12

The Plain Sense of Things

A meditation that starts from the beautiful Stevens poem quoted at the outset, this essay was written in 1984 as a contribution to a conference on midrash at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It first appeared in a collection of much more learned papers than mine, edited by Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick and called Midrash and Literature (1986). Once again it tries to stretch questions of biblical interpretation to cover other sorts, and in doing so it relies on authorities that have not always gone unchallenged. But once again it seemed worth a try, even though the effort probably exposes one to learned criticism; one can never know enough to avoid that entirely.

 

My title is taken from a poem by Wallace Stevens:

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to the end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

 

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

 

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

 

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

 

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

This is a late poem by Stevens, but it continues a meditation that began much earlier. In its own very idiosyncratic way that meditation echoes a central theme of modern philosophy. The plain sense is itself metaphorical; there is no escape from metaphor; univocity in language is no more than a dream. The position is familiar, and the interest of Stevens’ poem is that he is not so much affirming it as suggesting the movement of mind that accompanies its consideration. He is especially conscious of the extraordinary effort required even to imagine, to find language for, the plain sense of things and hold the language there for the briefest moment: worth trying, he seems to say, but impossible, this attempt to behold ‘nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’. To make the attempt, he said in the earlier poem I have just quoted (‘The Snow Man’), is ‘to have a mind of winter’ (CP, p. 9). Only such a mind, a snowman’s mind, could attend to the frozen trees without adding to them some increment of language, of humanity, even if that increment is misery.

Such a moment, of unattainable absolute zero, is anyway only to be imagined as a phase in a cyclical process. Language, always metaphorical, falsifies the icy diagram, corrupts by enriching the plain sense, which can only be thus corruptly or distortedly expressed. ‘Not to have is the beginning of desire’ (‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, CP, p. 382); and so metaphor, like spring, adorns the icy diagram; only when that desire is satisfied do we grow tired of summer lushness and welcome the fall and winter again. So the plain sense continually suffers change, and if it did not it would grow rigid and absurd. It must change, or it will simply belong ‘to our more vestigial states of mind’ (‘Notes’, CP, p. 392). But change is inevitable anyway, since the effort we make to attend to plain sense itself takes away the plainness. That this is the case may distress philosophers who want to be able to distinguish the literal from the metaphorical, but it is nevertheless a source of poetry: ‘Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace, / And forth the particulars of rapture come’ (‘Notes’, CP, p. 392). The imagination’s commentary is a part of the text as we know it – that is, distorted by metaphor, by secondary elaboration. This is what Stevens means when he speaks of the effect of the gaiety of language on the natives of poverty (‘L’Esthetique du Mal’): the games, fictions, metaphors which accommodate the plain sense to human need. Without such ‘makings’, as he calls them, the world is just ‘waste and welter’ (‘The Planet on the Table’, CP, p. 532). And the makings are themselves part of a reality more largely conceived, of a whole which is not merely or not always poor; the words of the world are the life of the world.

In the poem at the opening of this essay there is a winter, a due season, a world stripped of imaginative additions, so cold that it resists our adjectives. The summer world made by our imagination is now a ruin; the effort has ended in failure. So, difficult though it may be, one tries to find an adjective for blankness, a tropeless cold. But to say ‘no turban’ is to introduce a turban, something exotic, a gift of imagination; the floors, though lessened, are still fully there; the structure is still a house. Imagination wants a decrepit greenhouse, a tottering chimney; blankness itself becomes a pond, and the pond has lilies and a rat. ‘The absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.’ The pond has reflections, leaves, mud, as real a pond as imagination at the best of times could imagine. All these things have to be added to the plain sense if we want it; it is not to be had without comment, without poetry.

