"The bark of the letter": Herbert and the Material Text

Abstract

"The bark of the letter":Herbert and the Material Text Paul Dyck Let us love the country of here below. It is real;it offers resistance to love. – Simone Weil1 We also need to conjure up the physicalityof ourselves reading. – Random Cloud2 When the radical bibliographer Randall McLeod playfully and seriously asks why would you read a book when you can look at it, he would appear to be running afoul of George Herbert's comments on Juan de Valdés concerning those who neglect God's work in the heart by attending only "to the bark of the letter."3 Valdés was concerned about what he saw as a Protestant tendency to study Scripture without the heart being spiritually moved, and he prescribes instead the reading of Scripture as preparation for the Christian's purely inward conversation with the Spirit, at which point Scripture ought to be set aside. Herbert energetically responded by insisting that letter – the bark – and Spirit must not be separated in devotional life. McLeod, like other bibliographers of the radical school of unediting (including Jerome McGann and D.F. McKenzie), insists first and always that we attend to the bark of the letter, as it were, that we attend to a text as a "thing in itself," a thing that editing seeks to atomize.4 Radical bibliography resists the dominant direction of modern editing, which carefully considers multiple textual witnesses and produces from them a single, united text.5 This, of course, is the norm with almost any literary text we read. In response to this practical usefulness, McLeod offers impracticality: libraries full of unique editions and copies, each with secrets of its own. McLeod does not offer a plan for better editions; instead he "sheds darkness" on texts as we know them, or think we know them, that is, as the editorial tradition has normalized them.6 McLeod's meticulous and radical attention to material texts underscores the value of bibliographical work by doing the opposite of editing: by making the familiar text strange. But while McLeod has [End Page 81] protested that he is not reading Herbert's poetry but rather looking at it, and further, that he will leave doctrinal interpretation to Christians, I wish to lodge a counter-protest, suggesting that in fact McLeod's moves are the right moves not only bibliographically, but theologically as well. McLeod would impishly lead us to The Temple, to a point beyond which only Christian reading can take us further, but this only works because his stubborn insistence on embodiment and its particularity is already deeply sympathetic to Herbert's Christian sensibility. McLeod rightly apprehends that Herbert means something theological by his material moves, and following this, that when modern editing alters that materiality in order to stabilize meaning, it alters Herbert's theology too. Put another way, if we think of theology as assigning a stable meaning to things then modern editing is too theological. But for Herbert, theology was about anything but assigning a stable meaning to things.7 In what follows, I will take up McLeod's reading of "The Altar" and then ask how McLeod's attention to reading bodies might shape a reading of "The Altar" and "The Sacrifice" together. I will then consider in detail Herbert's strenuous objections to Juan de Valdés, who imagines spiritual growth as transcending the text and leaving it behind for inner conversation with the Spirit. When McLeod praises looking and Herbert criticizes those who attend only the bark, they seem to be going in opposite directions. But they are actually addressing very similar problems from different angles, and both are insisting on material particularity, as it were, that body and soul cannot be separated. When McLeod pits looking against reading, he actually demands both, insisting on material resistance to our idealizing notion of the text. And when Herbert refers to the bark of the letter, he simultaneously agrees with Valdés that reading should involve the heart, but also and more profoundly objects to Valdés's division of the literal and the spiritual. In the first meaning, "bark" names the literal exterior, an exterior to which...