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Liberated Arts: A Journal for Undergraduate Research

Volume 6, Issue 1 Article 5

2019

“What thou seest, write in a book” – Intertextuality in Journey of the and the Barrett Reid-Maroney Huron University College

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Recommended Citation Reid-Maroney, Barrett (2019) “’What thou seest, write in a book’ –Intertextuality in Journey of the Magi and the Book of Revelation,” Liberated Arts: a journal for undergraduate research: Vol. 6: Iss. 1, Article 5.

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“What thou seest, write in a book” – Intertextuality in Journey of the Magi and the Book of Revelation Barrett Reid-Maroney, Huron University College

Abstract: The Book of Revelation and T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi are radically different works in content and structure. One is a seemingly simple modernist poem that grounds biblical narrative in the language of everyday experience; the other is a canonical sacred text defined by its extraordinary sensory images. Both works, however, share an underlying intertextuality. Focusing on images of texts, writing and books in Revelation, and on the rich economy of biblical allusion in Journey of the Magi, this paper offers a comparative reading of St. John’s visionary writings and Eliot’s poem, exploring the ways in which both works serve as typological meeting places where biblical images are evoked and transformed.

Keywords: Intertextuality; Modernist poetry; T.S. Eliot; Typology; Book of Revelation; History of the Book

In one of Jean Duvet’s famous engravings of the Book of Revelation, an in the foreground marks the foreheads of the elect with a cross. The presence of the fundamental symbol of the passion narratives within the frame of Duvet’s apocalyptic engraving is a reminder that the Book of Revelation is meant to be read typologically – it is a biblical book that encourages its readers to reflect upon preceding passages from the New and Old Testaments with an eye towards comparison. Edward McKnight Kauffer’s artwork for the first edition of T.S. Eliot’s poem, Journey of the Magi, also features a cross. In McKnight Kauffer’s design, however, the cross is both given form and shrouded by cubist shapes, mirroring the rich and ambiguous pattern of biblical allusion in Eliot’s poetic method. The Book of Revelation and Journey of the Magi are radically different works in content and structure. One is a seemingly simple modernist poem that grounds biblical narrative in the language of everyday experience; the other is a canonical sacred text defined by its extraordinary sensory images. Duvet’s engraving of Revelation and McKnight Kauffer’s illustration for the Journey of the Magi, however, point to the underlying biblical intertextuality of both works, and offer insight on the ways in which the relationship between Eliot’s modernist poem and biblical text is made clear when examined through the lens of book history. Through an exploration of the images of material text in the visual history of Revelation and the allusive and intertextual fragments in Journey of the Magi, both texts emerge as literary spaces in which the Word is evoked and transformed. Published in 1927, Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” was his first poem following his conversion to Anglicanism. Some of the first critical readers of Journey of the Magi questioned T.S. Eliot’s adaptation of the biblical Magi narrative, suggesting that in its treatment of a biblical subject, the poem did not fit easily within the modernist aesthetic. Eliot’s contemporary, the poet Alan Porter, for example, told Eliot that Journey of the Magi would have benefitted from a more elevated and transcendent reimagining of Matthew’s . Eliot responded to Porter’s letter by reasserting that his decision to

2 ground the story of the Magi was no less an application of the modernist mythic method: “we start at quite different fantasies of what such an occurrence would have been like…I felt a certain liberty to treat it according to my own fantasy of realism.”1 In Journey of the Magi, Eliot’s use of the mythic method lies not in the blending of classical and modern images as it does in , but rather in the simultaneous invocation and transfiguration of biblical tradition. By treating the Magi as ordinary people beset by ordinary difficulties along their journey to , Eliot both uses and challenges the conventions of realism, a juxtaposition suggested in his paradoxical notion of a “fantasy of realism.” In this sense, the “fantasy of realism” in Journey of the Magi is an early expression of the views Eliot would discuss in his later works. In his book, “Poetry and Drama,” Eliot argues that he does not want poetry to “transport the audience into some imaginary world totally unlike their own…” but rather hopes that through poetry, “our own sordid, dreary, daily world would be suddenly illuminated and transfigured”.2 Eliot’s self-proclaimed transformation of the Magi narrative provides insight into the ways in which Journey of the Magi reframes biblical material through poetic realism. An equally important component of Eliot’s critical method is his treatment of biblical scope and chronology. A close typological reading of Journey of the Magi reveals a mosaic of images drawn from biblical texts that both precede and follow the narrative of Matthew’s gospel. In the first stanza, the biblical allusions are oblique. “Night fires going out” connects the travels of the Magi with the courtyard where Peter warmed himself by the fire while was interrogated as recounted in Mark 14. The reference to a “lack of shelters” repeats the motif of Mary and Joseph finding no room at the inn in Bethlehem. “The cities hostile and the towns unfriendly” evokes Jesus’ words to his disciples in : “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake the dust off your feet” (Matthew 10.14). The “temperate valley” is reminiscent of the pastoral imagery of the , while the life and vegetation of the following line hints at the idealised landscapes of Eden before the Fall. The foreboding image of the “Three trees on the low sky” anticipates the crosses of the crucifixion on the hill of Golgotha, while the “old white horse” reminds us not only of the Four Horsemen, but of the “pale horse” that appears in Revelation 6. The line “vine-leaves over the lintel” not only references to Jesus’ self- identification as the vine in John 15, but the doorways of Passover in Exodus 12. The “dicing for pieces of silver” brings to mind Judas’ betrayal of Jesus and the soldiers casting lots for his garments at the foot of the cross, while the reference to “feet kicking the empty wineskins” recalls Jesus’ parable in Mark 2. The encapsulation of centuries of biblical tradition in a rapid series of images creates a complex schema of intertextuality that shapes and reshapes the Magi narrative. The layers of intertextuality in Journey of the Magi exist not only as allusive references to the , but as distilled moments of metatext that are self-reflections on the acts of writing, speech, and translation. Toward the end of the poem, the persona steps out of the frame of the narrative to directly address the question of orality and