It may seem that I have begun this essay at a great distance from any topic that might be thought appropriate to the occasion of its writing, for I was asked to write about the Jewish interpretative practice of midrash and its relation – if any – to the interpretation of poetry more generally. In poetry there is often a plain sense and also senses less plain: we might risk saying, a sense corresponding to peshat, and others corresponding to midrash. But we know that midrash and peshat are also an intrinsic plural; that the play, might one say even the gaiety, of the one is required to give a human sense to the inaccessible mystery of the other. And it is on the other instances of this collaboration that I shall be expatiating. So it seems sensible enough to begin with a poet who saw so well the relations between plain sense and human need – saw it not as a philosopher or a hermeneutician, but rather as his own major man might, though the major man would understand wholly the supreme fiction in which plain sense and trope, truth and fiction, are finally apprehended as a unity, and the world stops. (Stevens sometimes thought of this major man as a rabbi.) For him the kind of poetry Eliot said he wanted would be a part, but only a part, of poetry: ‘poetry standing in its own bare bones, or poetry so transparent that we should see not the poetry, but what we are meant to see through the poetry’.¹ Note that in speaking of this impossible nakedness or transparency the poet has to imagine a skeleton and a window. The most arduous effort to express the poetry of plain sense brings with it its own metaphors, its own distortions. There are, as Freud would have said, considerations of representability, there are secondary elaborations, there are fortuitous inessentials, days’ residues; he might have agreed with Augustine that some things are there for the sake of the sense but not constitutive of the sense. And our only way to catch a glimpse of the sense is by attending to the inevitable distortions.

Northrop Frye remarks that the literal sense of a poem is the whole poem.² And the whole which constitutes the literal sense may not be a single poem; nor need that whole be the same for everybody. A canon may define the whole, and the same parts may figure in different canons. For Christian commentators the Psalms belong to a whole different from the whole to which they belong for Jewish commentators; they may agree that there are messianic psalms, but the plain sense of such psalms must be different for each, since the whole text of the Christian shows the fulfilment of the messianic promises. Herbert’s poem ‘The Holy Scriptures (II)’ compares the separate texts of the Bible to a constellation, and remarks on the remote interactions of the verses:

This verse marks that, and both do make a motion
Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie …

But for some, though they might accept the principle, those ten leaves are not in their copies. The expression Son of man occurs in Psalms 8:4, and modern scholars agree that it means simply ‘man’, and that it ought not to be thought of in relation to the apocalyptic sense of the phrase in Daniel or the passages in the New Testament which seem to derive from Daniel. But, as John Barton says, the case would be different if the New Testament had happened to cite the passage from the psalm for christological purposes;³ and in any case it seems unlikely that less scholarly Christians, coming upon these words or hearing them sung in church on the first day of the month, will quite exclude from their thoughts the resonances of New Testament usage.

So the whole, by which the sense of the part is to be determined, varies between the religions and the canons. And there is a further extension of context, which, since it will recur in my argument, I shall mention now. The Roman Catholic Church affirms the authority of the magisterium over all interpretation, and the Church is the custodian of a Tradition; so that to the two parts of the Christian Bible one adds a third contextual element, and the whole that determines the plain sense of the part is thus extended.

However, we need not confine the question thus: for it is clear that different people at different times will form their own notions of the relations between parts, and between parts and wholes. For example, some will maintain that christological interpretations of Old Testament texts are valid only when they have been made in the New Testament; others, a great army of them over the centuries, think otherwise. And the language in which each person or party expresses the sense of the text will necessarily be figurative. The plain sense is not accessible to plain common sense. That is why it has been possible to say, ‘The plain sense is hidden’. Luther believed that ‘the Holy Spirit is the plainest writer and speaker in heaven and earth’, but we may well sympathize with Erasmus, who wanted to know ‘if it is all so plain, why have so many excellent men for so many centuries walked in darkness?’⁴

The expression plain sense, as I am using it, covers the overlapping ideas of literal sense, grammatical sense, and historical sense. It is also a usual translation of peshat. The most obvious indication that the plain sense is not a universal and unequivocal property of mankind is that it resists translation from one language into another. A well-known example is John Lyons’ demonstration of the difficulty of finding a French equivalent for ‘the cat sat on the mat’; the nouns are troublesome but the verb is worse, since English does not adjudicate between the senses, in French, of s’assit, s‘est assis(e), s’asseyait.⁵ I shall return to the cat in another connection, but the present point is that plain senses can be tricky to translate. Bruno Bettelheim laments that Freud’s English translators alter his sense by refusing to use the word soul.⁶ But the senses of that word in English are very different from those of its German cognate; soul would often be wrong in English. Bettelheim is especially bitter that the translators of the Standard Edition have smuggled in a new word, very technical sounding, to translate Besetzung, namely ‘cathexis’. But would ‘occupation’ or ‘investment’ really do the work? And how should we deal with Überbesetzung? No doubt ‘hypercathexis’ gives a different idea, but it is probably closer to Freud’s sense than ‘overinvestment’, and the same must be true of ‘anticathexis’.

