Intertextuality in Journey of the Magiand the Book of Revelation
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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 Magi and the Book of Revelation Barrett Reid-Maroney Huron University College Follow this and additional works at: https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/lajur 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. Liberated Arts is an open access journal, which means that its content is freely available without charge to readers and their institutions. All content published by Liberated Arts is licensed under the Creative Commons License, Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Readers are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without seeking prior permission from Liberated Arts or the authors. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 “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 angel in the foreground marks the foreheads of the elect with a cross. The presence of the fundamental symbol of the New Testament 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 gospel. 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 The Waste Land, 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 Bethlehem, 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 Jesus 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 Matthew 10: “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 Psalms, 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 Bible, 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. 3 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 Christmas sermon. As one of the Church of England scholars who participated in the seven years of work to produce and publish The King James Version, 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.