in the Preface. Milly Theale confronts the very image of her creation [. . .] [and] her own mortality"(183).

In Biblical language, the temple is the human body, and the portrait Milly sees is a corpse – the ultimate reification of the body and her ineffable fate.¹⁷

Conclusion: the silent ark

The ark thus has multiple relevances to The Wings of the Dove. As a component of James’s use of the medieval fourfold hermeneutic, the ark relates to other Biblical tropes in the novel such as Milly’s Christological and pneumatological associations. This is an aspect of James’s general approach to metaphor, which creates multiple significations irreducible to a single metaphorical system.

The story of the Flood is enormous, absolute, one in which "all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered" and "every man: all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, and all that was in the dry land, died (Gen. 7:18, 21-22)."

Enormous lengths of time pass. But it is also a small, intimate story, with a small cast of characters contained in a single, rather snug setting. Throughout the novel James’s characters are allured by the absolute, by the infinite, by “everything.”¹⁸ But in James’s flood, everything is destroyed and “nothing” is left instead. The dry land at the end of the novel allows the characters to go their separate ways; Kate and Merton stop looking at each other, climb down from their ladders, and return to their respective gardens. Dry land allows no one to be fruitful and multiply; James’s melodramatic ending becomes ironic in addition to tragic. While we read this novel, the terrain of meaning is constantly shifting beneath us, as the flood of the narrative carries us along. When we find dry land, the ark breaks open, and The Wings of the Dove, abruptly over, becomes completely silent.

Bibliography

Auchard, John. Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and        Decadence. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1986.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford:        Basil Blackwell, 1990.
Botta, Gabriele. “Christussymbolik, Bibelexegese und die Kunst der        Interpretation – eine Interpretation von Milly Theale in Henry James’s        The Wings of the Dove nach der Methode des vierfachen        Schriftsinns.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 2        (1992):141-49.
Bradbury, Nicola. Henry James: The Later Novels. Oxford: OUP, 1979.
Cesario, Robert L. “The Story in It: The Wings of the Dove” in Modern        Critical Views: HenryJames. ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea        House Publishers, 1987.
Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York:        George Braziller, 1972.
Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before. Trans. William Weaver. New        York: Harcourt & Brace, 1994.
Epstein, Isidore, ed. The English Babylonian Talmud. Brooklyn, NY: 1990.
Fowler, Virginia C. “The Later Fiction.” in A Companion to Henry James        Studies. Ed. Daniel
Mark Fogel. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Greenwald, Elissa. “‘I and the Abyss’: Transcendental Romance in The        Wings of the Dove.” Studies in the Novel 18.2 (1986): 177-92.
Heyns, Michiel. “‘The Language of the House’ in The Wings of the Dove.”        Essays in Criticism 39.2 (1989): 116-36.
James, Henry. The Wings of the Dove. Ed. Peter Brooks. Oxford: OUP,        1984.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Rowe, John Carlos. “The Symbolization of Milly Theale: Henry James’s The        Wings of the Dove.” ELH 40.1(1973): 131-64.
Stowe, William. “James’s Elusive Wings” in The Cambridge Companion to        Henry James. Ed. Jonathan Freedman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,        1998. 187-203.

Notes

¹ Lionel Croy makes a tempting candidate for Ham, having committed some crime that makes him the accursed of the earth, but since neither Croy nor Mrs. Condrip appears explicitly on stage in the second volume they will be presumed, metaphorically at least, drowned, and Kate will be taken at her word when she broods about “the submersion of her father.” The silent Eugenio will make the eighth crew member, though he is also paired off like an animal, and Lord Mark, who gazes upon Kate and Merton’s nakedness, will be Ham instead of Lionel. That Maud, Kate and Milly underscore the Diluvian theme by becoming kids, lionesses, vultures, eagles, lions, and doves will not disqualify them from counting as people. Milly’s unfortunate family, dead and more or less unmourned, will also number among the drowned.

² The echo is presumably unintentional, but Nabokov also invokes the image of the reader throwing him- or herself against a translucent surface, in an ineffectual attempt to reach the meaning on the other side, in the opening couplet of Pale Fire: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/ By the false azure in the windowpane.”

³ In the Palazzo Laporelli, where the ark comes to rest and Milly is released, James is explicit: “She was in it, as in the ark of her deluge.” Though Milly will “ask nothing more than to sit tight in it and float on and on,” the reader may suspect that the ark is about to become a mountain-top. In the previous line Milly, with regard to her “place” had “a vision of clinging to it,” which recalls her vertigo in the final sentence of V, when “she continued to cling to the Rockies.” In X, Merton finds himself on "a small emergent rock in the waste of waters [. . .] clinging to it and to Susan Shepherd, figur[ing] himself hidden from view."He remains in the now stationary but still enclosing ark, waiting in vain for the dove’s return.

⁴ “She wrote short stories” tracks “Susan Shepherd Stringham,” which occurs in the previous sentence, in a positively Earwickerian way. For James, whose characters are each attempting to impose their own narrative on the others, you are what you write. The only paper mentioned by name in the novel is Mrs. Stringham’s precious Boston Transcript, but one can only hope that Merton Densher’s journalism is written for the Daily Mail.

⁵ James’s uses of “scene” and “picture” in his prefaces and other critical writings are fairly technical and have meanings for novelistic composition that are not intuitively related to their roles in the dramatic and visual arts. According to Robert L. Cesario, “picture appears to be analytic and contemplative narrative reasoning rather than dynamic presentation of acts” while the scenic mode, which he equates with drama, is “exclusively objective representation of appearances” (191).

⁶ As far as dramatic roles go, the Preface designates Mrs. Stringham as Milly’s “fairly choral Bostonian,” though she hardly meets the Sophoclean standard for either keeping the audience informed or warning the heroine of approaching danger. James’s use of a chorus reaches its apotheosis in The Golden Bowl.

⁷ James was interested by the effect of Europe on Americans all the way from Roderick Hudson to The Golden Bowl. But he also considers the effect of New England on Southerners in The Bostonians, while Susan Stringham, of Burlington, Vermont considers Boston “far too south” (75)!

⁸ Milly has been frequently identified as a Christological symbol; for John Carlos Rowe, “the incarnation, Passion, crucifixion, and ascent of Christ” constitute “the central myth of the novel” albeit one whose logocentricism James entirely undermines (134). The three days of Christ’s passion, obliquely mirrored in the three days of Merton’s waiting, are a particularly important component of this identification, because of the statement attributed to Jesus, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). The intense psychobiographical associations this metaphor would have held for James, who made Milly in the image of his beloved cousin Minny Temple, are obvious.

