The Bible and The Merchant of Venice: Hermeneutics, Ideology, and Displaced Persons

Abstract

THE BIBLE AND THE MERCHANT OF VENICE: HERMENEUTICS, IDEOLOGY, AND DISPLACED PERSONS P A T R IC K G R A N T University of Victoria O n e interesting result of concerns in recent times about the idea of a literary canon has been the re-admission to literary studies of that especially protected canon, namely, the Bible. We now venture without too many qualms to teach the Bible as literature, and this has, among other things, helped to erase the differences between sacred and secular texts. I think this erasure is all to the good: I don’t mind if we consider all the texts secular or all the texts sacred, and in different moods — at different times of the day, even — I can see it one way or the other. But I do worry about strong demarcation, and tend to resist it. That is my first point, and I would like my comparison here between Shakespeare and the Bible to exemplify it. But first, I would like briefly to notice the hermeneutic question raised by treating the Bible as literature. Hermeneutics was originally a branch of Biblical study, and Biblical manuals characteristically divided hermeneutics into noematics (how to determine the senses of scripture), heuristics (how to discover the appropriate sense), and prophoristics (how to convey the sense to others). The idea was to establish guidelines for fixing a right under­ standing of the sacred texts within shared traditions of exegesis. Friedrich Schleiermacher is usually credited with developing, in the early nineteenth century, a watershed distinction between general and special hermeneutics — the general field having to do with the conditions of knowledge itself and the totality from which it is inseparable. Traditional Biblical interpretation then is an example of special hermeneutic enquiry, limited to a specific set of concerns and procedures. It is easy to see how a secular hermeneutic — whether in the foundations of science, philosophy, or literature — devel­ oped, broadly, from Schleiermacher through the like of Dilthey, Heidegger and so to Derrida, but (as Frank Ivermode points out) until very recently, literary scholars and critics have not brought the principles of this kind of enquiry back to the sacred texts that are the source of so much that is in fact relevant to secular literary study. But, as I say, one result of the devel­ opment of critical theory has been a fresh rapprochement between Biblical scholarship and literary studies, so that the question stands out in sharper relief: How, through the ages, have values been transmitted through the Biblical texts, in ways other than those accounted for by explicit commit­ English Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , x v i, 3, September 1990 ments, declarations of doctrinal allegiance, and other special hermeneutic concerns? As a way of approaching this issue, I would like to make a fairly simple dis­ tinction, drawing broadly on Michael Polanyi and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is this: knowing what one is supposed to know to remain tolerably ortho­ dox, and the habitual, everyday actions and attitudes that constitute our knowing how to get along in the world and with one another can often be quite at odds. It is probably not too difficult for most of us here to accept that received patterns of meaning and evaluation — let us say, ideologies — often inhere more powerfully in the processes of knowing how, than in the declarations that constitute knowing what. In short, a good deal in the way we size things up, assessing what to include and ignore, embrace and repudiate, operates tacitly. One definition of literature might even be that it is a kind of writing that gives special access to the dynamics of such tacit commitments, the acculturized ways of knowing that are often taken as natural or self-evident. And so, my second aim today is to show through the comparison between Shakespeare and the Bible something of how such tacit evaluations might be transmitted. So far, I have at least mentioned hermeneutics and ideology, but I now must admit that the idea of the person, which is also part of my title, is itself going to remain largely tacit in the discussion that follows...