Bunyan on the Edge

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 10; p. 29
• Main Author: Slights, William W E
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2001
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Dryden, John (1631-1700); English literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

The 'logic of the supplement' that Derrida insists infects Rousseauistic nature from its point of origin and graphically points the way to the end of signification, dictates that 'The possibility of reason, of language, of society, the supplementary possibility, is inconceivable to reason'.2 Quite in ignorance of common sense, the referential residue that might be offered in the margins to augment the hermeneutic picture tends itself always to suggest potential new links to the divine world beyond the text - new, rationally uncontrolled directions for readers to take. Alluding to Rev. 3.7, he announces that 'God hath the key to the iust mans mouth' (242) and expounds the cryptic pronouncement as follows: [...]Saint lohn the Euangilist, the Secretary to Christ, and profound searcher into celestiali secrets, writing by Diuine commaundement to the Bishoppe of Philadelphia sayth: . . The migration of marginal notes to the bottom of the printed page during the eighteenth century has been persuasively explained by Evelyn Tribble, but the spiritual polemics behind this development in editions of Bunyan' s works differs somewhat from the polemics of scholarly classicism to which she attributes the development.21 Tribble argues that John Dry den satirically deflates the pedantic marginalia in John Ogilby's 1654 edition of Virgil, and Alexander Pope and others continue the attack on Richard Bentley and Lewis Theobald in such works as the Dunciad Variorum (1729), because they prefer to employ footnotes that bear the marks not of professional, shoulder-to-the-text scholarship but of tasteful appreciation of its poetic beauties. See Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis of Representation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), 34-76 on the Puritan attitude toward figurai history; also Maxine Hancock, The Key in the Window (Unpubl. diss. 1992), on Bunyan's compositional habits; and Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982), on the expansion of literacy during the later seventeenth century. 14 Maxine Hancock, 'Bunyan as Reader: The Record of Grace Abounding,' Bunyan Studies 5 (1994): 68-84, and also see her dissertation, The Key in the Window, from which I've learned a great deal. 15 Lewis Bayly, Practice of Pietie ...