These minor discrepancies are perhaps emblematic of much larger ones. Psychoanalysis changed when it moved from the Viennese into other cultures, and it can never again be what it was in pre-war Europe; like other religions it was fissile even in its early stages, and different sects and individuals have always found different plain senses in the original deposits of doctrine. There are obvious parallels in Christianity. Jerome began it, offering hebraica veritas, and Greek truth also, but in Latin. Thereafter logos became verbum, and verbum became so firm a part of the theological tradition that when Erasmus, with good philological justification, translated logos as sermo he got into trouble; for verbum seemed to match the required plain sense as sermo, a surprising novelty, could not. On the other hand More attacked Tyndale for giving ‘love’ instead of ‘charity’ for agape; but now ‘charity’ has changed its contexts and ‘love’ is preferred.⁷ The naïve desire of the New English Bible translators to provide plain-sense equivalents for the Hebrew of the Old Testament sometimes leads them into what can fairly be called mistranslation, as in their version of the rape of Dinah by Shechem (Genesis 34:3): ‘But he remained true to Dinah.’ The sense of the Hebrew nefesh is lost, though the King James version, which has ‘And his soul clave unto Dinah’, conveys, as Hammond observes, the intensity of Shechem’s erotic feelings. ‘“Remained true” is exactly the wrong phrase since it implies fidelity and honour; the point of the story is that Shechem’s lust is not fulfilled by one act of rape.’⁸ No doubt this view could be disputed, since nefesh, according to the Lexicon, is a tremendously complicated word, and no translation could do it justice. But King James wins by not seeking a commonplace equivalent.

When whole systems of belief are involved, as in the case of the Bible they always are, the difficulties are multiplied. Christianity decided to reject Marcion and keep the Jewish Bible, and thenceforth the question of the nature of its relevance to a non-Jewish religion became a permanent problem, with much bearing on the matter of plain sense. If the Law was abrogated the relevance of the Old Testament lay primarily in its prefigurative relation to the New; it became, more or less, a repository of types. But it contained other elements not easily given up - moral instruction and a history of God’s providence and promises. And from quite early times there was some resistance to the copious allegorizing of the Alexandrian tradition, some respect for the sensus historicus. The school of Antioch limited allegorical interpretation to the sort of thing licensed by Paul, for example in his reading of the story of the sons of Sarah and Hagar. Theodore of Mopsuestia sought to understand the Old Testament historically; for instance, he rejected the usual (and, in the circumstances, obvious) reading of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53. But Theodore was posthumously condemned, and the majority of Antiochenes were in any case less rigidly historicist, as D. S. Wallace-Hadrill explains.⁹

And yet, despite the success of allegory, the importance of the literal sense was habitually affirmed, most influentially by Augustine, a contemporary of Theodore but working in a different tradition. Augustine was a historian, and as an exegete he held that an understanding of historical reality must be the foundation of any attempt to provide spiritual interpretation. His emphasis on Jewish history as continuous with Christian was influential. But he also ruled that no interpretation should transgress against ‘charity’: any literal-historical sense that was inconsistent with virtuous conduct and the true faith should be treated figuratively. And he provided for the frequent occurrence of texts that appeared to have no particular Christian relevance; they were there for the sake of the others, as ploughs have handles.¹⁰ Thus the typical quality of the historical sense is maintained, and the position is as J. S. Preuss describes it: the plain sense of some of the Old Testament is edifying in itself, but the remainder has value only because it means something other than it seems to be saying; the literal, grammatical, and historical senses include what should not be figuratively interpreted and also what must be so interpreted. But that which is edifying is so only because it already conforms with the New Testament, and the unedifying has to be made edifying by figurative reading in New Testament terms. Thus the extended context determines the plain sense, which, in the case of the Old Testament, resides effectively in the text of the New. There was a Jewish or carnal sense, to which one might attribute more or less importance; but the true sense was Christian and spiritual, and that sense could be represented as the plain sense. The figurative becomes the literal.

