In a lecture titled “What is Interpretation?”, Bruce begins with “Religio Laici” (1682) and “The Hind and the Panther” (1687), a pair of John Dryden’s poems that to his mind best disclose what is at stake in this question.1 “Religio Laici” was Dryden’s first attempt in verse to define interpretation. The poem’s task was set in motion by Richard Simon, whose work tracing the corruptions that entered the Old Testament during its transmission and translation prompted Dryden to find a way of reading that acknowledged these corruptions but read across and above them. Behind Dryden’s method was a confidence that “truth by its own sinews will prevail”.2 Following his conversion to Catholicism in 1685, Dryden was forced to revise this method radically, which he did in “The Hind and the Panther”. With characteristic range, Bruce draws from Dryden’s awareness of the textual variations, revisions, redactions and gaps in the transmission of the Bible – not least the poet’s change in relation to this transmission pre- and post his conversion – a mode of reading that is appreciative of the chaos of a text’s composition, decomposition and afterlife.

My initial aim for this chapter was to respond to the critical history Bruce sets out in “What is Interpretation?”. I struggled to navigate the breadth and concentration Bruce balances. And so instead I offer a partial response. My hope is that it nonetheless captures in some small way what it was like to be taught by Bruce: the intimidation that comes from exposure to the chaos of the text and its endless expanse of intertextual connections, but also the excitement and energy produced as Bruce guides us through the chaos, giving students the vantage to see where a text’s part might fit into wider literary, intellectual and social wholes.

Bruce begins the lecture when Dryden, still an Anglican, is seeking out a way that he and other English gentlemen might read the Bible for themselves. To Catholics who assert that the “right to interpret” lies with their Church alone, the poet answers:

Dryden’s vision of the Bible does not only reject Catholicism, which requires its adherents to submit to the absolute authority of the priestly interpreter. It also rejects non-conforming varieties of Protestantism, in which unchecked personal interpretations flaunt the suggestion of external authority by their very nature. In Dryden’s mind, extending latitude to this extent cannot help but foment political upheaval. “Needful” sets the limits to Dryden’s middle way. The Bible makes plain what its readers need to know and leaves obscure those aspects of revelation beyond earthly requirement or comprehension at the moment of reading. For Dryden, the Bible is “Neither so rich a treasure to forgo”, nor do its proper readers “proudly seek beyond our power to know” (II.429–30). He does not resign the text to the hands of the priests, but nor does he allow its largesse to be spread equally.

In place of the absolutism of Catholic interpretive doctrine or the radically democratic reading practice of Nonconformists, Dryden seeks a hierarchy of readerly merit. Those like the learned friend to whom he showed “Religio Laici” before publishing it know more and so interpret better. These men – and for Dryden they are all men – are fashioned by nature as teachers:

The learning these elite readers carry gives them the scope to see where the part touches the whole. They can find the plainest path to this point by cutting away interpretations based on “genuine sense” from those adulterated by self-satisfied verbal and intellectual display.

Dryden’s emphasis on textual criticism as a means to find the truth marks a shift away from sacerdotal authority and towards the kind of authority established by the humanist teacher. By distilling centuries-long hermeneutic battles into sets of heroic couplets, Dryden holds them up as sententiae. The simultaneous reach and compactness of the couplets displays his learning, brandishing his pedagogic authority. In the tradition of humanist education, sententiae are also the basis for further thought and instruction. At once plain and gnomic, they convey a lesson but also stimulate further discussion and debate.3 With them, the poem becomes by its own criteria a suitable vehicle to interpret and teach Biblical interpretation.

It is in the poet’s approach to the nature of sense that his humanism meets the intellectual method proffered by the New Science. As an early, if inactive, member of the Royal Society, Dryden would have understood “sense” as both the means and product of perception; the sensed data upon which one reasons and the resulting sense of the object perceived.4 But the poem keys into a further sense of sense. In “Religio Laici”, the term appears six times, three of them modified (as “human sense” in two cases or “genuine sense” here). As Dryden uses and repeats these collocations, “sense” comes to invoke that smoke of the Godhead that is given off by the text of the Bible; that stokes reasoning but cannot be contained by it; the full heat of which the reader intuits but understands only partially.

 The modification that “human” performs keeps the Promethean promise of this sense in check. We can only grasp God in the world and the word by invoking the “Infinite”, a term that Dryden concedes acknowledges one’s inability to fully comprehend God’s magnificence. Putting “genuine” before sense registers its limits and requirements and transmutes them so that they set the standard for textual interpretation. As such, a “genuine sense” possesses empirical protocols and rests on a body of established learning. Above all it is aware that fidelity to the text and a clear reckoning of the outer limits of human reach mark the point, in Alexander Pope’s phrase, “where sense and dullness meet”.5

Dryden’s “genuine sense” is a good starting point for describing the experience of being taught by Bruce. In the lecture and in the way Bruce models and teaches criticism, the genuine comes to define a habit of noticing that is precisely attuned to the poem, aware of the history of its composition and transmission, and alert to all manner of possible precursors and intertextual interlocutors. In a lecture that shows a poet thinking through how the limits to this sense might be reached and pushed and then revising them in precisely the way he first thought they could not be revised, Bruce leaves his students forever changed by their awareness that the text before us might not be fully comprehensible at that moment, if ever. Despite this there is no doubt in the manner Bruce teaches that our interpretations remain important. In Bruce’s care and precision we find that there are ways to touch the intellectual, aesthetic and social firmament of the text that can radically shift and expand our sense of our sense.