⁹ The doctor’s visit corresponds to the beginning of Gen. 8:2: “the fountains of the deep and the waters of heaven were stopped,” or, as James says, “The weather changed, the stubborn storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine [. . .] came into its own again” (428). As the water recedes, the ark comes to rest in 8:4: “And the ark rested in the seventh month [. . .] upon the mountains of Ararat.” James causes Merton to come to rest, if only temporarily, on the same page: “That was where the event had landed him – where no event in his life had landed him before.” Sir Luke Strett’s arrival really does make Merton’s boat stop rocking: “The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of a blest calm after a storm. He had been trying for weeks [. . .] to keep superlatively still [. . .] but he looked back on it now as the heat of fever” (435). Only once the rain stops and the ark comes to rest does Noah release the dove, just as Milly dies only after Merton becomes still.

¹⁰ Analogically, the forty days of the deluge anticipate the Israelites’ forty years in the desert and Jesus’ forty day fast in the wilderness; the latter, which included three satanic temptations, is clearly invoked in Book III when Milly “was looking down on the kingdoms of the earth” (89).

¹¹ The narrative ubiquity and thematic importance of silence in James’s novel are important critical commonplaces. For John Auchard silence and related phenomena constitute Milly’s, and the novel’s, “abyss” (102-04).

¹² Milly, as well as the other characters, becomes another ark: the Ark of the Covenant, into which no human can look. Again, the ark is a type for James’s hidden and inaccessible meanings.

¹³ There is another fascinating scriptural precedent for this Jamesian reification. When the authorities forbade the wearing of phylacteries, the prophet Elisha donned them anyway. “He was seen by a casdor (quæstor), and the latter pursued him. Seeing that he could not escape, Elisha took the phylacteries from his head and carried them in his hand. When questioned by the quæstor what he carried in his hand, he replied: ‘Wings of doves.’ When opening his hand, he really found doves’ wings.”  (Babylonian Talmud, 1:XIX). The dove’s wings symbolize the merely textual (the Torah written on Elisha’s phylacteries) becoming the physically real (doves’ wings), just as externalities replace dialogue and interior thought in the sequestration of James’s ark.

¹⁴ Roland Barthes considers the Noah story as a myth of semiotic absence: “if it is true that every narrative (every unveiling of the truth) is a staging of the (absent, hidden, or hypostatized) father – [this] would explain the solidarity of narrative forms, of family structures, and of prohibitions of nudity, all collected in our culture in the myth of Noah’s sons covering his nakedness.” (10)

¹⁵ James’s indecipherable figures, seen this way, come close to revealing Deleuzian “essences” – the “unity of an immaterial [referentless] sign and of an entirely spiritual meaning [. . .] revealed in the work of art” (40-41). These essences, which Jacques Deleuze identifies with “absolute and ultimate Difference” (in a Proustian, pre-Derridean sense), are themselves sealed arks, in that the novel’s characters cannot peer out: “In this regard, Proust is Lebnitzian: the essences are veritable monads [. . .] they have neither doors nor windows” (41-42).

¹⁶ The metaphor works well for two other reasons: (1) because Maud becomes a reversed Penelope, weaving a suitor rather than weaving to keep suitors at bay; (2) because she is described as “Britannia of the Market Place.” Britannia’s figure is derived from Athena, the master weaver, and here Maud is weaving an economic transaction: a good marriage for her handsome niece.

¹⁷ At the same time that Milly becomes a real corpse, the living Kate Croy is becoming a copy of a human being. Her expression of surprise when she finds Lord Mark in front of the portrait with Milly has a secondary meaning, uttered as it is in a room full of paintings: “‘You had noticed too?’ [. . .] ‘Then I’m not original’” (158).

¹⁸ “Everything” and “nothing” saturate the novel. People have everything, tell everything, see everything, and want everything, including wanting to escape everything. All the while, Densher’s statement in Book II that “Everything’s nothing” tends to apply throughout.

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles | Book Reviews

Columbus’s America and Emerson’s America

Peter Dula

The Conrad Grebel Review 23, no. 2 (Spring 2005)

The idea of two Americas, put forth in Ted Grimsrud’s essay, is one that I have thought about a great deal in the last several months in Iraq. Most of my friends here are French, Spanish, and Italian. They go to great lengths to stay as far away from Americans as possible. In fact, one of them has strict regulations about avoiding contact with Americans, and many more refuse any kind of formal partnerships with US organizations. But all of them make exceptions for the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). I have been to dozens of NGO parties where an MCC colleague and I were the only Americans. Often the conversation would turn to complaints about Americans (the way they look, dress, or talk, how much they eat, the way they vote) followed by apologies – ‘Oops, sorry, I keep forgetting you are one of them.’ At that point I would often note the irony that such conversations were taking place against the backdrop of a very loud stereo playing REM, Beck, Lou Reed, or even Sinatra, all quintessentially American artists.

When I talk about two Americas here I mean Empire America, an empire possible in part because there is no civic nation, and the Artists’ America, the wild riot of our novels, films, and music. I will call them by the names of their founders, Columbus’s America and Emerson’s America. I will get to something more like Grimsrud’s distinctions later.

Withdrawal has a long and noble lineage in the mythology of Emerson’s America. I don’t mean the American mythology of the high school history books, of the politicians’ America, or of John Rawls, but the very different American mythology as presented on film and in literature. Thoreau headed for the pond to escape the ‘quiet desperation’ of his neighbors in Concord. Huck Finn lights out for the territories once he realizes that Missouri is unlivable. Shane rides off into the darkness after his attempt to rejoin civilization is foiled. He is pushed out, reminded that there is nothing for him but withdrawal. Bogart’s Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, one expects, have merely stayed out.¹ But we do not blame them. Their America, which is called ‘California,’ unlike Shane’s, is uninhabitable. Philip Roth’s Zuckerman lives alone like a hermit, because, he says, it is the only way ‘to keep the shit at bay.’²

These are Emerson’s compatriots, inhabitants of the city of words he founded, which he called ‘this new yet unapproachable America.’³ Why ‘unapproachable’? Why are its inhabitants withdrawn, or withdrawn from? Most obviously because this America, the one founded not by Columbus but by Emerson, a land of myth and dream existing in, and beckoning from, Emerson’s prose, is not something you can simply approach. You have to be born into it, ‘born again’ as Emerson puts it. It is also unapproachable in that you cannot get nearer to it because it is right next to us. It is in our laps. For some reason we cannot take hold of it, perhaps because we are not trying hard enough. But that doesn’t seem to quite get at what Emerson thinks. He writes, ‘I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch the hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.’⁴ If you read closely, you hear the connection between those clutching fingers and the hand in our ‘unhandsome condition’ and you may begin to think, as Stanley Cavell does, that the objects are not slippery in themselves. Our clutching makes them slippery. It is a parable of philosophy’s violence.⁵