So, although the warning that the sensus historicus must be the foundation of exegesis was frequently repeated, it appears that a really active concern for the historical sense of the Old Testament did not recur until the later years of the eleventh century, when it was in large part the result of intercourse between Jewish and Christian scholars. It was at that moment that peshat entered, or re-entered, Christian thought. Erwin Rosenthal has explained with great clarity the position of Jewish scholarship after Saadya Gaon; how the distinction between peshat and derash now grew sharper, how peshat served as a weapon against christological interpretations, and how Rashi, by his more correct understanding of the relation between the two, influenced not only his Jewish but his Christian contemporaries.¹¹ The conflict between extreme adherents of peshat and derash, between the literal sense and the tradition, the literal sense and the mystical kabbalistic sense, continued within the Jewish tradition. But meanwhile a new respect for the Hebrew text and the sensus Judaicus was once again altering the context of Christian interpretation.

Beryl Smalley established the influence of Jewish scholarship on the work of the Victorines.¹² Relations between Jewish and Christian scholars were never wholly cordial, but they were productive, for the ‘Hebrew truth’ of Jerome was now taken back into its own language. Hugh of St Victor had some Hebrew, and he consulted Jewish scholars and reported their interpretations. There was a new emphasis on the historical sense as Jews understood it. Hugh anticipated Aquinas in arguing that to be ignorant of the signs was to be ignorant of what they signified, and so of what the signified, itself a sign, signified. It will, however, be noticed that this formula does nothing to alter the position that a true understanding of the Jewish Bible depends upon and is subsequent to a true understanding of the New Testament; for the Jewish reading, though it accurately carries out the first stage of the process, the establishment of literal, grammatical, and historical sense, plays no part in the second, which is to determine what the signified signifies. The Jewish sense is still the carnal one, and preliminary to the spiritual reading.

It would seem that Jewish scholarship was bolder, in that it sometimes risked everything on the plain sense. Joseph Kara, early in the twelfth century, could remark that ‘whosoever is ignorant of the literal meaning of the Scripture and inclines after a Midrash is like a drowning man who clutches at a straw to save himself’.¹³ Masters of Haggadah may mock him, he says; but the enlightened will prefer the truth. Nevertheless, we are told, he himself frequently inclined after midrash. It was the next generation of Jewish scholars, contemporaries of Andrew of St Victor, the hero of Beryl Smalley’s research, who installed the literal sense more firmly. Andrew ecumenically devised a dual method of interpretation, giving the Vulgate text with a Christian explanation, and the Hebrew text with a Jewish. The literal sense was that of the Jews. For example, on Isaiah 7:14-16, ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive’, Andrew cites Rashi to the effect that the literal sense is this: the bride of the prophet will conceive a son to deliver Israel. Though he rejects this interpretation with some vehemence, Andrew allows it the title of the literal sense.¹⁴ But Christians live by the spirit, and their reading of the passage, based on the virgo of the Vulgate, is the true if not the literal one.

In using the Jews, to quote Smalley, as ‘a kind of telephone to the Old Testament’,¹⁵ Andrew naturally annoyed some contemporaries. He was accused of ‘judaizing’. But judaizing gave a new turn to the speculation about literal sense and its relation to spiritual sense. Henceforth the argument of Hugh of St Victor, as restated and given authority by Aquinas, prevailed. The words mean one thing only; but that thing may be a sign of other things, and it is from those secondorder things that the spiritual sense derives. The historical sense, the sense of the human author, is what he says; but there is a divine author whose intentions are other than his. ‘Truly, the literal sense is that which the author intended; but the author of sacred Scripture is God, who comprehends in his intellectus all things at once.’¹⁶ So the spiritual or symbolic or typical interpretation is more faithful to the mens auctoris than the literal; and regardless of what is properly to be called the literal sense, the true sense is to be found in the New Testament.