1 T.S. Eliot et al (eds) The Letters of T.S. Eliot Volume 3: 1926-1927 (London, Faber and Faber, 2012), 861. 2 Eliot, Poetry and Drama (London, Faber and Faber, 1951), 26.

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textual transmission: “set down/This set down/This.”3 The persona’s deliberate call for a scribe to “set down This” draws attention to the importance of the material written word across biblical tradition. The inscribed stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, God’s writing on the walls of King Belshazzar’s temple, and Jesus’ ephemeral writings in the sand in John 8, are all vivid biblical images of the materiality of the Word. Furthermore, the phrase “set down This” opens an additional aspect of the poem’s intertextuality. While scholars have linked this phrase to the final speech of Shakespeare’s Othello, it is also a phrase that recurs in the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester.4 The opening of Eliot’s poem, enclosed by quotation marks, is a reworking of Andrewes’ remarks in his 1622 sermon. As one of the scholars who participated in the seven years of work to produce and publish The , Andrewes provides a direct link not only to the source text for Eliot’s poem, but to a long tradition of biblical adaptation.5 Eliot’s 1926 essay, published in the Times Literary Supplement on the 300th anniversary of Lancelot Andrewes’ death, elucidates the ways in which Andrewes’ work influenced Eliot’s poetics. Eliot writes that “Andrewes takes a word, a concrete statement, and derives the world from it; squeezing and squeezing the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess.”6 Eliot emulates this approach. In Journey of the Magi, he creates a stratified literary space where the meanings and associations of diverse biblical texts underlie seemingly simple poetry. Andrewes’ place in the Bible’s complex textual history calls us back to the biblical book in which images intertextuality and metatextual references culminate: Revelation. While Eliot positions his poem at the heart of the New Testament and assumes a panoramic perspective on biblical events, Revelation, as the last book in the Bible chronologically, assembles and transforms the biblical narratives that precede it. Critic Paul Decock engages with St. John’s critical literary method, arguing that Revelation “bends” traditional biblical narrative into new forms.7 Decock’s idea of “bending” biblical language is an apt description of Eliot’s poetic method and the process used by the writer of Revelation. Just as Eliot transposes images from across the Bible onto the landscapes of Journey of the Magi, the author of Revelation engages in discontinuous reading, piecing together a pastiche from biblical fragments.8

3 Eliot, Journey of the Magi. (Faber and Faber, 1927), 33-35. 4 R.D. Brown, “Revelation in Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi.’” Renascence, vol. 24, no. 3, (1972), 140. 5 Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (New York, Harper Collins 2011). Nicolson suggests that the translation of The King James Version was defined by a “sense of an entirely embraced and reimagined past” (xii). 6 Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes.” Times Literary Supplement. 23 September 1926, 622. 7 Paul B. Decock, “The Scriptures in the Book of Revelation” Neotestamentica, vol. 33, no. 2 (1999), 385. 8 See for example Steve Moyise, “Intertextuality and the Use of Scripture in the Book of Revelation,” Scriptura, vol. 84 (Dec. 2013), 391-401. Moyise draws parallels between the revelatory writings of St. John and the visions of an idealised temple in Ezekial 40, arguing that John evokes the structure of this Old Testament text while providing “not