Emerson feels the burden of this unapproachability as acutely as any thinker I know. In ‘Self-Reliance’ he says of Americans, ‘Every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.’⁶ The ‘us’ is important. We are chagrined by each other. All of us harbor different visions of America, none of which can be adjudicated – a way of saying we are still not democrats. Furthermore, it confesses Emerson’s own weakness and complicity. ‘We know not where to begin to set them right’: Emerson offers no place where words can be safe – not in church, not among the proletariat, not in a Scottish fishing village. ‘Every word they say chagrins us’: whether it is the speech of our politicians or the advertisers, or the fact that millions of Americans will, on any birthday, wedding, or death, allow their sentiments to be expressed by Hallmark instead of by themselves.⁷

The problem is that every word chagrins us. Cavell suggests Emerson recalls here the opening of Aristotle’s Politics, where we are told it is language that fits us for political association.⁸ Emerson says the same thing, but in a minor key so it sounds like language fates us, condemns us, to political association, as if language is itself a prison, the ‘zoo of words’ to use Nabokov’s terrifying image. Emerson is saying that politics in this country called America chagrins him. Or, as Cavell puts it, ‘America has not yet been discovered.’ There is no civic nation, no Democracy Story.⁹

If every word chagrins us, this means there are no words left for Emerson that aren’t the same as the chagrining words. The words we share in common are all the words we’ve got.¹⁰ So the heroes of Emerson’s America perform an act of withdrawal. They deny their audience; they write for everyone and no one; they attempt to turn their stammering into irony, paradox, pun. That is, they write like Emerson, Nietzsche, or Wittgenstein. They write like the modernist artist painted and sculpted. They deny their audience in hopes of creating a new one.¹¹ Cavell wrote of modernist art, ‘The loss of a public is in fact the artist’s withdrawal from his public, as a consequence of his faithfulness to his art. The public is lost to art because they are readying themselves for war, for life by the gun. They are also lost because of art, because art maintains itself against their assaults, and because, almost against its will, it unsettles the illusions by means of which civilized people conduct themselves.’¹²

Why is this so hard for theology to understand? One way to approach it would be to wonder why theology is so preoccupied with the question of the ‘public’ and so resistant to the redefinitions that, say, John Howard Yoder tried to give to that term. Instead, I am asking what words we might substitute for ‘artist’ and ‘art’ in Cavell’s statement. Could we substitute ‘theologian’ for ‘artist’? Why not? Because the proper analogical terms are not theologian and church, but Christian and church? Could we honestly substitute ‘church’ for ‘art’? Are discussions like this one, and the many preceding it, just covers for the anxiety that even if we could withdraw we don’t deserve to? That we haven’t earned the right, or that we have lost the right, to withdraw? That we are part of the public, participants in Empire, just insofar as we are not yet democrats? What is democracy? Who is a democrat?

Democracy does not name a pre-designed framework of principles, rights, privileges, and institutions presented to the people as a gift from the elites, though some such framework will be indispensable. It names a space in which diverse individuals and groups come together in hopes of discovering how their interests are tangled up with each other’s interests. In doing so, they are forged into political beings. They may fear that in this conversation they might have to compromise, but they persist in hoping that they might be transformed. Democracy encourages the voicing of differences, and welcomes and demands dissent from the most unruly corners of the demos. But it is never difference for the sake of difference or unruliness for its own sake. Democracy is deliberation about how the goals of individuals and groups might be seen as interconnected, and about how those goals may not be able to be formulated, let alone achieved, in isolation. Democracy is deliberation about what constitutes the good and how to achieve it, not about how to achieve a good known in advance through strategies known in advance. Furthermore, that good is never allowed to become a ‘common good,’ if this means a good that becomes reified in such a way as to overrule emerging conflicts, one that is not allowed to be provisional but instead becomes a possession.

That many so-called democrats too often forget this is one reason Sheldon Wolin, who for many of us has come to define the political and to whom the previous paragraph is indebted, insists that democracy has become fugitive. Now that the spaces of democracy have been colonized by the internal workings of Empire, now that the civic nation has been swallowed up by the megastate – the Economic Polity, governmentality, the society of control, pick your description – the moments of democracy’s achievement are fleeting, episodic, and local. But for Wolin this is not a problem. He writes,

The true question is not whether democracy can govern in the traditional sense, but why it would want to. Governing means manning and accommodating to bureaucratized institutions that, ipso facto, are hierarchical in structure and elitist, permanent rather than fugitive – in short, anti-democratic. . . . Accordingly, small scale is the only scale commensurate with the kind and amount of power that democracy is capable of mobilizing, given the prevailing modes of economic organization. The power of a democratic politics lies in the multiplicity of modest sites dispersed among local governments and institutions under local control.’¹³

This is Wolin’s version of the Democracy Story and the Empire Story. I am largely persuaded by it, though I want to let Emerson guard against any attempt to read nostalgia into Wolin’s account of American history.

I am struck most by the differences between Wolin’s version and Grimsrud’s, yet I am open to the argument that the latter may have a similar meaning. Such an argument would have to explain the relative priority in Grimsrud’s account of democracy of things like ‘voting and office-holding’ or the repeated insistence on influencing the government. It would also have to explain the near-total lack of attention to the local and the small scale, and be clearer that the validity of democracy is not to be understood as dependent upon its influence over our government. Despite Grimsrud’s criticisms of the nation-state, his repeated references to ‘public policy’ suggest he is far less aware than Wolin that democracy is an end in itself that is likely to be squandered when it attempts to find a home in federal institutions. For Grimsrud, instead of containing hierarchical and elitist bureaucracies that are essentially anti-democratic, it is as if the Democracy Story includes a set of institutions that are essentially in good order but are being misused. This difference has to do with his failure to develop a critique of liberal democracy. As it is, his democracy can seem like it is just Rawls plus religious voices. That is a good thing, but the critique of Rawls offered by Stout (not to mention Wolin) goes much deeper and is much more unsettling. It reveals liberalism as ‘a program of social control.’¹⁴ For Grimsrud, however, America’s violence is almost exclusively identified with foreign policy. The bad America is the one of militarism and imperialism, not the corporatist state at home.