There is a communitarian aspect to this approach, an acknowledgement that interpretation is a transhistorical enterprise, and, as such, no one interpreter or interpretation can be all encompassing. As the lecture unfolds, it becomes clear that each interpretive effort should be approached with even-handedness and judged on how well the terms it sets meet and amplify the terms of the text. We see this principle put into practice in the rare respect Bruce shows student essays. He treats our enthusiasms, our leaps of fancy – however sophomoric – our missteps and misreading with seriousness. Anyone who has been taught by Bruce immediately recognises the letters he wrote in response to our work, his refined hand drawing us into the community of interpreters by engaging us as if we were part of it already – and thanking us, sincerely, for our attempts. The interpretive habit imparted in these letters, as in Bruce’s lectures, is formed from the kind of concentrated attention that can only be sustained if one reads and cites ecumenically – catholically, not as Dryden at first would have it, but in its original inclusive sense.

I hope this accounts for why I had such difficulty responding to the critical history Bruce’s lecture traces. From Dryden, Bruce moves to Jonathan Edwards and Friedrich Schleiermacher, covering Heidegger, Hobbes, Bishop Lowth, Richard Hooker, Kant, Darwin, Freud, Walter Benjamin, Trotsky, W.E.B. Du Bois, Derrida and others along the way, stopping briefly to rout Stephen Greenblatt and the narrowness of an archaeo-historicist criticism, which seems narrower still when set against the expansive terrain Bruce traverses.

As I chafed against the edges of my reading and understanding, I found some comfort in Bruce’s invocation of Jonathan Edwards’ A Divine and Supernatural Light (1733). Pushing against his Puritan background and its emphasis on the gradual preparation for conversion, Edwards makes a claim for the immediacy with which God imparts spiritual knowledge. For Edwards, this knowledge is so present in the text that “persons with an ordinary degree of knowledge are capable” of being “taught by the Spirit of God, as well as learned men”. The distinction Dryden insisted upon between those “Born to instruct” and those to be “taught” collapses in Edwards’ sermon. In Bruce’s account, this parity points to a theory of reading that “lifts us beyond our peculiar limitations into an intersubjective, supra-subjective realm in which language releases us from our selves” (2).

The notion that reading offers a sense of communion clarifies why so much anxiety has surrounded the act. Historically, interpretation was not simply the basis for confessional politics but civic life. Those who controlled access to the world of the text and its hermeneutic processes exerted a clear influence on how societies were organised, how communities were formed, how hierarchies were assembled or challenged. I was introduced to this idea in Bruce’s lectures and it has shaped my work on the literary histories of sovereignty, immigration and statecraft ever since. As with all of Bruce’s lectures – at least as I experienced them – the idea that interpretation has civic and spiritual aspects closely linked to its critical methods worked its way on me over time.

The point where interpretation meets the world beyond the page, like the perdurable effects of Bruce’s pedagogy, is captured by the way reading moves us beyond ourselves in Edwards’ interpretive theology. At the moment of release we gain perspective, clocking both the potential range and exacting demands of the task, its importance and the modest part we play. We thrill to the smallest details and the connections such details open up. These connections take in the non-literary aspects of language, its communicative and organisational functions. (A.E. Housman reminds us that “Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else”.6) They also span outwards to a textual world not limited by known channels of influence or scholarship.

As a guide Bruce offers a mode of literary interpretation that echoes both Richard Simon’s interpretation of the Bible and Darwin’s interpretation of the book of nature. Bruce urges us to interpret literary texts as a “radically confused and partial stratigraphy, a writing in layers, each of which, extant and lost, reaches beyond itself into other texts in which it is subject to very different confusions and metamorphoses” (5–6). In seminars Bruce carried a stratigraphic map on A3 paper, held down by a can of Diet Coke. He showed us that the good interpreter is a geologist not a miner, an observer of the layers, not one who bores through them looking for that single vein of ore.

Since graduating, my discussions with Bruce have often circled back to the point of origin for his history of interpretation, Biblical hermeneutics. And so here I want to return to one of the central ideas traced through his lecture: that, from the Enlightenment onwards, “the resemblance of human and divine authorship grows ever variously closer” (2). “Variously” does some heavy lifting in this maxim, hinting at the radical upheaval of thought required to apply the methods for reading the Bible to literary works. For Bruce, Dryden provides a good starting point for this history because he can be thought of as “an early English harbinger” (2) of Schleiermacher, the German theologian and textual scholar who founded the modern discipline of hermeneutics by turning its Biblical focus to all texts and modes of communication.

