The Spirit and the Letter of Literary Criticism

St. Paul says that “the letter brings death, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). He may be speaking about religion and the circumcision of the spirit, but my concern is with something a little less poetic: education. As an English student, I constantly hear about how students delight in reading texts a certain way: “Oh, I really like that reading because it brings women to the fore” or “If we just see the Pardoner as gay and with deformed genitalia, then abortion is fine.” These readings ignore the spirit of the text by warping the letter.

This is not to deny the importance of the letter. Most of my current work is with Old English. If I don’t learn the language, I may as well just start making Happy Meals (something I should be preparing for anyway).

But this isn’t about the letter in that sense. What imposing ideology onto a text does is examine the letter while removing the spirit. The words themselves could be found to be different in different manuscript versions, but, overall, most texts enjoy some degree of fixity. The words are what they are and they can often be twisted to mean what the critic wants them to mean. This is how the spirit suffers. Of course, we all have our biases, but texts are texts. Sometimes we have to wrestle with the realities of a particular work. Some cultures did not place an emphasis women; this does not make the cultures evil or even misogynistic. That’s like saying Plato hates freedom because he seems suspicious of democracy. The emphasis is simply elsewhere; our vacuuming out of the original spirit will do little to remedy that.

We should want to hear texts speak to us. Calling critiques “readings” is a tacit way of saying that we always impose a bias. This is true. But I prefer to say that I hear a text speak. I listen for what it says about what it is and in so attempt to touch on the Truth it has to offer. We cannot escape bias, nor can we over-emphasis objectivity. Subjectivity is to be loved and celebrated as God’s imprint on the mind of man. But we also mustn’t warp the spirit of a text and watch it squirm. “The text matters.” We must begin here.