If Wolin is correct, what light does he throw on ‘let the church be the church’? What is the difference between that admonition and being part of the multiplicity of modest sites under local control? What if ‘let the church be the church’ meant being part of that multiplicity? It would not have to mean that Mennonites ‘have the responsibility to speak out openly and assertively in contributing to democracy by playing a role in the public conversation by which our society arrives at governmental policies.’ It would mean the careful cultivation of a radically democratic church life, what Yoder called ‘a freechurch ecclesiology,’ based on the vision of 1 Corinthians 12-14. It would strive to enact in its own life what has been made impossible by contemporary configurations of power. It would by no means rule out ‘openly and assertively . . . contributing to democracy by playing a role in the public conversation by which our society arrives at governmental policies,’ but doing so would not be seen as particularly democratic, let alone as a privileged mode of fulfilling the mandate to work for a more just society. Instead, it would focus on entering into alliances and coalitions with other outposts of the multiplicitous witness for something more humane than the administered society. Not, however, only to promote an agenda but to discern an agenda, and to be transformed in the process. This would not be done in addition to being the church. It would be done out of the recognition that being the church demands vulnerable encounters with others. Only then will our eyes be pried open to the sins we are too blind to notice without the prodding of outsiders, and only then will we have the opportunity for confession, hence forgiveness.

Notes

¹ Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 56.

²American Pastoral (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 64.

³ Emerson, ‘Experience,’ in Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 485.

⁴Ibid., 473.

⁵ For much of this paragraph, I am indebted to Cavell, ‘Finding as Founding,’ in This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989).

⁶Essays and Lectures, 264.

⁷ Cavell, The World Viewed, 245.

⁸Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 24.

⁹ At least not Grimsrud’s version of it. We will get to Sheldon Wolin’s version shortly.

¹⁰ To say that Emerson, and we, have no words but all those words we have in common, the current use of which chagrins us, is to deny that Emerson is the conventional individualist of liberal philosophy. For Emerson, the social is everywhere. As Cavell puts it, ‘In Emerson, as in Wittgenstein, I encounter the social in every utterance and in each silence. Sometimes this means that I find in myself nothing but social, dictated thoughts (the condition Emerson opposes as “conformity,” what philosophy has forever called the unexamined life); sometimes it means that I find in the social nothing but chaos’ (Cities of Words, 4).

¹¹ Ted Koontz beautifully modeled this kind of Emersonian self-reliance in his remarks to the Ethics War and Peace conference in Jerusalem, a story he tells in the essay Grimsrud is criticizing (see MQR 77.1 [2003]). Grimsrud likes this part of the essay because it is an example of ‘first language discourse’ but thinks Koontz should decline ever to use ‘secondlanguage discourse.’ But it is not clear if Grimsrud is saying, ‘always use the language of Christian faith and never the language of secular and pragmatic considerations,’ or that the distinction too easily breaks down, or that second language use is okay, just so long as it is Arundhati Roy, Jonathan Schell, and Noam Chomsky and not the ‘pragmatic’ discourse of the politicians. While preparing these remarks I spent a day in Washington, DC, meeting with Senate staffers and officials at the State Department and National Security Council to talk about Iraq. There I quite freely used the sort of ‘second language’ Koontz recommends. Not doing so was and is a bit hard for me to imagine. I wonder if first and sec ond languages is the best way to phrase the options. Wittgenstein pictures language as an old city. In that case there is only one language in question. What Koontz calls ‘first language’ we might then call the part of the city where we grew up. Wittgenstein’s image may make it easier to see how the lines between first and second languages are often rather difficult to discern.

¹²The World Viewed, 230.

¹³Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 602-03. See also the introduction to Wolin, The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 5: ‘Less than two hundred fifty years ago, “America” was primarily the name for diffused powers represented by thirteen provincial societies and their scattered towns, villages, and settlements. Now it signifies an imperial system struggling to preserve its global influence while simultaneously launching its power into outer space.’

¹⁴ Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 81.

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles | Book Reviews

Book Reviews

On the Cross: Devotional Poems

Paul Tiessen

The Conrad Grebel Review 23, no.3 (Fall 2005)

Dallas Wiebe. On the Cross: Devotional Poems. Line drawings by John Leon, based on crosses by Paul Friesen. DreamSeeker Books (Cascadia Publishing House), co-published with Herald Press, 2005.

Throughout his long career, Dallas Wiebe – poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist – has been both serious and playful, sacred and profane. He has enjoyed creating literary parodies; at the same time, he has produced work that is deeply moving and spiritually envigorating. His work manifests sometimes a tender lyricism, sometimes a delicate – or a rough – piety.

Born in Kansas in 1930, Wiebe graduated from Bethel College in 1954.
In 1960 he received a PhD in literature from the University of Michigan, and from 1963 until retiring in 1995 he taught at the University of Cincinnati. Recently, he has taken a significant place in the expanding world of “Mennonite” literary figures. From the 1960s to the late 1980s, little on the surface of his work linked him with either Mennonites or Christians in general. By the late ’80s, however, audiences such as those developing through the Mennonite/s Writing conferences – at Conrad Grebel University College (1990), Goshen College (1997, 2002), and Bluffton University (forthcoming, 2006) – began to recognize him as an “elder statesman” among American- Mennonite writers. Mennonite Life and The New Quarterly published lengthy pieces of his “Mennonite” fiction beginning in 1989 and the early 1990s.

On the Cross is both devotional and disturbing. The topic – the cross
in our culture – offers an opportunity for Wiebe to express his religious
sensibility. His emotional and intellectual register moves in and out of the
deeply personal, his poetic language encompassing a ready bluffness and a
gentle piety. In the first of his opening poems, “Going to the Cross,” the initial sentence, responding to the poem’s title, puts it simply: “It’s not easy to find.” “The Anabaptist Radiance” suggests comic bemusement with its opening image, “We are marching, marching upward / into the afterglow of our ancestors.” In “Christmas Eve, 1998,” we enter a tender, yet ever so slightly ironically observed, moment: “It’s a first for us; / Christmas Eve alone. My wife and I sit / and wonder / What to do / To greet a savior’s birth / by ourselves / in silence and old age.” In “Take Up Your Cross and Follow Me,” the speaker seems at first brazen, even sacrilegious, when he asks in response to the command: “How is that possible? / Who could bear the weight, / And who knows how to follow?” We soon learn that the voice belongs to an authentic quester. The plain-spoken narrator in the end takes up the cross, “no matter how heavy, / and how far.” In “Lift High the Cross,” as elsewhere, the narrator carries the wrenching, startling, political punch of Dylan Thomas’s narrator in poems such as “Do Not Go Gentle.”

One of Wiebe’s concerns is the spiritual and intellectual dullness by
which North American society pushes and drifts along. In “On a Hill Far Away” he stingingly rebukes society’s preference for commodifying its icons, for turning the cross into a fashion statement. Some poems (“Punch Lines,” “Gladly the Cross I’d Bear,” “On a Hill Faraway”) start with or hint at bad jokes, silly rhymes, popular songs; but they progress to searing looks into the human heart, and the body that contains it.

