Renaissance Forum: v2no1 (Spring 1997): Ceri Sullivan

Thomas H. Luxon. 1995. Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Renaissance Crisis in Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 260 pp. ISBN 0-226-49785-2. $28.00.

What was a Puritan literalist such as Bunyan doing, writing allegory yet wrestling with the problem of the literal? Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Renaissance Crisis in Representation deals with a faith which has produced many allegorical interpretations of itself, while boasting a rallying cry of literalism.
Luxon starts with the most extreme of situations: where interpretations of the self were affected by 'radical hyperliteral enormities' (x). Examining Puritans such as William Franklin and Mary Gadbury (acclaimed respectively as Christ and his Spouse in 1649), Thomas Tany (who in 1649 moved rapidly up the hierarchy from being the high priest of the Jews, to becoming the King of England, then of France, and finally the King of the Jews), and John Roberts (simply Adam, as of 1650), Luxon shows how the early interregnum was blessed by many such direct manifestations of the spirit. The Pauline insistence that 'Christ liveth in me' was interpreted literally by them, a 'doctrinal privileging of experience over notions' (4), even while the ontological realms of God and humanity were kept strictly apart. The former necessarily then requires a allegorical mode of representation. This Luxon sees as the central paradox of Puritan hermeneutics: an experiential attitude towards the workings of the spirit is set against a commitment to the absolute separation between this world and the the next. Differences in rank and gender indicate how far the Puritan reader might take Cranmer's encouragement to find themselves in the Scriptures, how far they might interpret literally; the tropic is reserved for the educated male.
In a closely-argued chapter, Luxon does some ground-clearing, warning against an acceptance by Barbara Lewalski and Erich Auerbach of the Puritan claim that typology did not constitute allegory. Typology, the symbolic application of biblical history to contemporary events, divides the Bible into 'things' which signify themselves and 'things' which mean because of their reference to other events (the terms are Augustine's). 'The "things" of this world are only things allegorically speaking.' (37) Thus, in typology the things of the Bible are read allegorically, with reference to the 'things' of today, themselves merely shadows of what is to come. 'The rhetoric of fulfillment' (39) in the Gospels announces that performance has not yet been completed, the promised ideal is not yet present, regardless of whether the allegory there is divinely authored and interpreted. 'The real reality signified in typology turns out to be every bit as ahistorical, spiritual, eternal, timeless, ever present (and so, historically speaking, ever absent) as God and his majesty, the very things typology was first defined as prohibited from figuring.' (53)
Having established the practical effects of typology, and examined its theoretical backing in the early modern period, Luxon turns to early Reformation leaders' arguments about whether Christianity as a whole was always in crisis over representation. In particular they work hard to explain away Paul's 'new-birth midrash' on the Old Testament, that members of the new Christian community 'are not children of the bondwoman but of the free', referring to Abraham's two wives (Galatians 4:22-31). Commentaries by Tyndale, Luther, and Calvin produce modifications on each other's views of this Pauline allegory, ending with William Perkins's statement that any sense that can be construed as authorized by the Holy Spirit is the literal sense, the 'one full and intire sense of every place of scripture'. Typology, concludes Luxon, is a euphemism. How to read truly becomes a particularly pressing issue when it is the self which is being read. 'The Protestant self is both reader and text; the Protestant's God is both author and exegesis.' (103)
The second half of the book concentrates on The Pilgrim's Progress and Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Here Luxon suggests that early modern concepts of identity are based on allegorical schemes of being. Stanley Fish designates The Pilgrim's Progress as 'the ultimate self-consuming artifact, for the insights it yields are inseparable from the demonstration of the inadequacy of its own forms, which are also the forms of the reader's understanding' (130). Luxon suggests that Fish's scepticism about language and forms of understanding are implicit in seventeenth-century religious writing, just as much as in twentieth-century deconstruction. Bunyan's work is anxious about whether language can adequately represent spiritual experience. 'One's words are inevitably othered by utterance, floating free from one's intention', so that other people's words will always prove allegorical to the hearer, as in Bunyan's reponse to the Justice who asked him why he absented himself from divine service: 'I said that those prayers in the Common Prayerbook, was [sic]such as was made by other men, and not by the motions of the Holy Ghost, within our hearts' (138). The groan of the person who prays is the true invitation to the Spirit to enter and replace the old self: the new birth where the self becomes an allegory of the Other within. Bunyan explores the allegorization of the self, when 'virtually the entire plot of [The Pilgrim's Progress] is generated by a string of occasions in which the pilgrim characters temporarily forget the allegorical status of their experiences in this world' (160). They are only rescued by sudden acts of grace which reread these events for them. In the same way the reader of Bunyan's words must understand their insufficiency, and refuse to literalize them in her understanding, creating what Luxon calls 'an anti-hermeneutic theology' (168).
I found this a most elegantlyexpressed and intelligent argument, well-grounded in theology and more concerned to engage with Reformation and Puritan divines than cite recent critical arguments about the self. It lit up the uneasy insistence characteristic of Bunyan's allegorizing. Luxon takes the time to examine the topos in detail before moving on to a reading of Bunyan, drawing on historical evidence, Church fathers, early Reformation writers and interregnum tracts. This lets the reader meditate on the theological implications of allegory in sites other than Bunyan, and understand the central arguments about representation which have always engaged Christian thinkers.

CERI SULLIVAN
UNIVERSITY OF WALES BANGOR