Not Yet: Chaucer and Anagogy

Chapter 22 of harriet beecher stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) adumbrates the child Evangeline’s Bible reading to the adult slave Tom. Evangeline, we learn, prefers “Revelations and … Prophecies.” These biblical books are not wholly intelligible either to Evangeline or to Tom, but both characters are drawn to these genres in particular, since they “spoke of a glory to be revealed,—a wondrous something yet to come, wherein their soul rejoiced, yet knew not why”:

For the soul awakes, a trembling stranger, between two dim eternities,—the eternal past, the eternal future. The light shines only on a small space around her; therefore, she needs must yearn towards the unknown; and the voices and shadowy movings which come to her from out the cloudy pillar of inspiration have each one echoes and answers in her own expecting nature. Its mystic imagery are so many talismans and gems inscribed with unknown hieroglyphics; she folds them in her bosom, and expects to read them when she passes beyond the veil.¹

Stowe imagines a scene of biblical reading in the here and now of the novel, but that reading is for the moment unintelligible to both Evangeline and Tom. Only when the soul “passes beyond the veil” will the text become clear. For the moment, the souls of our readers are alert and aroused between two eternities, yearning for futurity.

Stowe is working from within a tradition of biblical reading here, whereby the biblical narrative points not only to the past event (the literal sense); not only to the fulfillment of that past event in the intermediate past (the allegorical sense); and not only to the applicability of those senses to the present (the moral, or tropological sense).² Evangeline and Tom are also, however uncertainly, imagining their way into the future here, where the future is a higher version of the broken present. They inhabit an interim state, suspended between implicit rejection of the present and uncertain perception of a future that drives that rejection. Dogma of any kind is in flux: that of the present is losing its legitimacy, even as the dogma of the new dispensation remains unclear. Tom and Evangeline are, in short, practicing an anagogical reading, or a “leading up.”

The novel, however, is not merely representing anagogical reading, but enacting it. Stowe pitches her own book, that is, into the future, from a present that confronts only “unknown hieroglyphics,” and is itself the locus of “voices and shadowy movings.”

That anagogical posture simultaneously underlines two key aspects of this novel. On the one hand, Stowe implicitly recognizes the novel’s present as wounded, a provisional and damaged shadow of better things to come, from which one can only desire a different future. That a novel occupying such a wounded present should have had such very mixed reception history is perhaps unsurprising, from President Lincoln’s famous and admiring (though possibly apocryphal) comment about it in 1862 (“the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war”) to the fiercely negative response that, from 1910 or so, produced the phrase “an Uncle Tom.”³

On the other hand, more positively, Stowe uses her own book as a reading prophecy of sorts. Even if the present from which her novel derives is provisional and wounded, it prophesies a future in which its own intelligibility will become clearer through readers’ responses to it. Biblical prophecy leans into a messianic future of the New Jerusalem; Stowe’s own novel leans into an uncertain, but imagined, secular future in which Evangeline and Tom’s relations will no longer be underwritten by slavery. This future is activated by the novel itself: by reading it, we ourselves participate in the construction of that future—a massively incomplete future, which is, as yet, not yet.⁴

Stowe’s mighty novel implicitly recognizes, then, that it will remain incompletely intelligible until the conditions that have brought it into being are resolved. Such a “not yet” temporal posture in fact characterizes many novels and movies. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) ends by underlining the...