Threshing Floors: A Response to Joanna Brooks

Joanna Brooks’s essay convincingly complicates the familiar literary historical narrative of how religious impulses, ideals, and beliefs were translated into secular terms. This was a narrative particularly congenial to modern literary historians, who had, for the most part, come to see “literary” and “religious” as incompatible. Exceptions were allowed only if they were sufficiently erudite (T. S. Eliot) or grotesque (Flannery O’Connor). Brooks covers concisely, but with remarkable range, the multiple ways that literary scholars have now begun to recognize that—and how—the work of American writers remained imbricated with religion throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Brooks offers hers as one of many possible genealogies. I am struck by the fact that the narrative form she chooses, that of the genealogy, is, of course, deeply, typically biblical. Indeed, there are at least three narrative structures at work in the literary histories that Brooks proposes and critiques, all of them central to Christian readings of the Bible: genealogy, typology, and teleology. (Although I take Brooks’s point about disruptions and the narrative possibilities they afford us, I would claim that for postmodernists “to look for fractal paths of revelatory discontinuities and creative heterodoxies plotted in narrative” is, in fact, to look teleologically.) The history of our discipline makes it unsurprising not only that we use these forms—genealogy, typology, and teleology—heuristically in our pedagogy, but also that they shape our scholarship and criticism. What Brooks’s essay suggests to me is not that we need to abandon these organizing heuristics, but that we need to become more conscious of them ourselves and more explicit about them with our students. I confess that I am, in part, thinking about this from the position of a department chair faced with the simultaneous proliferation—and evisceration—of the term “critical thinking” in mandates for evaluations and outcomes measures. Perhaps foregrounding these reading and writing structures can help us reclaim our work and words in ways that allow for flexibility, variation, and innovation, rather than a mechanical uniformity and unanimity. How do we put together our syllabi and select the texts and writers who come together in our articles and books—and why?

Primarily, however, I want to focus on the central metaphor that Brooks uses in discussing James Baldwin: that of the threshing floor. This is, as Brooks says, a powerful and pervasive trope in American evangelism. The image of the threshing floor is used several times in the Bible. It is the place where Joseph and his brothers mourn Jacob; where Ruth seduces Boaz; where Uzziah touches the Ark and is killed.

The specific story that Brooks mentions in Chronicles is also narrated earlier (with some differences) in Samuel. Chronicles and Samuel tell us that David, having sinned, makes partial reparation by giving up some of his wealth to purchase a threshing floor as a fit space to perform an offering. After he sacrifices his offerings, David collects and contributes materials for his son Solomon to build on the spot a house for the Ark of the Covenant that will serve as a temple. Not worthy to take up this task, the father dictates to the next generation the narrative and the structure for its worship. At Brooks’s behest, we might think here of Jimmy Baldwin and his father’s bottles or forms.

The threshing floor is, therefore, a space of humbling and of sacrifice. It is a holy place where one approaches God, a space that commentators have interpreted as the site of individual revelation, reading, and interpretation. Moreover, there is the most familiar sense of the threshing floor: the area where wheat is separated from chaff, truth from falsehood. Overall, then, it is a space of separation or sorting: profane from sacred, good from bad, true from false, essential from superficial. On the threshing floor, the individual, stripped and broken down—flailed—comes face-to-face with God. Yet it is also the space where a building and an institution are constructed.

The push and pull between these last two—individualism and institution—turns out to be central in twenty...