Wiebe boldly makes the speaker’s body a site for the cross in one
series of four poems (31-37). Here he projects the body under a surgeon’s knife and, without blasphemy, observes that an operation “left upon my chest / a scar in the shape of the cross.” The scar becomes a sign not just of physical healing but of spiritual rebirth: “My cross that will not / let me forget / That moment God tried / to save us all.” But the narrator’s scar also invites sardonic humour, as in the opening lines of “My Pectoral Cross”: “It’s not much of a cross / but it will have to do”!

Wiebe boldly makes the speaker’s body a site for the cross in one
series of four poems (31-37). Here he projects the body under a surgeon’s
knife and, without blasphemy, observes that an operation “left upon my chest / a scar in the shape of the cross.” The scar becomes a sign not just of physical healing but of spiritual rebirth: “My cross that will not / let me forget / That moment God tried / to save us all.” But the narrator’s scar also invites sardonic humour, as in the opening lines of “My Pectoral Cross”: “It’s not much of a cross / but it will have to do”!

This collection not only plays with various themes but foregrounds a
range of sources. For example, one sequence of poems responds to El Greco, Dali, and Grünewald (24-28), another to Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams (62-63). In “A Note to Paul Friesen” Wiebe addresses the Kansasbased artist, visual adaptations of whose sculptures of the cross punctuate the text. Cincinnati-based artist and sculptor John Leon has used a line-drawing technique to present images of Friesen’s crosses – sculpted from wood and installed in a number of Mennonite and Methodist churches in the United States. The images are riveting in their elegance, simplicity, and understated passion.

There are over forty poems in the collection, which Wiebe has dedicated to his wife, Virginia (Schroeder) Wiebe, who died in 2002. Here celebrations of Christ, life, the body, and the soul offer contemplative material for worship, meditation, and encouragement. The final poem, its shape recalling a cross, offers a poignant closing:

    INRI
In his hands
the iron nails.
In his side
the iron spear.
On his head
a crown of thorns.
In his arid mouth the final words.
In his longsuffering the first offering.
In his slow death the first redemption.
In his sight
the standing mother.
In his nostrils
the whiff of Rome.
In his ears
the babbling mob.
In his mouth
the sour drink.
In his dying
the wind of eternity.
In his burial
the promise of life.
In his resurrection the sign we all awaited.
In his ascension the rising of our souls.

Paul Tiessen, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON

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My Struggle for Freedom: Memoirs

Thomas Finger

The Conrad Grebel Review 23, no. 3 (Fall 2005)

Hans Küng. My Struggle for Freedom: Memoirs. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2003.

Hans Küng has never been praised for brevity. Among his many books, On Being a Christian (1976) covers 720 pages, Does God Exist? (1980) lasts for 839, and Christianity: Essence, History and Future (1995) consumes 936. I should not have been surprised, then, after freeing large chunks of time for these tightly printed, 478-page Memoirs, to find that they merely constitute Volume I! (Küng anticipates only one more Volume – as of now.)

Lengthy as Küng’s productions are, his writing style is smooth, engaging, often moving, and as readable as possible when the subject matter becomes complex. Nearly all readers, though, will find some sections too detailed and will want to skim or skip them. Yet the sections omitted by some readers will be interesting to others, who will welcome their wealth of information.

My Struggle for Freedom covers four main periods, linked by the
author’s growing appreciation of, and emphasis on, freedom: (1) Early years in his native Switzerland (1928-48), strongly shaped by its heritage of political and cultural freedom. (2) Study for the priesthood in Rome (1948-55), where his conscience gradually attained freedom. This period gave Küng surprisingly frequent contact with the leading theologians and officials of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, including Pope Pius IX. (3) Küng’s increasing advocacy of freedom of thought, expression, and publication against conservative Roman resistance (1955-62), including a brief pastorate, teaching at Tübingen University, and early controversial publications. (4) The running debates, intrigues and shifting alliances experienced during Vatican II and shortly thereafter (1962-68), which brought the “universal Catholic Church” a measure of “modern freedom” from the “medieval Roman system.”

The author aims to provide “objective” accounts of these events. Before long, however, the reader gets used to hearing about the “hell of the totalitarian Roman inquisition” that can burn deviants “psychologically” (99), or of Rome’s “absolutist system like that of the French kings without the guillotine” (357). This is the Küng who often employs language like that of oppressed theological minorities (e.g., Black theologians), and frequently draws standing-room crowds, almost uniquely among theologians.

Küng’s numerous, detailed, insider accounts of major events, persons,
and processes provide invaluable insight into the volatile transition from pre- to post-Vatican II Catholicism. Even those acquainted with much of this history will be surprised and enlightened by many specifics.

The author’s comprehensive narrative also lends insight into where he
stands theologically. Küng seeks to erect his theology from Scripture, interpreted in historical-critical fashion, which shakes many a treasured Roman teaching (e.g., papal infallibility). His emphasis on freedom, conscience, and reason are clearly modern, in contrast to postmodern. My Struggle for Freedom chronicles Küng’s great admiration for, and reciprocal admiration from, the neo-orthodox Protestant theologian Karl Barth. Yet he begins his theology not with God’s revealed Word, like Barth, but with a more general trust in existence accessible to all humans and in all religions. Küng often sounds more like a liberal Protestant than a Catholic theologian.

Apparently his Roman superiors have heard him similarly. Yet Küng
insists that he does not “repudiate the pope, but papalism,” not “the Roman center but its centralism, legalism and triumphalism” (426). He argues that this center has been misshapen by medieval hierarchalism for a millennium, and often contrasts it with universal Catholicism. Nonetheless, he still expresses hope that authentic Catholicism can be Roman. On the other hand, Küng evaluates Vatican II more negatively than many others, and almost seems to predict at times that Rome will inevitably keep turning back from the Council’s reforms.

Küng’s Memoirs (Volume I) close by detailing the author’s relationship
with Joseph Ratzinger, whose recent election as Pope has apparently fulfilled those dire predictions. Until about 1967, he and Ratzinger were allies in struggle against the Roman system. But then Ratzinger shifted course and became a chief Vatican spokesman. Küng tells us that he too might have attained high Church office, had he moderated his tone and become more obedient. He surmises that Ratzinger accepted those conditions. Looking back on his career in 1996, Küng concluded:

I could not have gone another way, not just for the sake of freedom, which has always been dear to me, but also for the sake of truth. . . . I would have sold my soul for power in the church. And I can only hope that my contemporary and colleague, Joseph Ratzinger, who took the other way, is also as content and happy as I am as I look back on my life . . . (461).

Thomas Finger, scholar and writer, Evanston, IL

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Hate-Work: Working Through the Pain and Pleasures of Hate

Howard Zehr

The Conrad Grebel Review 23, no. 3 (Fall 2005)

David Augsburger. Hate-Work: Working Through the Pain and Pleasures
of Hate. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

When David Augsburger checked a local research library, he found 4000 titles about love but only 41 about hate. This 100:1 ratio, he suggests, indicates that we are in denial about hate. At minimum, our understanding of it is simplistic, much too limited, and too negative.

