Marginalia as interpretation and liberation

August 3, 2018 a good book life lessons musings the eye of the beholder

I learned about florilegia from the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast. This practice — “the gathering of literary flowers,” as I described it earlier — involves assembling several texts and then examining them, singly and in relationship, to see what meanings emerge. The so-called “sparklets” that you collect are words or passages that stood out for you, and so you note them down for further reflection. 

ASIDE: A sparklet, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a small spark: a tiny point of light” or “a small sparkling or glittering object: a small spot that is relatively bright against a dark background.”

Here I share a set of sparklets that I have been pondering of late. My aim is not to draw firm conclusions but rather to juxtapose these texts in hope of sparking reflection on the relationships between texts and power, the difference between privileging the words of a text over the spirit of a text, how fixed texts adapt to changing times, and how and when we can claim the authority to talk back to a text. (I hope you’ll talk back to this text!)

Sparklet #1: A Thousand Splendid Suns

Last week, I went with my sister to see A Thousand Splendid Suns at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. As always at ACT, the play was beautifully staged and performed; the story was rich in human emotion — and heartbreaking. Adapted by Ursula Rani Sarma from the novel by Khaled Hosseini, it tells the story of two women married to a brutal man and how their love and support of one another allow them to survive his tyranny, as well as that of the changing social and political order. Set in Kabul, the play unfolds over several years during which the Taliban eventually supplant the mujahideen.

Two scenes stood out for me: in one, the young daughter of the house, Aziza, reads out the Taliban’s rules for women’s lives — a litany of restrictions and taboos, supposedly grounded in a strict reading of the Koran. In another scene, an official refuses to let the women depart the country, even though they risk abuse if they are returned to their husband. Closing his ears to their arguments and pleas, the official simply declares that “it’s the law” that women may not travel without a male relative — and sends them home.

Sparklet #2: Claiming the text through marginalia

The day before seeing this play, I was listening again to an episode of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, in which host Casper ter Kuile interviews The Reverend Canon Broderick Greer of St. John’s Cathedral in Denver. They were talking about the ways in which we interact with sacred texts, and Greer described his grandmother’s practice of writing in the margins of her Bible as a means of interpreting and engaging with the text — of taking ownership of the text. He contrasts that with his own experience when at the age of thirteen he joined a fundamentalist church:

Over time I stopped writing in my Bible. Because in that tradition the Bible is basically held above God, and it was like writing on God, and I thought that was irreverent to write in a Bible anymore. And in a way, the text owned me instead of the other way around. And so there was a time in my life where I stopped conversing with the text and was only open to hearing in my own naive way what the text thought about me, instead of the other way around…

Greer eventually returned to conversing with his Bible. He reflects:

I think about what doors are opened for us when we can name… this work of filling in the blanks, of writing in the margins… Who in our culture needs permission to name marginalia? Who is imagined out of stories? And who needs to re-imagine themselves back into them… Who’s allowed to write in the margins? Who’s allowed to own the story? [Creating marginalia] is a very democratic approach to texts: texts as popular work, of-the-people work…

  • If you're interested, this extended excerpt from the interview is well worth reading.
Broderick Greer: My maternal grandmother was a devout missionary Baptist and had been since childhood. She was also a church musician and was the musician at the church I was baptized in for forty years. And she had a green King James Bible — kind of a pocket Bible — that by that time she’d had for about twenty years. It was just soaked in ink, and it was because she would write in the margins. It was very small and really there wasn’t much space in the margins for anything. I don’t think it was meant to have ink in it. But she would write the sermon text and the title of the sermon and the person who preached it.

And so I would go back through this Bible and look: what was preached on September 21, 1987 — before I was even born? And so you see this ongoing conversation between my grandmother and the Bible, and my grandmother and these preachers, and my grandmother and her own thoughts about different texts in the Bible. And it gave me this sense from an early age that the Bible is fluid, that it is open to interpretation. I loved to see, okay, well, this is… Matthew 6:33, and there are four different preachers over the last twenty-five years who have preached on this text, and they all have different interpretations and they all have different sermon titles. So marginalia is really taking ownership and responsibility and liberty with texts.

My grandmother was this highly literate, highly musical, deeply spiritual person, who, if the times had been different, probably would have been a minister herself. And to think about, you know, from an early age, that someone somewhere taught her the practice probably of taking the text and making if her own through the simple and liberating act of writing. So that really taught me a lot about a kind of generative approach to religious texts…

I think about the fact that when I was thirteen I left that Baptist church — I became Church of Christ, which is a mainly white southern fundamentalist denomination — and how I over time stopped writing in my Bible. Because in that tradition, the Bible is basically held above God, and it was like writing on God and I thought that was irreverent to write in a Bible anymore. And in a way, the text owned me instead of the other way around. And so there was a time in my life where I stopped conversing with the text and was only open to hearing in my own naive way what the text thought about me, instead of the other way around…

Casper ter Kuile: The school that I went to was an Anglican school… and I remember that at some point it was made clear to me that being gay or lesbian was not in accordance with the Bible. And I’m just thinking about how when we put the text above God, as you said, the text can be weaponized in this very powerful way, because it seemed to be inerrant — there’s no mistakes in it. Or at least it’s uncomplicated. So I just love that image of by us putting our pen onto the text, it’s actually a way also of putting the text in its rightful place, maybe.