There were various attempts to resolve the ambiguities of this position, as when the extremely influential commentator Nicholas de Lyra also spoke of the literal sense itself as dual; the symbolic interpretation was to be regarded as the literal one if expressly approved by the New Testament (a partial return to the Antiochan doctrine). When God says of Solomon (I Chronicles II): ‘I will be a father to him, and he will be like a son to me’, the application to Solomon is literal; but because the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews uses the text to show that Christ is higher than the angels, it has a second literal sense, which is also mystical. Preuss thinks this is the ‘first time … a New Testament reading of an Old Testament passage is dignified with the label “literal”’; though the general idea is of course not new.¹⁷

It seems, then, that throughout this period there grew up a desire to narrow the gap between the Christian and the literal sense. But since the literal sense could still be referred to the New Testament, some Jewish scholars now abandoned their own messianic interpretations and clove to the sensus historicus, in order to avoid any suggestion that might give support to the christological reading, for example of Psalm 2. Once again it is apparent that the Christians, however devoted to the hebraica veritas, could not be so bold as the Jews; for their interpretations were always subject to censorship by the custodians of an infallible tradition that was partly independent of Scripture. Of course Jewish interpreters had to steer a course between the fundamentalism of the Karaites and the allegories of the Kabbalah; but the institution controlling Christian interpretation was very powerful, and the authority of the tradition, which in some ways stood to the New Testament as the New Testament did to the Old, could be enforced by the Inquisition; these were not merely erudite arguments.

By the fifteenth century the matter of literal sense called for formal discussion, as in Jean Gerson’s De sensu litterali sacrae Scripturae of 1414, which decided that the Church alone had the power to determine the literal sense. It derived its authority to do so from the promise of Christ in the New Testament; that is, the literal sense of the New Testament confers on the Church the right to declare the true sense of any text. Preuss comments on the importance and timeliness of this pronouncement. Heretics claimed that their doctrines were founded on the literal sense of Scripture; but if the literal sense is by definition the ‘literal sense of the Church’, and not anything more generally available, then merely to affirm a different sense from that of the Church was proof of heresy. ‘The possibility of argument from Scripture against the magisterium is for the first time … programmatically and theoretically eliminated.’¹⁸ There would no longer be any point in asking Jews about the plain sense of an Old Testament passage; that sense was first revealed through Christ and the apostles, then protected and studied by the Church, and subsequently enforceable with all manner of sanctions.

So the lines were drawn for the struggle between Luther’s plain sense, his sola scriptura, and the authority of Rome, only possessor of the sense of Scripture. Luther was speaking no more than truth when he accused the Popes of setting themselves up as ‘lords of Scripture’; that was exactly what they had done. Of the religious, political, and military consequences of this hermeneutic disagreement it is unnecessary to speak. Curiously enough, in our own time it is a Protestant hermeneutics that has insisted upon the necessity of understanding tradition as formative of the horizon from which we must seek some kind of encounter with ancient texts, denying at the same time any immediacy of access to those texts. It seems that Gerson and the Popes had grasped an important point, namely that all interpretation is validated in the end by a third force, and not by the unaided and unauthoritative study of isolated scholars; and they wished to be sure that the third force was the Church.

Luther, as a matter of fact, opposed enthusiastic reading also; as far as he could see Müntzer and the Pope were both arrogating to themselves an improper authority over Scripture. But in the next century the Council of Trent made equivocation and compromise impossible by giving renewed emphasis to tradition and authority. The subsequent history of the Catholic view was determined by the Tridentine decisions.