The sacred origins of interpretation continue to shape perceptions of literature and its status, as they do the authority of the critic and her task. In this essay I want to look at two moments in the history of interpretation, united as much by my interest as anything else, where the sacred vestiges of textual scholarship confront readers trying to negotiate the value of literature and its relation to their religious identity. The first occurs after Dryden’s conversion when his search for the original text leads him and other Christian Hebraists to confront a Hebrew-speaking God, whose Rabbinic interpreters they attempt to supplant. The second occurs when an early generation of Jewish critics naturalised to the republic of American letters began to reclaim the value of this Rabbinic gestalt for the discipline of English literary studies. I have none of Bruce’s range, but these two layers raise interesting questions about transmission and tradition, the ethos of the critic, and the social place of interpretation. My intent in considering them is to find by Bruce’s light a way to read that resists the neatness of any one system, the limits of a single context, and (not so implicitly) the drive to specialisation that marks the teaching and practice of interpretation today.

Literature and the Layman’s Faith

Canvassing the errors made “Both in the copier’s and translator’s trade” (I.249), Dryden cannot see how any religion can stake its authority on a unique capacity to possess and interpret the original Biblical text. In “Religio Laici”, this misguided belief in textual fidelity applies equally to “Jewish” and “Popish” interests, to the “rabbins’ old sophisticated ware” – the arcane rigours of Talmudic exegesis that “make algebra a sport” – and to the “country curates” who without any knowledge of Hebrew “make most learn’d quotations” (ll.237–43). Any interest in the purity of text is folly; and a disturbing folly at that, because this interest sets itself against the central insight of Dryden’s Anglicanism: that each person’s interpretive ability is sufficient for their salvation. Dryden is confident that it is both “safe” and “modest” to say

For Simon the corruptions found in the Biblical text are unmistakeable evidence that readers should seek guidance in “Tradition”. Dryden takes the opposing position. Following Tillotson, he maintains that the Scriptures, though in parts corrupted, are sufficiently whole and plain. Dryden introduces “needful” not simply as the limit point of an Anglican via media but to convey the idea that this middle way is individuated. There is enough clarity in the Bible to give lay interpreters what they need according to their ability to interpret it. Each reader has enough to sustain their faith. At this stage in his thinking, Dryden holds that tradition should work to confirm individual belief and judgement, rather than determining them a priori.

Dryden’s poem does not deny the importance of tradition. Rather, it urges readers to seek it for themselves, a process that involves cultivating communities of other readers (in person, through the national church and in print) against whose interpretations they can temper their own. The ideas of other readers do not impinge on one’s faith, but form a communion encompassed by the national church. “Religio Laici” is in and of itself a community-building exercise, giving Dryden’s extensive lay readership a shared point of interpretive contact. Access is crucial. It is the reason for translating the Bible into English, a justification for interpreting the Bible in verse, both of which strengthen the ties of national communion.

Poetry’s immediacy and reach present a problem after Dryden’s conversion to Catholicism. To Catholics the arcana of the original text are a source of clerical authority. And the poet himself questions the reverence of directly interpreting the Bible in verse. In the preface to “The Hind and the Panther”, Dryden cites intense partisanship as the reason for why his earlier idea of a community of readers cannot work in practice:

Six years earlier, in the preface to “Absalom and Achitophel” (1681), Dryden vaunted the ability of verse satire to win over opponents, however gradually: “There is a sweetness in good verse that tickles while it hurts; and no man can be heartily angry with him who pleases him against his will” (156). Read against this, the preface to “The Hind and the Panther” shows Dryden’s loss of confidence in the suasive capacity of verse. In the account of the poem that follows, this loss of confidence leads Dryden to separate the poem’s aesthetic and argumentative aspects. Because the first part of “The Hind and the Panther” consists in “general characters and narration” the poet feels comfortable giving it “the turn of heroic poesy”. Because the second part “concerns church authority” Dryden is obliged to make it “as plain and perspicuous” as possible, subordinating aesthetic considerations to argumentative clarity. The third part is a familiar “conversation”. It works on a personal level at justifying and so encouraging a conversion to Catholicism, a task that transcends the heroic and the poetic. In concert the poem’s three parts stage and vindicate a reversal in the poet’s interpretive practices – one that requires Dryden maintain more separation between poetic beauty and religious polemic than he had in “Religio Laici”.

The poem takes the form of a beast fable, with the Panther standing for the Anglican Church, the Hind the Catholic Church, and the varieties of non-conforming Protestantisms represented by a host of other animals. When the Hind and the Panther speak to each other in the poem’s final part they also speak in fables: the Panther uses the fable of the Swallows to depict the internecine squabbles of English Catholics (though she does so in a way that ends up representing English Catholicism more positively than she would like). The Hind responds with the fable of the Pigeons and the Buzzard (Anglican cleric Gilbert Burnet), which depicts the dangers of the clergy opposing the authority of the Catholic King James II. The embedding of fables within fables gives the poem a Midrashic tenor. The tales encode their own interpretation, as does the poem. Contra “Religio Laici”, it is less a vehicle for a particular reading of the Bible than an allegorised depiction of reading itself. The figure of the Hind renders simplicity, humility and grace the virtues of a particularly Catholic mode of interpretation. These values are absent in the Panther who, at the poem’s close, shows that those who claim they are most open – most susceptible to reason and good sense – are in fact the least receptive of readers. Hearing the Hind’s tale, the Panther sighs into “affected yawnings” (III.1291) before settling herself into the complacent sleep of the satisfied status quo.