Broderick Greer: Absolutely… I mean literary theory is pretty clear about that — that texts never speak: we only interpret. I think about my grandmother, and I also think about that someone at some point gave her permission to take ownership of the text, gave her church ownership of the text. Black preachers… have this reverence for the Bible and reverence for the stories and reverence for the literal words, but will take a liberty in the middle of a sermon. And the way that they’ll cue the people to this liberty that they’re about to take with the text, they’ll say: “Now in my sanctified imagination…” and they’ll give a riff on the story, or what our Jewish friends would call a midrash on the story… One of the great things about that black preaching tradition… is to say [that] the conversation with the Bible — the conversations with our sacred texts — don’t end with the final cover of the book. It continues, and we are given the gift of imagining, and we’re given the gift of taking liberties, and we’re given the gift of riffing off of what people have thought and used to interpret and used to weaponize for thousands of years. This is ours to imagine with…

I think about what doors are opened for us when we can name… this work of filling in the blanks, of writing in the margins… Who in our culture needs permission to name marginalia? Who is imagined out of stories? And who needs to re-imagine themselves back into them… Very rarely are my ancestors thought of as being founders: they’re never listed among the “founding fathers.” [What about] the women who are not mentioned as the founding fathers but who were very much a part of the founding of the United States? So who is allowed to have a sanctified imagination? Who’s allowed to write in the margins? Who’s allowed to own the story? It’s a very democratic approach to texts: texts as popular work, of-the-people work…

Sparklet #3: The flexibility of myth

Some articles from my graduate school days have stayed with me, and one of these is Theodorus P. van Baaren’s short piece on “The Flexibility of Myth.” This article explains that as long as sacred narratives are preserved in oral tradition, their texts are flexible. They can be easily adapted and reworked to meet changing times and challenges, while remaining theoretically unchanged. Narrators tweak these stories, so that they remain relevant as times change.

Once sacred narratives are written down, however, their form becomes fixed. A single version becomes canon — doctrine. How, then, can these narratives continue to be useful and meaningful? The answer, van Baaren proposes, is that their flexibility moves from the text itself to the interpretation of that text. He concludes:

History of religions teaches us that in this situation [when the invention of writing has made it possible to fix the text of a myth more or less permanently] the flexibility of myth is transferred to its exegesis. This explains the important function of this branch of theology in all religions based on sacred texts. It is well known that in primitive religions [i.e., in oral traditions, corrects the folklorist in me] a large number of versions of one and the same myth exist and it is not possible to point out one of them as the generally authoritative and original version. In the same way do we encounter in the book-religions a large variety of exegeses of which, mutatis mutandis, the same can be said.

So we might say that Greer’s grandmother was performing her personal exegesis by writing in the margins of her Bible. And, in contrast, the official in the play was refusing to — or would not claim the authority that would allow him to — interpret his text (the law).

It also strikes me that what van Baaren says of myths could likewise be said of laws like the U.S. Constitution, which, in the context of America’s civil religion, could be considered our principal sacred text. Such laws endure — and we continue to endure them — because they are continually reinterpreted to meet changing times. Hence civil rights and gay marriage and more.

In this framework, originalists like the late Justice Antonin Scalia would be the legal equivalents of fundamentalists. In the originalist view, to paraphrase Canon Greer, the text owns us instead of the other way around. Chilling — especially in a time when the United States’ president is threatening to nominate only originalists for the Supreme Court.

ASIDE: Of course, I am not the first to make the connection between originalism and fundamentalism: see “Connections,” below, for other discussions of this issue.

Sparklet #4: A church of one’s own choosing

I didn’t much like Patrick DeWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor, which I read for my book club. This novel is the genre-bending tale of feckless Lucien (“Lucy”) Minor, who escapes his village to take up employment as assistant to the majordomo in the forbidding and mysterious Castle Von Aux. There he meets an assortment of odd and unreliable characters. Hijinks and horror ensue, all of which seemed pretty pointless to me.

Nevertheless, one sentence from this book — Lucy’s epitaph — stayed with me. It feels like it belongs in this conversation:

A blessing for all those who empower themselves — or others —to talk back to sacred texts; may these marginalia illuminate the dark corners of our doctrines with colorful brilliance!

Connections
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3 thoughts on “Marginalia as interpretation and liberation”
  1. Christopher L Cudworth

    Thank you for including my work from The Genesis Fix in your referral about originalism. I’ll follow your site for more insights as well.

  2. A. Ecaf

    I like the florilegia thing and wonder if it grew alongside floriography- the late 18th-19th century symbolic messaging via flowers (well of course flower symbolism goes way back globally, but I’m thinking about the public, social uses of flowers.

    Also a comparison between a florilegia and a variorum could be interesting? The latter being a definitive collection of variants of a text— perhaps like a catalog of all roses — to see what we can learn.

    • JM

      Thank you for raising the question about a possible connection between floriography and florilegia. My use of the word florilegia comes from the idea of gathering together various texts, which grew up in classical and Christian traditions. But your question made me look a bit further, and I discovered that a florilegium is also the name for a book of flower illustrations. It certainly seems possible that such a book might include information about floriography, along with botanical information — but this is only speculation on my part. Interesting to think about, though! BTW, I recently read a mystery novel — can’t remember the title right now — in which the mystery was solved by deciphering the meaning of a bouquet of flowers delivered to the victim. I think it might have been one of Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher mysteries, but I’m not sure.
      As far as a comparison between a florilegium and a variorum (thank you for introducing me to that word!), I see the similarities. The chief difference might be that a variorum gathers versions/variants of the same text, which a florilegium gathers different texts — but I’m not sure this is always the case.
      As a folklorist, assembling a variorum of Little Red Riding Hood, say, by collecting all the variants of this folktale is in line with what some scholars have done, in order to better comprehend the tale’s adaptations over space and time. Folklorists just haven’t had this word to describe this sort of collection — or, at least, I have never heard it used in this context… Anyway, thanks so much for this additional food for thought!

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