Augsburger argues that hate is not a single, simple emotion but rather is composed of a family of emotions. In Chapter 1, he describes a nuanced spectrum of hate, ranging from simple hatred through spiteful hatred, malicious hatred, retributive hatred, principled hatred, moral hatred and, finally, just hatred. While he does not assume a linear progress through stages, he views movement through this range as a journey from natural but unhealthy hate toward healthy hate. This journey involves an increasing ability to think objectively about the events and people involved, to separate wrongdoing from wrongdoer, and then to develop compassion for the wrongdoer while hating injustice. Hate becomes more “positive” as it moves through this spectrum. In just hatred, the highest form of hatred, love and hatred come together. The discussion of this subject is one of the book’s most important contributions.

Succeeding chapters explore the journey: why and how hate arises;
how empathy can be developed and how transformation happens; the relationship between hate and memory and the stages of “hate-work”; and the respective roles of the “shadow self,” absolutes, and enemies. As well, the author analyzes real-life situations: hate-crimes, the Cold War, the holocaust, and others. Importantly, he argues that role of Christian theology in justifying anti-Semitism and the holocaust is one of the most pressing questions confronting Christianity today.

In Chapter 4, Augsburger explores the role of “re-membering” and restorying (my word) in trauma and its transcendence. Brooding, he argues, is to hate as mourning is to grief: a normal and perhaps essential phase of recovery. In this chapter and in several appendices, he describes the hard but liberating work of hate-work.

The final chapter – on justice – opens with the story of Jacob and Joseph. It, and the book, ends with an analysis of the Psalter, especially the difficult Psalm 139, as a paradigm of the movement from moral hate to just hate. In the process, the author concludes with a discussion of forgiveness and its many misconceptions. Most important here is his claim that in our individualistic culture, forgiveness has been reduced to individual therapeutic healing rather than a relational dynamic.

Augsburger argues that the thread of justice runs through the various
stages of hate-work. He delineates five types of justice: attributive, retributive, distributive, redemptive, and restorative. He then explores the nature of justice and mercy involved in just hate, arguing that redemptive and restorative justice are the healthiest forms.

The overlap between categories of hate is confusing at points. While
the author recognizes that these are neither inevitable nor linear stages, the reader could easily lose track of this. It might be helpful to conceive these as points on a spiral, similar to the way that the STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience) program describes the victim/aggressor journey. (See Carolyn Yoder, The Little Book of Trauma Healing (Intercourse, PA: Good Books; forthcoming fall 2005). Other than that, I see little to criticize.

Augsburger has written this book first of all for caregivers – counselors, social workers, mediators, and lawyers – but also for nonprofessionals. He also has a Christian audience in mind – but not exclusively. This volume will be useful for study in many fields, and will be especially helpful for classes focusing on identity, trauma, reconciliation and the like. It is, moreover, essential reading for those involved in justice and peace-building work, and in pastoral care.

Howard Zehr, Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA

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Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles | Book Reviews

The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited

Dennis Stoutenberg

The Grebel Review 23, no.3 (Fall 2005)

Yoder, John Howard. The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited. Ed. Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs. Radical Traditions Series: Theology in a Postcritical Key. Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, England: Eerdmans, 2003.

The reader of this volume will get three unique impressions of the text, conveyed by (a) reading only the material written by Yoder and interpreting it for her/ himself; (b) reading only the material written by Cartwright and Ochs; and (c) reading the book as it is formatted, with editorial direction and interpretation as a guide.

Judging by its cover, one expects this book to revisit aspects of the Jewish-Christian schism, as written by Yoder and edited by Cartwright and Ochs. However, this is not the case. Instead, it is either an introduction by Ochs to post-liberal Jewish thought or a post-liberal Jewish dialogue between Ochs and “Yoder” on ideas contained in the latter’s posthumously published writings. If it is an introduction to post-liberal Jewish thought about the Jewish- Christian schism, then we can see how Ochs employs Yoder’s writings as a foil to advance the discussion from the perspective of “post-liberal Jews” to distance Yoder’s thesis and approach from subsequent debate.

Ten of Yoder’s essays provide the body of the text. This is supplemented by a (second) preface and a conclusionary sermon (Appendix A), both by Yoder. Yoder’s contribution comprises 156 pages of this 290-page work. The rest is by the editors: an editors’ introduction before Yoder’s preface, commentary by Ochs at the conclusion of each essay, an afterword by Cartwright, and an essay by Cartwright attempting to contextualize Yoder’s theological dialogue with Judaism. The book also includes a glossary and three indexes.

(a) Yoder’s Content Yoder expressed reluctance to publish these essays, which he had been working on from 1971 to 1996. He wanted to undertake further interaction with the writings of Krister Stendahl, Lloyd Gaston, Alan Segal, John Gager, James D. G. Dunn, E. P. Sanders, and James Sanders. Only in the last section of his preface do we learn the collection is dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Steven S. Schwarzchild.

Yoder revisits Judaism and Christianity at a definitive, schismatic, intersecting point in their histories. With rabbinic insights provided through ongoing correspondence with Schwarzchild (Yoder calls him as his own Rabbi), in wondering whether a schism need have occurred, Yoder explores what better path could have been taken by the two monotheistic religions in their nascent stages. He adopts three classic models — a Jeremaic Judaism that gives way to Rabbinic (Judaism) and to messianic (Christianity) offspring — to advance his reconstruction. He hopes to initiate a resumption of dialogue characterized by respect and acknowledgement of the other’s religious convictions. (“Both parties agree on what happened and why. My claim is that they are wrong not where they differ but where they agree” [31].)

b) Ochs and Cartwright’s Content Yoder’s thesis and approach are framed in a context that highlights theoretical and methodological constructs of the Society for Textual Reasoning, of which Ochs is a member. The Society, boasting some 300 members, seeks “to articulate the patterns of Rabbinic and post-Rabbinic reasoning that could guide religious reformation after the Shoah” (5). Textual reasoners purposefully distance themselves from the “first principles of reasoning imposed by the modern Academy” and distinguish their efforts from those of Rabbinic scholars, whom they label as anti-modern because they “insulate an ‘indigenous’ Rabbinic tradition from any exposure  to the ‘alien’ influences of modern thinking.” Ochs and other textual reasoners instead determine to combine Rabbinic sacred literature with academic exigency, unfettered by the Rabbinic tradition’s hermeneutical demands or the Academy’s scholastic containment.