It seems reasonable to conclude this brief anthology of disputes about plain sense by glancing at some exegetical problems which had to be settled at the time of Catholic Modernism. The intellectual atmosphere of the late nineteenth century, including the success over a generation or so of Darwinism and, perhaps even more threatening, the achievement and the fame of German Protestant biblical scholarship, made both Authority and Tradition subject to question. There arose within the Church scholars who thought the official position needed revision. An early hint of the new kind of hermeneutic understanding recommended to the Church is to be found in the work of the Tübingen Catholic theologian Johann Evangelist von Kuhn. He agreed with the Protestants that the Bible is privileged over all other documents, but said that they failed to understand this: Tradition, as distinct from traditions, is the preaching and consciousness of the Church in the present moment. ‘Tradition is the kerygma of the present; Scripture, the kerygma of the past, is the doctrina-source of the present.’¹⁹

This new formulation places the sense of Scripture firmly in the here and now; it denies that application can be divorced from understanding. A related idea, very characteristic of its time, is that religion has undergone an evolutionary development, and that the old texts and forms might be thought of as types of later doctrine, an idea prevalent in the thought of the period, and given expression in literature (by Hawthorne, for instance) as well as in Catholic theology (by Newman, who said that ‘the earlier prophecies are pregnant texts out of which the succeeding announcements grow; they are types’).²⁰

Such views were condemned in 1870, but a generation later they appeared again in a rather different form with Modernism proper. Its proponents favoured Tradition over Scripture, seeing Tradition as a process of inspired development. The reflex of the Church, inevitably conservative, was to retreat to a scriptural position. This is not surprising; it must have been rather horrifying to hear Von Hügel, a man of impeccable piety (Yeats praised him because he accepted the miracles of the saints and honoured sanctity) proclaiming that even if the Gospel narratives were unrelated to historical events they would still be true as ‘creations of the imagination’ – a position not really very far from that of some modern Protestants. The English convert George Tyrrell was shocked to find in the Roman Church the sort of bible religion he had thought he was leaving behind. He believed that God was he First Cause, and so the author of Scripture only in the sense that he was the author of everything. He was aware of the difficulty of steering a course between the two positions, one holding that the deposit was perpetually valid, the other that doctrine developed progressively. Here again is the hermeneutic problem about original and applied sense. Tyrrell failed to solve it and was disgraced. In France Alfred Loisy expressed similar views and with more force, remarking in a very modern manner that a book absolutely true for all times would be unintelligible at all times; he too saw the danger of reading back a modern idea of religion into the Scriptures. Caught between these positions, he too fell foul of the Church and was excommunicated.²¹

The plain sense of Scripture, as of anything else, is a hermeneutical question, and we have seen how different are the hermeneutics of Augustine, the medieval Jewish scholars, Gerson, and Loisy. One concept that was rigorously developed was that of the role of authority, the institutional power to validate or to invalidate by reference to Tradition; but when Tyrrell and Loisy were purged authority was acting as it were politically, for to the outsider it might have seemed that they were trying to give the idea of Tradition new force. Their proposals, like those of von Kuhn, offered the Church a plausible modern hermeneutic, with an acceptable view of the relation between the origin and the here and now; but the idea of development, though supported by the whole history of dogma, was too frightening.

Modernism was revived in a modern form in the 1940s and partly endorsed by Vatican II. The principal effect has been to allow Catholic scholars to engage in the sort of historical research formerly associated with Protestant scholarship; and this may seem belated, for elsewhere there is a strong shift away from the objectivist assumptions of that scholarship and toward a newer hermeneutics. It is now often maintained that the plain sense, if there is one, must be of the here and now rather than of the origin.

One thing is sure: the body of presuppositions which determines our notions of the plain sense is always changing, and so is the concept of the validating authority. As the new canonical criticism demonstrates, there are new ways of establishing relevant contexts, and new extratextual authorities, like the idea of canon in this case. And a hermeneutics that allowed for possibilities of change and adaptation might have suited the Church, as the defender of Tradition, very well, as – or so it appears – the Jewish tradition has accommodated change and adaptation without sacrificing the original deposit. What the Modernists saw was that if Tradition entailed change, there was a need for a theory of interpretation which could close the widening gap between doctrine and text and require newly licensed plain senses. In practice the means has always been available; the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin, promulgated in 1950, depends on Tradition and not on Scripture, and on a tradition that can only with difficulty be traced back as far as the fourth century. It would have been particularly surprising to St Mark. But if we think of Tradition as the third part of the Catholic canonical context it is possible to suppose that the Assumption is part of the plain sense of the whole; and, after all, assumptions occur in both the other parts.