The interpretive virtues of the Hind are a product of her faith in tradition. No longer a body against which to confirm individual sense, the idea of tradition revised in the poem is one transmitted via the hierarchy of the Church to the lay reader. The Panther acknowledges apostolic tradition but tests it against scripture. The Hind, on the other hand, interprets scripture according to tradition, stressing that the lack of an external point of authority is not simply the source for sectarian disputes within Protestantism but the source of England’s political and civic divisions.

In “Religio Laici”, such slavish adherence to tradition smacks of a “Popish” or even “Jewish” obsession with originality. In “The Hind and the Panther”, Dryden had to untie this knot. He had to find a way to endorse a tradition authorised by its primacy – its claim to possess the original interpretation of the text – when doing so meant invoking the spectre of a Hebrew-speaking God and the Hebrew readers of his first books. To an extent this question is glossed over as the poem conveys an uncontroversial supercessionist view of the Testaments. “The Hind and the Panther” skirts the fact that in conversion Dryden embraced a more expansive Hebrew Bible, one that included the so-called apocryphal or deuterocanonical books. The poem is able to do so because the idea of tradition to emerge from the Hind’s appeal is something akin to common law, but with a selective view of common law’s capacity for additions and revision. The poem presents an unwavering belief in the security offered by a body of interpretation that is complete and stretches further back than any (Christian) body. This body can compensate for any gaps, corruptions or difficulties that arise with the translation of the original Biblical text. For Dryden and his new-found co-religionists there is divinity in the passing on of tradition. To challenge its authority (or even to subordinate it to individual judgement) is to make a rival claim upon that divinity and so raise man to the level of God.

Dryden may have abrogated the poet’s ultimate authority as an interpreter. Yet in order to justify his conversion (in verse) he had to return to, and offer new definitions for, two crucial terms: “sense” and “needful”. As we saw, the first established the value of poetry as a medium for practising and disseminating Biblical hermeneutics by virtue of its capacity to bring the full range of man’s ken and experience to the text. The second set the individuated limits to that range. In “The Hind and the Panther”, human sense is “imperfect” (I.ll.83), more likely to lead to doubt than knowledge. In a series of triplets Dryden yokes together the reliance on individual sense in interpretation with the indulgence of the senses, positioning both as the root cause for England’s moral decline:

The personal preference guided by individual sense (to say nothing of sensuality or sensuousness) eases traditional moral strictures, setting aside clerical celibacy, confession, fasting and penance. In the end, works of grace are themselves set aside, as more and more people follow the Calvinistic tenet that salvation is bestowed by God and cannot be altered by man’s actions to its logical but heretical conclusion that one need not do good works at all.

When the poet reaches the predetermined point where the argumentative style supplants the poetic, he finds himself less and less able to contain his argument within the bounds of the heroic couplet. Having signalled in the preface that poetry is an imperfect medium for debating the nature of Church authority because it is too concerned with beauty and the gratification of the senses, Part II renders such excess and incapacity at the level of the line. In this part Dryden increasingly relies on triplets. According to Christopher Ricks, Dryden’s triplets act as formal breaking points.7 When the verse spills into a third line in “The Hind and the Panther” it constitutes both a break and a reformation (or counter reformation). Each triplet girds the poem against the weakening of the consubstantial trinity at the same time as it exposes the sensual excesses and formal weakness of heroic poetry.

Dryden is, however, unable to dismiss sense entirely. The previous range he accorded the concept meant that doing so would be to deny something at the core of humanity. Instead, he reworks sense (not entirely convincingly), giving it a new adjective that contains it within the bounds of apostolic tradition:

In “Religio Laici”, the natural teachers are those gifted with insight and dedicated to reading as widely as possible. In “The Hind and the Panther”, the role of teaching is itself transmitted. The “sense” of the best readers (and by this virtue, teachers) is no longer preternaturally heightened, but simply received. It is this notion of transmission that the poem conveys in its allegory of reading: demonstrating and so passing to the next generation of readers what it is to be guided by a body of received wisdom, arbitrated by the Catholic Church. To inculcate this habit Dryden has to undo the idea of “needful” that previously gave lay readers their interpretive purview. Again, he does so through a triplet, showing that any Church that authorises the error-prone work of lay interpreters in effect sacralises common man to the point of heresy:

The view of interpretive tradition is one that brooks no challenge. This is not the dissensus and argument by which Rabbinic law is conveyed, where interpretation and counterinterpretation build to form a body of oral law accessible to all who are literate. It is a view that denies the lay interpreter, and sees the pleasure of poetry as a liability, not something that can tap into parts of the world, mind and soul that cannot be broached by reason alone.