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One of Revelation’s most prominent intertextual features is its awareness of the written word. The first words that the Lord speaks to in Revelation 1 signify that Revelation is a fulfilment of the images of writing and material text scattered throughout the previous books of the Bible: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending” (Revelation 1.8). Not only does this verse conjure the textual metaphor of Jesus as “the Word made flesh” that is established in the opening of the gospel of John, but it identifies Jesus with letters of the alphabet, the very foundations of language and the written word, introducing the interwoven images of writing and books that are soon to unfold in Revelation. Writing is particularly central to the Book of Revelation because St. John’s account of the apocalypse is entirely a work of metanarrative. In verse 11, Jesus instructs St. John to document his visions by writing them down: “What thou seest, write in a book” (Revelation 1.11). In the same way that the persona of Eliot’s poem calls upon a scribe to “set down This,” so Revelation opens with a reflection on its own narrative frame. The metatextual images of Revelation can be traced in the extensive visual exegesis of the biblical apocalypse. For centuries, artists have sought to capture the vivid and surreal imagery of Revelation through their engravings, woodcuts, tapestries, paintings, and illuminated manuscripts. Perhaps the most frequently recurring image in artistic depictions of Revelation is that of the codex. In artistic collections such as Revelations: Art of the Apocalypse, Picturing the Apocalypse, and The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, books can be found in almost every visual representation of Revelation.9 Many artistic interpretations focus on John’s consumption of the “little book” in Revelation 10. In William Blake’s 1803 watercolour piece, The Angel of Revelation, a small codex is clearly visible in the hand of the angel as he appears to St. John, and in Albrecht Dürer’s depiction of Revelation 10, the angel holds a codex while John takes a bite from its corner. In choosing to illustrate John’s ingestion of the codex in such detail, Dürer draws attention to Revelation’s clearest realisation of the scripture that precedes it. The angel’s call to partake in the eating of the little book parallels the invitation Jesus gave to his disciples at the and brings full circle the typology of the codex itself and its identification with Jesus as the Word. Many works also depict St. John with pen in hand and an open codex in front of him. For example, the right panel of Hans Memling’s late 15th-century triptych, St. on Patmos, features John preparing to write as he dips a stylus in an inkwell and gazes toward a visionary montage in the upper half of the work. Similarly, in a 1260 illuminated manuscript entitled The Lambeth Apocalypse, a vividly-coloured inset illustration sees St. John transcribing his visions as they occur before him.

simply a fulfilment but a radical reinterpretation of Ezekial’s vision (393). 9 Frances Carey, ed., The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1999); Nancy Grubb, ed., Revelations: Art of the Apocalypse (New York, Abbeville Press, 1997., Anthony O’Hear and Natasha O’Hear, Picturing the Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in the Arts of Over Two Millenia. (New York, Oxford University Press, 2015).

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These images of writing converge in the paintings of Diego Velazquez and Gaspar de Crayer. In his painting of John at Patmos, Velazquez uses the heavy light and shadow characteristic of Baroque artistic style to illuminate the material process of St. John’s writing. The pages of St. John’s codex, entirely blank except for one line of script, convey Revelation’s awareness of its own metatextual nature. In the bottom right corner of the painting lie two smaller books, one of which has a bookmark between its pages. In de Crayer’s work, John holds his pen with one hand, while the fingers of his other hand act as placeholders in other pages of the text. Both paintings present John in the act of discontinuous reading even as he writes, alluding to method through which John of Patmos, the biblical writer, Lancelot Andrewes, the biblical scholar, and T.S. Eliot, the modernist poet, transformed the Word. Metatextual images of bookmarked codices, inkwells, writing instruments, and blank pages waiting to be filled are not merely representations of the books that are mentioned as a part of John’s visions. Rather, they point to the complex processes of inscription, annotation, cross- referencing, translation and adaptation that lie behind the simple instruction to “set down This.”

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Bibliography

Brown, R.D. “Revelation in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi.’” Renascence: Essays on Value in Literature 24, (1972): 136-40.

Carey, Frances. The Apocalypse and The Shape of Things to Come. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Decock, Paul B. “The Scriptures in the Book of Revelation.” Neotestamentica 33, no. 2 (1999): 373-410 Eliot, T.S. Journey of the Magi. London: Faber and Faber, 1927.

Eliot, T.S. “Lancelot Andrewes.” Times Literary Supplement. 23 September 1926, 631-2.

Eliot, T.S. Poetry and Drama. London: Faber and Faber, 1951.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns, , and John Charles Robert Haffenden. The Letters of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 2012.

Grubb, Nancy. Revelations: Art of the Apocalypse. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997.

Moyise, Steve. "Intertextuality And The Use Of Scripture In The Book Of Revelation?" Scriptura 84, no. 0 (2013): 391-401.

Nicolson, Adam. God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.

O’Hear, Natasha, and Anthony O’Hear. Picturing the Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in the Arts over Two Millennia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

The Bible. King James Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

BARRETT REID-MARONEY is in his third year of undergraduate studies in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Huron University College. His research interests include textual studies, History of the Book, and graphic design.