My purpose has been to suggest that the plain sense of things is always dependent on the understanding of larger wholes and on changing custom and authority. So it must change; it is never naked, but, as the poet says, it always wears some fictive covering. Time itself changes it, however much authority may resist. It must, of course, do so. And it cannot do so if it fails to preserve its foundation text; and, short of keeping that text out of unauthorized hands, it cannot prevent readers from making their imaginative additions to the icy diagram.

Finally, the plain sense depends in larger measure on the imaginative activity of interpreters. This is variously constrained, by authority or hermeneutic rules or assumptions, but it is necessary if the text is to have any communicable sense at all. Given plausible rules and a firm structure of authority, change may not be violent. One recalls Raphael Loewe’s magisterial essay on ‘The “Plain” Meaning of Scripture in Early Jewish Exegesis’.²² The word peshat itself is metaphorical; its plain senses have to do with flattening, extending, and derivatively with simplicity and innocence and lack of learning, with the popular, the read-once-only, the clear, the generally accepted, the current, and so on; but the central sense, Loewe maintains, is authority. It is used to describe readings by no means literal, and applications ‘entirely arbitrary’. Loewe concludes that the best translation of the word, at any rate up to the end of the period of the Talmuds and the midrashim, is ‘authoritative teaching’, which covers both traditional teaching and teaching given by a particular rabbi of acknowledged authority. And, says Loewe, ‘the conventional distinction between peshat and derash must be jettisoned’. In times later than those of which Loewe speaks, the identification of peshat with plain sense became firmer, with important results. But its historical association with authority, and its inescapable association with derash, point clearly enough to the conclusion that our minds are not very well adapted to the perception of texts in themselves; we necessarily provide them with contexts, some of them imposed by authority and tradition, some by the need to make sense of them in a different world.

It is possible for some philosophers of language to speak of a ‘zero context’ – to maintain that ‘for every sentence the literal meaning of the sentence can be construed as the meaning it has independent of any context whatever’. In expressing his dissent from this opinion, John Searle argues that the meaning even of ‘the cat sat on the mat’ depends upon ‘background assumptions’; there is, he believes, ‘no constant set of assumptions that determine the notion of literal meaning’. ²³ Some of these assumptions are silently at work when we make the statement about the cat. Its plain sense depends, among other things, on the assumption that the cat and the mat are within the gravitational field of the earth; and Searle is able to fit out the sentence with speculative contexts which give it quite other senses. But this fascinating sentence invites other potentially interesting considerations. For example: the sentence is felt as somehow infantile, as belonging to a reading primer, perhaps; it owes its memorability to a triple rhyme – a phonetic bond which solicits our attention to the code rather than the message. That the procedures are metaphoric rather than metonymic gives the sentence a poetic quality and more potential intertext (so long as we have it in the original language). There is the further consideration that the sentence must almost always have a citational quality – Lyons and Searle both cite it as an example, and I have cited them citing it. Since it lives in such rarefied contexts its simplicity is certainly bogus, and its use variously coloured by pedantry and archness. It has no plain sense; it merely serves as a lay figure, like the poet’s icy diagram, his lake with its shadows, rats, and lilies.

And that takes me back to the imaginary zero context where I began. There is no ‘inert savoir’; to speak as if there were is already to speak ‘as if’. Metaphor begins to remodel the plain sense as soon as we begin to think or to speak about it. If Stevens is right in saying that the words of the world are the life of the world, then metaphor runs in the world’s blood, as if derash and peshat were the red and the white corpuscles, intrinsically plural.

I have taken most of my examples from exegesis as practised in religions which maintained over very long periods an extreme veneration for their sacred texts, and which certainly abhorred the idea of deliberate interference or distortion. The place of rule-governed imagination was clearly established in midrash. In the Christian tradition, with its basic belief that the sense of the Jewish Bible must be sought in another book, there is a quite different imaginative challenge. All such result in Entstellung, not Darstellung. Among the thousands of commentators there have been literalists of the imagination and also extravagant poets. But all have in their measure to be creators, even if they wish to imagine themselves at the end of imagination when the lake is still, without reflections; there may be silence, but it is silence of a sort, never zero silence.