The cleverness and the paradox of “The Hind and the Panther” is that the allegorical and metaphorical aspects of verse – those that rely on something beyond Dryden’s understanding of the rational – inculcate a mode of reading that is in the first place deeply uncomfortable with the pleasure poetry produces and in the second remains sceptical whether this pleasure can play a productive role in interpretive disputes. Dryden’s efforts to separate poetic and religious authority show a poet trying to arrest a process he helped set in motion: one where the interpretations of laymen issue in works that bring human and divine authorship dangerously close together.

Anglican Bishop and Oxford Professor of Poetry Robert Lowth (1710–1787) was similarly exercised by the potential conflation of divine works and human analysis. His particular concern was with the poetry of the Hebrew Bible. We saw that as an Anglican, Dryden dismissed the search for Hebrew originality as a form of primitivism; and as a Catholic, he unquestioningly accepted the interpretation of sacred Hebrew verse provided by the Church Fathers. This is perhaps why he was increasingly discomfited by poetry’s capacity to speak to the senses and ignite the passions that inflamed them. An inflammatory satirist for most of his career, he had formerly drawn on this capacity to alter the consciences of his readers.

 Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753) offer a way to interpret the constitutionally transformative aspect of poetry by seeking a form of analysis that allows precisely what the later Dryden sought to prevent: the application of humane literary analysis to works of divine authorship. In this pursuit Lowth reads Hebrew poetry as the Biblical Hebrews had – in the original – while subjecting it to methods derived from the analysis of Greek and Roman poetry. This has the effect of acknowledging the divine authorship of Biblical Hebrew verse while wresting the tools for understanding it from the hands of Rabbinic interpreters.

Lowth’s lectures are too extensive to cover in any detail here. There is, however, a moment in lecture fourteen that speaks directly to Dryden’s anxieties. Throughout the lectures, Lowth characterises Hebrew verse style as “parabolic”, a word he derives from the Hebrew mashal [משל], to mean a combination of aphoristic, metaphorical and sublime. In lecture fourteen, when discussing the sublime, Lowth makes an indirect case for why poetry can convey divine authority:

That poetic expression is driven by the passions is not necessarily a bad thing, for

Hebrew poetry is at once aphoristic and exhibits, according to Lowth, a mimetic tendency, deploying imagery of the natural world and life of the common folk that though splendid is also accessible and routine. Its power derives from the force by which it simultaneously draws one’s internal life out and the external world in – the point where the two rays meet lights the habit of perception and thereby illuminates the state of the perceiving soul. Poetry’s clarity is supra-rational; it is perspicuous by other means than prose. It offers images, fables, and metaphors that encourage the kind of interpretation able to reveal aspects of the divine author and human reader that the language of reason cannot reach.

By aestheticising and Hellenising Hebrew verse according to Longinian standards, Lowth cannot help but raise the idea that human poetry, even that written by pagans, might possess a similar power and efficacy to that written by God. For the Catholic Dryden, human writing that marshals such techniques to interpret God’s way in the world impinges on God’s role. This poetry is a power without authority, an indulgence of the senses dangerously free of the “undoubt’d sense” of doctrine. In Lowth’s view, basic literacy should prevent any categorical errors that might be caused by a literary analysis of the Bible. Even the simplest reader has to see that sacred and profane poetry are separated by style as well as substance. In the hands of this Anglican bishop, the force of verse reverts back to the “needful”: sacred poetry animates the object it represents just as it does the reader – according to the amplitude of their feeling as well as the depth of their understanding.

Naturalised Citizens

Looking back on her reading life, Vivian Gornick reflects on her changing view of poet and short story writer Delmore Schwartz. Where once she admired him, on re-reading she finds his work more significant for what it stands for in the history of American Jewish literature than what it does. In Gornick’s revised reading, Schwartz was only ever able to mix the “high-minded” and “vernacular in private”. In the idiom of evolutionary archaeology, he is a transitional form: an intermediary step before the vernacular and high-minded developed to the point of public emergence in the novels of Saul Bellow. By Gornick’s account, Schwartz was “hobbled by the tenderness he could neither honour nor abandon, forever unable to decide how much of his people he was willing to let the world pass judgement on”. Bellow, on the other hand, wanted “neither to serve high culture nor to save the Jews from embarrassment”. His driving intent was “to make the page explode with the taste of his own life: a taste that could never have made itself felt through the King’s English, it required a language all its own”.9

Gornick counts herself among the last generation of American children born to the European Jews who arrived at the turn of the twentieth century. Bellow and Schwartz come from the generation before but bear the same embarrassed angst, the same guilt produced by the same cultural dislocation that occurs when American children face their Yiddish-speaking parents. It is from this intimate perspective that Gornick distinguishes Bellow from his compatriots. Able to set aside filial pieties, he is fully naturalised without being entirely assimilated. This marks the quality of his art. Shaped by the world of his fathers, he expands the language of the new world to bring the two into relation.