Ochs’s concern that Yoder’s thesis offers the potential for a supercessionist strategy (68) appears unfounded. Yoder has stated his opposition to any expression of that view (“The theological claim that the Church has replaced God’s people for the salvation and blessing of the world,” as indicated by identification as God’s elect people and royal/holy priesthood). Even when explaining supercessionism, Yoder indicated his own view moved well beyond it. Some 39 times in his responses to Yoder, Ochs refers to a Jewish “post-liberal” counter-perspective. By this epithet he encapsulates his stance and that of other contemporary, post-Holocaust Jewish scholars, contrasting or comparing it to identifiable “others” within the Judaisms of past and present. (Yoder refers to some seventeen varieties of Judaism.) I sometimes identify with the post-liberal soubriquet myself but wonder what other Jewish scholars might think of inclusion in this category. Ochs argues that Yoder’s reconstruction at times portrays a Judaism unrecognizable to him and his Textual Reasoning colleagues. So far as Yoder expresses dependency on a Jewish perspective appropriated through extensive dialogue with Schwarzchild, Ochs’s criticism is directed primarily at the latter (7, 12- 19, 92, 120, 203).

Cartwright concludes his part of the editors’ introduction in a summary statement of Yoder’s thesis. “Yoder’s argument is directed at overthrowing the assumptions of Constantinian Christianity as they have shaped virtually all forms of religious practice in western civilization since the second century CE” (22), an imprecision of Yoder’s own timeline that Ochs corrects (67). He cautions against accepting Yoder’s attempt to re-situate the conversation between Jews and Christians to a pacifistic, nonviolence forum. Yoder “not only does not aptly characterize the deviance of the ‘pacifism of rabbinical nonviolence’ but displaces the necessity for contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue” (23-24).

Cartwright and Ochs should be recognized as this book’s real authors.
In making the case for a post-liberal Jewish approach to the topic, Ochs
offers the greater contribution. Cartwright’s introductory words and afterword summarize what Ochs and Yoder have already introduced, and his appendix on (re)locating Yoder’s dialogue is misplaced. On this reading, Yoder’s essays serve mainly as a foil for Ochs to advance the ideas of the textual reasoners.

(c) Reading The Text as a Whole The format establishes Cartwright and Ochs’s material as a clavis scripturae or crux interpretum for Yoder’s thoughts. If the former (clavis, a key), then Yoder’s best thoughts are highlighted by their additions. If the latter (crux, a decisive point), his intentions are compromised by an imposed editorial hermeneutic.

Given that the “editors” have both the first and last word for the entire
collection, and an interpretive word at the end of each chapter, their names should be included as authors. Further, given that they employ Yoder’s essays to advance their own thesis towards Jewish-Christian dialogue, perhaps his name should be removed completely as author, and a title change would be in order. I suggest: On Yoder’s Unpublished Collection of Essays Entitled, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited: Why It Does Not Offer a Valid Paradigm for Modern Jewish-Christian Dialogue, by Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs.

I also note that neither Yoder nor Cartwright and Ochs interact with the internationally acknowledged Christian statement about the Church and Jews in the Nostra Aetate of Vatican II. As well, no mention is made of the great contributions of the statement’s authors, Monsignor John M. Oesterreicher and Sister Rose Thering.

It is regrettable that we cannot know Yoder’s response to the way his essays are arranged in the present dialogical format, and we may wonder what his rejoinder would be to Ochs and Cartwright.

Dennis Stoutenberg, Kitchener, ON

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Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles | Book Reviews

The Lamb Christology of the Apocalypse of John

Sheila Klassen-Wiebe

The Conrad Grebel Review 23, no. 3 (Fall 2005)

Loren L. Johns. The Lamb Christology of the Apocalypse of John. Mohr
Siebeck, 2003.

This volume explores one aspect of the Apocalypse’s rhetorical force, namely the integral link between its Lamb Christology and ethics. Loren Johns argues that by his faithful witness unto death, Jesus, the slaughtered lamb, conquered evil and thereby became a model for first century believers’ own nonviolent resistance to evil. Johns’s reading of the text seeks both faithfulness to its historical context and concern for the effects of the reading on the community of faith. Both of these aims he accomplishes well.

Much of this book is a detailed examination of the semantic and religiohistorical background of the image of Christ as lamb, in order to understand its associations for the original readers of the Apocalypse. A study of the semantic domain of “lamb” in biblical and extra-biblical writings results in the cautious conclusion that “lamb” in the Apocalypse has a non-sacrificial connotation and expresses vulnerability. To establish the cultural gestalt of ovine symbolism in the Apocalypse, Johns examines the role of sheep in Paleolithic art, Egyptian religion, Aesopic fables, and Greek and Roman mythology, art, and religion. A study of early Jewish literature and rabbinic literature follows. Johns finds no precedent for the triumphant Lamb Redeemer figure in Early Judaism, where lambs usually symbolize vulnerability.

A discussion of method in symbol analysis in chapter 5 prepares the
way for questions addressed in the final chapter: What kind of symbolic universe does the Lamb Christology help to construct, and what does it do within that symbolic universe? (120) Johns argues that the social-historical setting of the Apocalypse is not a specific experience of persecution but the pervasive economic and political seductiveness of the imperial cult. The chapter examines traditions in the Hebrew Bible upon which the author of the Apocalypse may have drawn. Johns concludes that “the concept of nonviolence or vulnerability seems most capable of characterizing the symbolism expressed in most of these symbolic uses of lamb” (148). This vulnerability is not helpless victimization but leads to victory.

Johns’s final chapter takes up the project’s core question, the rhetorical force of the Lamb Christology. It focuses on Revelation 5, which provides the “rhetorical fulcrum” of the whole Apocalypse. The crucial reversal occurs when the One worthy to open the scroll switches from being the Lion of Judah to the slaughtered Lamb. The nonviolent resistance of the slain but victorious Lamb is paradigmatic for believers’ own response to evil. Johns explores key exegetical terms such as “witness” and “victory,” and investigates the ethical import of the violent imagery.

It is not entirely clear how the examination of lambs in Greco-Roman culture helps clarify the rhetorical impact of lamb symbolism on the primarily Jewish Christian, “average Ephesian” audience of the Apocalypse, since it seems to yield few results for this study. One also wonders why Johns devotes so much attention to the “ram” traditions when he has already argued that the animal in question in the Apocalypse is the “lamb” and not the ram (23-25).

As well, Johns’s argument sometimes needs further support. For
example, except for citing Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza as a precedent (123, n 57), he does not defend deciding to translate the Greek term as “consistent resistance” instead of the usual “patient endurance.” Also, at one point he implies that the disciples’ safety is in view in Luke 10:3, whereas the real issue in this text is their danger (144). In his argument that “lamb” in the Septuagint “symbolizes defenceless vulnerability in the face of violent power” (148), it is hard to see how the “trembling submission” of Ps. 114: 4, 6 or the tender care of the shepherd in Isa. 40:11 (Aquila ms.) constitutes vulnerability in the face of “violent power.” Finally, although Johns does believe that the triumph of the Lamb comes through death and resurrection, he often settles for language that asserts “evil is conquered by the death of the lamb” (194) and that defines “victory as non-violent resistance to the point of death” (170). More explicit emphasis that victory comes through God’s overturning of death might have been helpful.

