Levinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic Texts (review)

Since the appearance of Jill Robbins’s seminal work on Levinas and literature, Altered Reading (1999), there have been a number of period-specific applications of the idea. The present collection appears at the same time as Donald R. Wehrs’s and David P. Haney’s 2009 collection on Levinas and nineteenth-century literature. Reading literary texts through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought can seem counterintuitive given Levinas’s apparent ambivalence toward art. Yet it is this very tension between art and Levinasian ethics that makes this collection of twelve essays and an introduction an intriguing and intellectually stimulating project.

The introductory essay economically states the raison d’être of the work, claiming that Levinas’s writings “can truly alter our reception, our reading, of [medieval] literature. Of equal importance is the discovery that the literary works of the medieval period can illumine our understanding of the Levinasian œuvre—its characteristic style, method, and themes, as well as its profound resistance to thematization” (p. 2). The subsequent essays reinforce this claim—more or less.

Naturally (and not unjustifiably) contradictions between Levinas’s thought and the medieval worldview are minimized in many of the essays, but there is one difference that cannot and should not be papered over, and that is the priority that Levinas gives to the ethical over the ontological and metaphysical, the centering of truth and value in the “Other,” unless, as some have claimed, the “Other” is, in fact, the Deity. This confusion appears in a remark in Cynthia Kraman’s interesting discussion of the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi, who “understands the Bible to be not only an approach to the divine but, more importantly, a roadmap to human relations . . .” and she goes on to attribute the same view to Levinas (p. 208, my emphasis). While this may be true of Rashi, it is the antithesis of medieval Christian thought expressed at least as early as the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus that gave priority to union with God over all moral goods and ethical relations.

A related tension found in several of the essays has to do with the nature of medieval allegory’s “open-endedness.” Although the Middle Ages recognized the limitations of the human intellect and had a finely theorized sense of contingency (for example, Aquinas Summa Theologiae 1: 2,3), it is easy to over-nuance this concept so that it melds with the postmodern infatuation with indeterminacy and its related relativism. Thus Susan Yager in “Levinas, Allegory, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale” associates Levinas’s philosophical thought, which can be “taken in many directions, interpreted in multiple ways,” with medieval allegory: “in reading from either set of Levinasian or medieval texts, we are drawn into a tentative, contingent enterprise” (p. 35). For its proponents, medieval allegory was the way in which the author of Holy Scripture expressed himself, the closest thing to God’s mind, and thus, subject to the limits of human capacity, the vehicle of certitude. Nevertheless, Yager’s reading of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale is perceptive and suggests interesting solutions to certain difficulties in the tale, such as Grisilde’s passivity, by linking it to Levinas’s concept of the vulnerable face.

Valerie Allen’s essay, “Difficult Reading,” which launches the collection, helpfully highlights several aspects of Levinas’s thought so that, when they arise and get developed in the subsequent essays, the reader is already somewhat familiar with them. She introduces Levinas’s powerful image of Raba who, while reading, deep in thought, distractedly rubs his foot to the point that the skin is broken and blood flows. Several of the essays take up this image, but oddly none of them connect it with the theory of medieval allegorical reading in which the inner truth of the text is metaphorically covered with a skin (integumentum) that must be stripped (rubbed away?) so...