The conceptual frame imposed by immigration and naturalisation captures some critical developments too. Lionel Trilling was so possessed of the King’s English that he was able to make it seem natural to him. In his essays, the urbane meets the urban as he expands the social world of interpretation beyond the country club hermeticism of New Criticism. Alfred Kazin’s criticism displays the same exuberant force and exhilarating release as Augie March’s monologing. In the contrapuntal rhythms of Trilling and Kazin beats the same base note of insistence. These are critics, like Bellow is a novelist, “born Jewish” and “awakened into America” – an awakening that Cynthia Ozick defines by the fact that they “refuse to be refused by Western history”.10 In Ozick’s account, the classic expression of this refusal comes in Bellow’s eulogy for Bernard Malamud, another refusenik. Discussing the weight of a largely Protestant canon, Bellow resists its pressure:

In the generation of critics and writers who followed Trilling and Bellow, the Hebrew Bible became the basis for claiming a Jewish place in Western history. Robert Alter, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom and Cynthia Ozick were foremost among the claimants. My focus here, though, is on Ozick, who has produced a body of interpretation exquisitely sensitive to its own place because it is attuned to the social and literary significance of multiple intellectual and interpretive traditions. Ozick’s efforts to forge a Jewish hermeneutics for literature provide some answers to the problems raised by Dryden and raise her as his unlikely heir.

The story behind the production of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), first recorded in the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates, is as follows. Ptolemy II, the ruler of Alexandria, decided that the Torah should be included in the collection of the city’s famed library. He sent gifts to the High Priest at Jerusalem who, in exchange, sent the Pharaoh seventy-two scholars: six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Each scholar was locked in his own room in Alexandria and set to the task of translation. In the end, all seventy-two produced identical translations.12 The sinews of truth prevail, but so do the bones, the flesh and all its clothes. The story accords with Dryden’s initial thought that transmission and translation will not diminish the Bible’s essential truth. However, contra Dryden’s Anglican view, the emphasis on this improbable consistency conveys the anxiety that even minor variations in translation might affect that essential truth.

Ozick argues that if we strip this story of the sacral “it encapsulates the most up-to-date thesis concerning the nature of the Hebrew Bible: that it can, after all, be read as a unity, indivisibly, like any literary work”.13 The disputes over authorship and provenance of the various books and parts of the Bible give way in the literary approach to what Robert Alter speaks of as their “moral, psychological, political and spiritual realism”. If we direct our attention to the literariness of these books, Alter writes, we open ourselves “to something that deserves to be called their authority, whether we attribute that authority solely to the power of human imagination or to a transcendent source of illumination that kindled the imagination of the writers to express itself through these particular literary means”.14 The Anglican Dryden would not have countenanced – let alone endorsed – what in Alter’s hands is the endpoint of raising poetry as a venue for Biblical hermeneutics: the application of literary analysis to the Biblical text. Even Lowth, who was the first to defend a literary analysis of the Bible, was strident in his belief that the ultimate author, the mover of its literary brilliance and technical skill, was unmistakeably divine. According to Alter’s argument, the confusion of man and God is justified for, regardless of its source, authority manifests in the same way. There is no difference between how human and divine authorship mark the page.

This apparent lack of difference – part of the Enlightenment’s legacy as Bruce lays it out – forces a choice upon Ozick. Born long after Heine’s poetry carried the Haskalah through the shtetls of Eastern Europe, Ozick and her generation did not have to choose “whether to accept cultural liberation and variety”, this much is given, “but whether to fuse that freedom with the Sinaitic challenge of distinctive restraint and responsibility that the rabbis laid out”.15 At the core of this “distinctive restraint” is an insistence on distinction-making, a maintenance of the line between God and idol, lest the creator and created become confused. In Ozick’s work this restraint guards against the reflux that occurs as the same modern exegetical tools that originated in the study of the Bible wash back over the Bible as if it were any other literary text. This lack of distinction is the source of Ozick’s famed disagreement with Harold Bloom, and the basis for her theory of interpretation.

In 1978 Bloom and Ozick were invited to take part in “an amiable discussion of the rival claims of Judaism and the aesthetic”. Bloom agreed on the condition that neither one would read from a prepared text. Bloom arrived to find that Ozick carried a hefty script that detailed the contradictions in his The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975) and A Map of Misreading (1975). When asked about the evening, Bloom’s response was “This splendid lady sandbagged me”.16 That evening and in print, Ozick took aim at Bloom’s confusion of categories. In A Map of Misreading he identified himself “as a teacher of literature who prefers the morality of the Hebrew Bible to that of Homer, indeed who prefers the Bible aesthetically to Homer”.17 For Ozick, this is a false dichotomy: “there is no morality, of the kind Bloom means, in Homer. And simply to speculate whether one might prefer the Bible ‘aesthetically’ to Homer is itself, of course, already to have chosen the Greek way: the Jewish way, confronting Torah, does not offer such a choice.”18 To consider the Bible aesthetically is to side with Athens over Jerusalem. It is to continue the decontextualising process that Lowth initiated when he considered Hebrew verse in Greek aesthetic terms.