The author does persuasively argue that the Lamb Christology has
ethical implications for Christians’ nonviolent resistance. The attention to
exegetical detail and the thorough exploration of the religio-historical
background of the lamb imagery is an obvious strength, even as it marks the book as more for scholars than non-specialists. Especially valuable is Johns’s balanced consideration of the merits and problems associated with seeing each Old Testament tradition as an antecedent for the Lamb Christology. The book’s critical engagement with current scholarship is also a strength, especially in the last chapter, where Johns forthrightly addresses difficult questions that might challenge his thesis. His scholarship will be welcomed especially by pacifist Christians troubled by the violence of the Apocalypse and unsure about its ethical relevance.

Sheila Klassen-Wiebe, Canadian Mennonite University, Winnipeg, MB

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Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles | Book Reviews

Piano in the Vineyard; David Waltner-Toews, The Complete Tante Tina: Mennonite Blues and Recipes.

Ervin Beck

The Conrad Grebel Review 23, no. 3 (Fall 2005)

Jean Janzen. Piano in the Vineyard. Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2004;
David Waltner-Toews. The Complete Tante Tina: Mennonite Blues and
Recipes. Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 2004.

Jean Janzen and David Waltner-Toews are two of the earliest successful poets in the late-twentieth century flowering of Mennonite literature. Both poets use the cruel experiences of their Russländer ancestors to fine effect. And in the two books under review, both offer their best, mature poems. But, otherwise, what an odd couple they make for a combined book review!

Waltner-Toews writes dramatic monologues in the swaggering, colloquial sprawl of Whitman. Janzen writes closely observed, restrained lyrics in the manner of Dickinson.

Waltner-Toews uses poems for social commentary, often drawing parallels between current events and Mennonites’ experience in Russia; Janzen explores personal and spiritual conditions and uses Mennonites’ experience in Russia as a kind of origins myth for tragedy. Because Waltner- Toews relishes the materiality of life, he alternates juicy recipes with his poems. Janzen embraces the created world, too, but also art and music as she reaches for the transcendent.

The Complete Tante Tina is a compilation of all of Waltner-Toews’s poems that feature the persona of Tante Tina and depict her family’s development through three generations—her own, her son Haenschen’s, and his son Johnny’s. Waltner-Toews says the book’s purpose is to “make some sense of her life” (127).

As the sequence of poems unfolds, we learn about Tante Tina and her Low German immigrant culture; Haenschen’s rejection of his background; and Johnny’s quasi-return, thanks to developments in the Canadian counterculture. As her children become formally educated, Tante Tina becomes self-educated enough to address people and affairs of the world—most wonderfully Salman Rushdie but also Maggie Thatcher, Pierre Trudeau, and even Rudy Wiebe. Tina seems to think the world’s ills could be cured if only the movers and shakers could share a faspa with her. Her history concludes with her death, lovingly tended by her musician/poet grandson: “When life slides down the snowbank, /tobogganing, to frozen toes, and gone,/ what can be said? Hang on. / Into the dazzling light, / hang on” (92).

Waltner-Toews implies that the genius of poetic utterance among
Russian Mennonites resided in their immigrant folk culture. The poems of third-generation Johnny, for instance, are good, but not as good as Tina’s. As in “Little Haenschen’s Vision,” Johnny tends toward explicit rant against the troubles of the world, less well redeemed by humor and charm. However, Waltner-Toews’s own powers seem undiminished, since one of the finest poems in the collection, “My Map of the Promised Land,” was written only recently.

Waltner-Toews has said he uses Tante Tina because he can “say” so much more through her persona. In the Thatcher poem he criticizes heartless conservatism. In the Trudeau poem he endorses liberalism. And in the Rushdie poem he emphasizes that “God is in the story hiding,” making a convincing case for the religious value of art.

What makes such poems so appealing is the Low German vocabulary
and syntax of Tina’s discourse. On the surface that can make things seem all “aufgemixed” (42). But Waltner-Toews is that rarest of poets who can create a new language or poetic diction. That it is “only” Plautdietsch-influenced English should not detract from his achievement—although it necessarily reduces his appeal to a mainstream English audience. Alas, his poems will not be published in the journal Poetry, as Janzen’s have been.

The voice in Janzen’s poems is quiet, self-effacing, and sensitive to the
surrounding people and natural world. The Piano in the Vineyard offers abundant examples of finely honed form, consisting of page or half-page poems written in short, compact lines, occasionally in two- or three-line stanzas that sometimes jell into slant-rimed sonnets.

Janzen’s true métier is the sharply observed image that leaps into metaphor and then blossoms into transcendental insight. I expected to find that movement here, and did, but was moved first by the autumnal subject and tone of most of the poems. The first section, “Broken Places,” deals with the deaths of a baby, a friend by cancer, a squirrel by electrocution—”all of us shipwrecked / clutching what we can” (20). The second section, “The Garden,” presents the yearly cycle, but it begins and ends in winter. Most of the poems in “Carving the Hollow” are elegies for victims of the troubles in Ukraine.

The title poem for the book and for the final section, “Piano in the Vineyard,” emphasizes the redemptive turn found in virtually all of Janzen’s poems. Janzen depicts the vineyard in wintertime, following pruning, when its stark outlines suggest a cemetery instead. The bare vines suggest a broken body when the speaker’s husband winds them around grape stakes to make a crude cross for Holy Saturday.

But the old piano standing in the vineyard offers something even more than hope. Like the music of Chopin and Ravel (or the art of Cranach or Rubens), it affirms the “pause before the next movement, / which is the first and last fire” (67), suggesting Godself, as known by Pascal and the mystics. “Fire,” which also appears in other poems, is the book’s final word.

Janzen’s physical images move one toward transcendent awareness and experience, not just insight. Images from the conclusions of her poems suggest the Hopkins-like plenitude characterizing her world: “seeds of stars,” “the whole world is lit from within,” “Love gazes at you,” “spilling into the night,” “a silence which is immense and open.”

Piano in the Vineyard may be Janzen’s equivalent to Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” but her poems move beyond Bach’s (and Keats’s) “It is enough” to the healing of the “broken heart” (18) through the forgiveness found in Schumann’s “I bear no resentment” (18).

Janzen and Waltner-Toews are alike in a very important way. Both are faithful members of the Mennonite church, which can be grateful that the contemporary Anabaptist tradition is represented so well in the world of letters.

Ervin Beck, Goshen College