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The Mysterious Stranger : a Religious Allegory for a Post-Christian Age

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The Mysterious Stranger : a Religious Allegory for a Post-Christian Age The Mysterious Stranger : A Religious Allegory for a Post-Christian Age Bill Scalia The Mark Twain Annual, Volume 14, 2016, pp. 56-77 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633860 Access provided by UFMG-Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (24 Oct 2018 13:48 GMT) The Mysterious Stranger A Religious Allegory for a Post-Christian Age Bill Scalia Abstract Allegory in its basic form posits a dynamic relationship between explicit and implicit elements. If allegory is a negotiation between an explicit text and an implicit text with the locus of meaning generated in the relation between the two (or a relationship that has been reclaimed as culturally and politically determined in the work of Benjamin, Jameson, and de Man), then a post-Christian allego- resis negotiates between the explicit text and the void left by the “disappeared text,” a text negated by endless internal negotiations. This article will not claim that Mark Twain composed The Mysterious Stranger as an allegory; rather, it will determine an allegoresis model acknowledging an inherent destabilization of the text. While this negotiation is necessary because text veils what it can- not state directly, a postmodern allegoresis suggests that the implicit text of The Mysterious Stranger has become inexpressible not because the themes are neces- sarily unspeakable but have become meaningless. Keywords: allegory, allegoresis, The Mysterious Stranger, post-Christian, postmodern Charles Taylor frames the thesis of his book A Secular Age in this way: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” (25). In a way, this is similar to the question Mark Twain pursues in his last novel No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger: What is different about August Feldner’s late medieval Austria and Twain’s nineteenth-century America? And how might that difference extend into twenty-first-century America? We may address this question by reading The Mysterious Stranger (composed 1897–1908; scholarly The mark twain annual, Vol. 14, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA edition established by the Mark Twain Project in 1969) allegorically. Generally speaking, allegoresis as a reading practice is centered on the fundamental dual nature of the allegorical subject: the written text and the referent “text.” The interpretive schema of allegoresis depends on the relationship between text and referent, and the schema by which this association is made. In the medieval era, allegory as a compositional practice and allegoresis as a reading practice were tied to a common understanding of relation, contained within a framework determined by a divine order. However, as this framework shifted over time, especially after the Enlightenment and with the emergence of postmodernism, the relationship changed as well. Thus we require a unique kind of allegoresis to investigate what possible significance Twain’s last novel might hold for us today. I will not claim that Mark Twain composed The Mysterious Stranger as an alle- gory; rather, I will determine an allegoresis that allows us in the post-C hristian era to read the novel as an allegory concerning, in the words of Andrew Delbanco, “the shrinking range of phenomena to which accusatory words like ‘evil’ and ‘sin’ may still be applied . and what it means to do without them” (9). Allegory simply means “saying other.” As Angus Fletcher writes, “[Allegory] destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words ‘mean what they say.’ When we predicate the quality x of person Y, Y is really what our predication says he is (or we assume so); but allegory would turn Y into some- thing other (allos) than what the open and direct statement tells the reader” (2). It is easy to see in this definition how Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, asserts that all critical activity is allegorical; that is, critical interpretation con- siders one text and posits a separate “meaning” (89). Both allegoresis and alle- gory involve a doubling of the text: either one text that evokes another, “veiled” or coded text; a text that relates to a symbolic/anagogic register in which an interpretation is imminent; or a text that is determined by meaning-making determinants that operate both (in terms appropriate to Twain’s novel) ad intra (OED: “with reference to an action or characteristic of God which is not com- municable to the world outside the Persons of the Trinity; or, with the effect or result only in one’s mind”) and ad extra (OED: “with effect or result in the outside world; . in the world at large; externally, perceivably”). Medieval allegory in its basic form posits an explicit text, an implicit text, and a determined relationship between explicit and implicit elements. The relation between the texts is grounded in moral certainty and mutual understanding; as Karl Barth argues, the explicit text speaks a “veiled” text in concepts not express- ible (or at least subject to linguistic mediation), while at the same time the veiled text participates in the explicit text by taking its animating meaning from written The Mysterious Stranger 57 elements (Knapp 166). The correspondence between these elements drives allegoresis forward, which Ethan Knapp, his 2014 essay “Reading Allegory in a Secular Age,” defines as “the hermeneutic project of establishing meaningful correspondence between divergent representational systems” (169). Allegory in the medieval mode is a negotiation between an explicit text and an implicit text with the locus of meaning generated in the relation between the two, given that the framework for this negotiation is contained within an understanding that the world is an expression of the will of God. Allegoresis as a reading practice (which predates allegorical writing) seeks to establish the relationship between text and referent; in medieval allegory, par- ticularly in personification allegory, this relationship is fairly clear: within the framework of a natural order, willed by God, represented by the Great Chain of Being, every aspect of the created world—and thus every idea as referent— had an established locus. So, allegoresis/allegory were fixed within a specific framework of common understanding and were intimately tied throughout the Middle Ages. By the nineteenth century the genre of allegory, both as writing and criti- cal practice, had fallen into decline (Herman Melville’s failed 1849 allegory Mardi is an example of this). Enlightenment rationalism rejected allegory in the interest of realism; Romanticism favored the symbol over allegory, shift- ing the focus away from allegorical construction, which Romantics viewed as merely aesthetic artifice, and toward the iconic (organic) function of the symbol. The albatross in Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, for example, is a symbol rather than “allegory” because, as Coleridge noted, the poem refused to interpret the symbol; that is, the symbol was dynamic, not reducible to a single, universal meaning (Tambling 79). As the late nineteenth century shifted toward realism, allegory declined further; realism had little need for referential writing, since the world could be understood rationally and expressed as it existed (or appeared to exist). Allegoresis as a reading practice concerned more the shifting relation between word and thing, signi- fier and signified, and the instability (though largely still coherent) relation between the two. While the term allegory describes linked writing and read- ing practices (and tied in some way to authorial intent), and while it may be argued that reading itself is an allegorical practice, it is certain that allegory is far more complex than a simple 1:1 coding/interpreting structure. Generally speaking, allegory suggests an explicit text that elicits another, implied text. Or, we might say, one narrative that alludes to, without directly stating, a corollary text. The meaning of the hidden text depends on the nature of the 58 Bill Scalia space between the two texts—that is, the formulae by which the material in one text informs the hidden text. Allegory suggests a text pointing to a referent located other, in the sense of elsewhere; so, where is the referent for the text located? Fletcher notes that the oldest idea of allegory “is a human reconstruction of divinely inspired mes- sages, a revealed transcendental language which tries to preserve the remote- ness of a properly veiled godhead” (21). This is indeed the type of allegoresis recommend by St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians (especially 4:21–31); as well, in 2 Corinthians 3:6 Paul writes, “He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Is the referent inside the original text, outside the text, or in some degree, both? In the case of medieval allegory, the referent rested in the world inferred through the evidence of God’s creation. So, in the event that the text pointed to a referent outside itself, the order of the referent was contiguous with the order of the narrative; in a sense, we might say that the inferred world mirrored the narrated text—even if through a glass, darkly. The Enlightenment shifted attention away from the mystical and toward the rational. That is, after the Enlightenment allegoresis becomes focused on the relation between human perception of the world and the bases for that perception; accordingly, allego- resis as a critical practice concerned the perceived relation between observa- tion and essence, between the text and the reader’s perception of the text (and through the text, the world). We might say the fact of the world (in whatever way we might assume the world to have facts, or at least artifacts) was elided in favor of the perception of the world.
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