And so despite Bloom’s professed affiliation with the Hebrew Bible, Ozick finds him standing against it. This opposition extends to the idea of transmission. The kernel of Bloom’s aesthetics is the recognition that we are all “disconsolate latecomers”, “envious and frustrated inheritors”. In Bloom’s system poets have to undo their precursor’s strength. The idea of tradition that emerges is one of productive misreading, in which poets foster modes of discontinuity that allow them to confront the brilliance of previous generations. The poet as interpreter does not so much break idols as reform them in new vessels. In contrast, Jewish liturgy, as Ozick outlines, “affirms recapturing without revision the precursor’s stance and strength”. Indeed “‘Torah’ includes the meaning of tradition and transmittal together.” Once mainstream Judaism rejected the Karaitic claim that the only source of law was the written and not oral, the modes of interpretation applied to the Hebrew Bible gained new freedom. Yet:

Every move that brings human and divine authorship closer together violates the Sinaitic pact. So where does this leave Ozick, who is a novelist as well as a critic? Can there be a Jewish aesthetic, a way to read the Hebrew Bible that affirms its literariness without subjecting it to the Hellenising imperative of aesthetic judgement? At stake in any answer to these questions is the project of refusal that drove critics of Ozick’s generation and the one before. To put it another way, the efforts of Jewish critics to become naturalised citizens of the American republic of letters without assimilating to its predominating culture hinge on presence and presentness: to live in Western culture as Christians lived in the Hebrew Bible without forgetting that these Jewish critics stood at the foot of Sinai with all other generations before and after.

Ozick’s essay on The Book of Job sketches an interpretive method that might fuse the Enlightenment legacy of “cultural liberation” with the call of the Rabbis for “restraint” and “responsibility”. Ozick’s fundamental premise is that Job is “timeless because its author intended it so”; “timeless the way Lear on the heath is timeless (and Lear may owe much to Job)”. The author, an anonymous Hebrew poet, renders an old folktale so sublimely universal by ensuring that Job himself lacks identification. He speaks beautiful Hebrew, yet is not a Hebrew. His customs are unfamiliar and yet he is not Pagan, for the story is governed by the actions of a monotheistic God. And it is the challenge to retain belief in this God’s omnibenevolence in the face of unjustifiable suffering that gives the story the aspect of universality, calling forth “a questioning so organic to our nature that no creed or philosophy can elude it”.20

The comprehensiveness of the story allows Ozick to suggest that it possesses a kind of supervening influence over the Western literary tradition. (In Ozick’s argumentative shorthand this tradition is represented by Greek and Shakespearean tragedy.) In the process of establishing Job’s universality or eternal presentness Ozick comes up against the same interpretive crux that faced Dryden in “Religio Laici”. That is, the story does not come to us bare. The history of its composition, transmission, redaction and translation, how it came to be included in the Hebrew Bible all intrude, as do the commentaries of theologians both Jewish and Christian: Rashi, Maimonides, Saadia Gaon, Gregory, Aquinas, Calvin. There is in the third place a mass of “philological evidence” that places the story in a particular time and place, showing “intrusions from surrounding ancient cultures” that shaped it. All of this seems to militate against the book’s “common largesse”, requiring readers to possess specialist knowledge. Suddenly Job seems neither comprehensive nor easily comprehensible – the meaning of the two interlinked. The long histories of philological and theological knowledge that form the basis for any interpretation of The Book of Job distance the text, removing it so that it becomes “triumphantly intolerant”, the rightful attitude of High Culture according to art historian Jed Perl.21

Ozick insists that the complex and recondite histories of translation, transmission and interpretation “will not deeply unsettle the common reader” of Job. To justify this position and with it the “common largesse” of the Book, she proves herself a deeply uncommon reader. Ozick canvasses the names for God used in Job, showing its author’s preference for Pre-Israelite names over the Tetragrammaton, an observation that is “veiled” by translation. She shows how the depiction of Satan as an adversary bears Persian and Zoroastrian influences. She notes that the Book’s focus on personal over collective conduct draws parts of Job closer to Near Eastern Wisdom literature and folk philosophy than to the other books that make up the Hebrew Bible. Such knowledge, however, proves itself somewhat superfluous when Ozick finds herself seized by precisely those “passages that violently contradict what all the world, yesterday and today, takes for ordinary wisdom”.22 The common reader, who Ozick also calls the naked reader or novice reader, might have the advantage in this regard. For it is the novice readers who “come to Job’s demands and plaints unaccoutered”, who “perceive God’s world exactly as Job perceives it”. Ozick does not so much do away with Dryden’s readerly hierarchy as attempt to conflate it. Contorting herself into naivety, Ozick claims with the novices that “Job’s bewilderment will be ours, and our kinship to his travail fully unveiled, only if we are willing to absent ourselves from the accretion of centuries of metaphysics, exegesis, theological polemics”.23

Ozick’s self-levelling is at first glance a fiction – like the physicist’s frictionless plane. She cannot unlearn what she knows, but she can imagine what it might be to slough it off momentarily in order to perceive, with Job, the central insight of his experience. The question Job asks God: how can the deity permit injustice? and God’s non answer sparks Job’s realisation: ‘“I have uttered what I did not understand,’ he acknowledges, ‘things too wonderful for me, which I did not know’”. His new knowledge, according to Ozick, is this: “that a transcendent God denies us a god of our own devising, a god that we would create out of our own malaise, or complaint, or desire, or hope, or imagining”.24 The voice out of the whirlwind calls all readers of the Book that purports to contain this voice to remain to some degree naive, humbling themselves before the text.

