Borderline Exegesis

Chapter 4: Interrupting Hope: The Book of Revelation

4 What does one do when the effort to live otherwise, as someone else, in a world that is not working well for most of us (and ultimately not well for any of us) finds itself fully foiled and flummoxed? When the world as it is, as we have known it, relentlessly continues to unfold as ever, insisting with growing vehemence on total conformity to the current order of things, with “zero tolerance” for all exceptions to this rule? What does one do when the insistence is imposed globally, multiculturally, willy-nilly, sometimes through economic sanction, sometimes through military force, by rule of law, in the name of national security, for the sake of business as usual, under the aegis of human reason, that is, human rights? What does one do when hope itself seems to be threatened with extinction, as though all further resistance—as the Klingons on Star Trek used to say—now were futile? Or, as Donald Hall has put it in a cheeky little poem that bristles with justified anger, it is as though democracy at last is brought to the fish to “liberate them / into fishfarms,” where their final purpose shall be enacted upon maturity.1 For the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, the book of Revelation was the biblical text in which all the other writings of the Christian Bible finally “came together” in a concluding paroxysm of symbolic surcharge.2 For less enthusiastic readers—often representing some version of mainline liberal Protestantism (as Frye)—the same work instead seems to be a site interrupting hope the book of revelation 126 borderline exegesis of serious confusion. Always prone to excessive interpretation, the book of Revelation in their estimation might better be described as a loose cannon . At the same time, for other readers, the text represents a discourse of “die-hard” resistance to the reigning superpower of the day, which was the Roman Empire, and thus is still able to provide inspiration for similar strife today.3 Yet another group of especially Anglophone and frequently Evangelical readers of the book of Revelation continue to consult the work as though it were a weather forecast for the future, using it to debate exactly where the world now stands in a cosmic countdown to the end of history.4 One might imagine that a borderline exegesis of the book of Revelation, whose meaning already has become overdetermined through this history of interpretation, would first attempt to “turn the volume down.” Instead of rendering the dominant diversity of appropriations even more acute through the proposal of yet another framework for investigation, would not the road less traveled by (as Robert Frost once said) first entail abstaining from this flurry of divergence, seeking instead the center of the storm?5 Under the aegis of a promising interruption, this is what I shall ultimately argue for the book of Revelation in this chapter. Nonetheless, the first step will be to join the busy crowd of critics, expanding even further the number of possible frameworks for interpretation of the work. In this regard, the practice of borderline exegesis is akin to karate, which uses the opponent’s force against itself by following it first wherever it wants to go. Again, I shall do this by proposing yet another framework for scholarly interpretation of the book of Revelation. My proposal will be to read the work not primarily as an instance of biblical—Second Temple Jewish—apocalyptic “literature,” nor as a sort of symbolist “fantasy” (mass hysteria) or social-class “ideology” or divine “prophecy” of future events, but, rather, as a case of collective dream work. The category of collective dream work encompasses a number of the same discursive elements that the other categories—apocalyptic literature, symbolist fantasy, social-class ideology, divine prophecy—also underscore, just as each of these must take up some of the same discursive elements that the others emphasize too. Nonetheless, each term, including “collective dream work,” aims to shape the task of interpretation by pitching the discourse of the book of Revelation in a distinctive key. Thus it orients a reading of the work in a specific direction. The result is an interpretation inclined to develop some features of the text more than others. Regarding the category of collective dream work, I will shortly say a little more about its specific emphases below. the book of revelation 127 The borderline nature of dreams and...