By Christopher D. Morris
ISBN-10: 0820488577
ISBN-13: 9780820488578
The determine of the line examines the metaphor of the line, method, or course in works of consultant humanities disciplines (literature, faith, philosophy, visible artwork, pop culture) to teach how writers and artists expected the quandary identified to modern deconstruction because the «aporia» or «pathless place.» this practice exposes the answer encouraged in Derrida’s past due concept - the hunt for the «tout autre» - as a destructive theology and suppression of writing’s freedom to allegorize those insoluble difficulties. The determine of the line concludes by way of tracing the grim, Beckett-like implications of this freedom for curriculum and ethics in an international understood as entirely figural.
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It is never established whose “too familiar analysis” might jeopardize these sacred themes. If the narrator means the reader’s, then he is asserting that sublimity can’t be represented at all—since anyone (perhaps someone with “false taste”) might read them. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would be an argument against the publication of The Pathfinder. But the narrator might also refer to his own “too familiar analysis”: that is, once recorded on the page, Mabel’s sacred themes might invite his own reflection, commentary, or interpretation and thereby jeopardize their sacred character.
Instead, the arbitrary signs of The Pilgrim’s Progress must themselves be taken as real before a new commentary on them, by way of a story, can be 38 The Figure of the Road undertaken. In Reading Narrative, J. Hillis Miller describes the paradox of beginnings: “one must have something solidly present and preexistent, some generative source or authority, on which the development of a new story may be based. ” With the greatest integrity, “The Celestial Rail-road” begins by acknowledging the impossibility of any beginning other than the event of metaphor.
When Pathfinder sides with the patriotic prejudices of Cap and Sarj, the narrator abruptly intervenes: The trio of men, indeed, in this particular, so much resembled the great mass of their fellow creatures, who usually judge of character equally without knowledge and without justice, that we might have not have thought it necessary to record the discourse, had it not some bearing in its fact, on the incidents of the legend, and in its opinions on the motives of the characters. (308) At a stroke, the narrator dissociates himself from the opinions of his title character, leaving the reader to wonder whether there are other “particulars” in which Natty’s or anyone else’s judgments should be considered unjust and, if so, how we would know.