The humbling that Ozick endorses and practises is a vital precondition to her interpretation. It allows her to maintain the distinction Lowth insisted upon, approaching the sacred by finding in Hebrew scripture a literary artistry equal to its divine source. Where Alter sees the words on the page to be the same, regardless of their origin, Ozick finds a grain of difference. To her the ideas expressed in Job:

The question suggests its answer. The tools Ozick uses to separate God and idol, the Bible and literature are literary critical. Her method is comprehensive. She is acculturated to the forms and techniques of Rabbinic knowledge, has read the works of the Church Fathers alongside Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. Above all, she takes from Torah a view in which transmission and tradition are one and the same. As with Job’s first readers we need comfort in the face of a comfortless book. For Ozick the mode of its transmission and history of its interpretation coalesce to place us on the plane of an eternal present, along with all readers before and after us. She concludes her essay with a declamation: “how astoundingly up-to-date they are, those ancient sages – redactors and compilers – who opened even the sacred gates of Scripture to philosophic doubt!”25 The closest thing to shedding the centuries of interpretation and textual criticism is to have a tradition that allows for the entrance of textual and philosophic doubt. It is tradition that leaves one naked. With Job we question. Like him, we are given no clear answer from his Book save for that “primal monotheistic insight”: that God is not a god of our devising.

The desire to return to a naive or naked form is in itself a quest for origins. To Ozick, this does not imply a Gnostic or Kabbalistic imperative, in which to search for origins is to establish a rival claim upon them and thus issue an antinomian challenge to the Church Fathers or the Rabbis. It is more earthly than that. It is also speculative: so much so, that Ozick offers it to us not as an essay but an “Inkling”, “a First Inkling”:

Mica is embedded in geologic history as well as in the pavement fashioned out of the earth. It also has, quite literally, an enlightened character; it seems lit from above. Its name is one shift of stress away from the later prophet, one whom Ozick associates with Job.

The shards spark Ozick’s early memory of her childhood during the Depression, of how she wondered what it was like to be a baby, to embody the perspective of each and every animal, to speak every language on earth. It is the play of light, and sky and earth that sets her wondering: “I wondered why my shadow had a shape that was me, but nothing else; why my shadow, which was almost like a mirror, was not a mirror”. She wonders why she thinks these things, feels in the sense of wonder something akin to but separate from love as she has experienced it. It is only decades later that she realises what “shone up out of the mica-eyes” when she read Wordsworth’s “Prelude”:

In Ozick’s mind:

The inkling then becomes a question:

The image of the mica is a nice complement to Bruce’s view of literary texts as “a radically confused and partial stratigraphy”. The glints of mica – individual, particular – shine out, revealing the layers around them. In the process they show how the layers reach into each other. As the mica is absorbed and moved it becomes, to adapt Bruce’s words, “subject to very different confusions and metamorphoses”. Ozick’s preoccupation is with the moral force behind such metamorphoses. Her essays and inklings offer an expanded idea of interpretive origins. Not as piously circumscribed as “The Hind and the Panther”, the sense she intuits is deeper than the human sense of “Religio Laici”. It is mammalian. Yet she faces the same conundrum that the form and message of “Religio Laici” unwittingly set forth. As divine and human authorship move closer together, literature becomes something of a rival faith. Ozick’s particular solution to the idolatrous potential of literature is a view of interpretation as a distinguishing power. This view guides her as novelist as well as critic, underwriting her belief that literature must have a redemptive power, what she calls a moral corona. To the critic this corona provides “that steady interpretive light” that allows one to make distinctions, to find where creation has purpose and where it flexes its might to the point of idolatry.

Regardless of one’s moral convictions or religious creed, Ozick’s work illumines what is at stake in the process of interpretation, and why it is so hard to teach. At its best it is simultaneously rigorous and wonderful. It is comprehensive and yet discriminating. It can draw out the universal and yet it is doggedly and uncompromisingly particular. The negotiation of these competing forces is, for me, where the “genuine” in Dryden’s formulation meets and morphs into the generous in Bruce’s teaching. As with mica and Micah, the words themselves catch the light of the eye in similar ways. Seek out their origins and both genuine and generous find root in the Latin gignere “to beget, produce”. There is a moral scrupulousness in the detail of Bruce’s lectures. But it is his willingness to engage us, the particular and individual interest he has shown our interpretations, that has shaped more than how we read. Bruce’s productive generosity has shaped how many of us think. The expanded sense of interpretation traced here – one that reaches across perception, intuition, wonder, delight, doubt, submission and recognition so that it fundamentally orients our existence “to things existing” – cannot be contained by a modern university classroom. To teach it is a burden greater than the one Dryden acknowledged. Bruce has borne it and all of us collected in this volume – and countless others – are its grateful beneficiaries.

​Bibliography