:: The Young Enthusiast ::

Introduction: Job is, in essence, an uninterpretable text; instead of coherency, the reader gets contradiction; instead of meaning, the reader gets repetition. As such, Lamb’s project is not a history of how Job was read across the 18th century; rather, it is used as a site of what he calls a “recurrent cultural antinomy” that is prevalent throughout the century (in other words, he will use Job much as John Bender used prisons in Imagining the Penitentiary or Terry Castle used masquerade in Masquerade and Civilization). While the very nature of Lamb’s project seems to work against the idea of making sense of Job, he points out three “positions” that can help make sense of Job’s rhetoric: the discourses of sublime, practice, and self-reference.

In regards to the sublime, Lamb concentrates on the mimetic nature of the experience of the sublime; however, this is not mimesis in the Platonic sense, but a mimesis of interpretation or experience in which the person who experiences the sublime must inspire the sublime when explaining that experience. The sublime somehow moves from person to person without losing its energy, copied through their discourse in an almost mystical fashion. Also, the sublime is subjective; the power to create the sublime is never in the text itself, rather it is available to anyone who can respond to the text in that intense a fashion.

When Lamb moves to practice, he writes about the tension between individual instances and the collection of them that ostensibly results in some kind of rule, norm or custom. Lamb’s most powerful example of this is the English law, which consists merely of the established legal precedent of previous cases. Supposedly this system priveleges the normative and the customary, but it presents a great deal of problems when trying to interpret the particular event that probably does not conform to that quote unquote “standard.”

Finally, by self-reference Lamb seems to mean something like tautology, though infused with some kind of vague meaning thanks to the kind of mimetic circuit described in the section on the sublime. Here Lamb appeals to systems theory, noting that any system which cannot justify itself ultimately can only rely on tautology. When tautology takes the form of expressions like “society is what it is” and “the law is the law,” it highlights the inability of systems like society and the law to justify themselves on any deeper level. To put it more bluntly, all systems not only rely on tautology, they are based on it.

The chapter ends with two readings of 18c retellings of Job. Lamb argues that whenever later authors try to retell Job and systematize its meaning they always fail thanks to the inherent resistance of the text to interpretation. In one story, Job is assured by God that he is not being punished for anything he did wrong, and hence Job is cast as the model of patience who endures God’s trials. However, the figure of his wife exists in the original’s periphery; she cannot understand why God is punishing them, and hence she becomes the story’s Job, Job becomes the comforters and the story remains as difficult to interpret as ever. Whenever you introduce the nasty world of particulars into Job the whole thing just falls apart.

Chapter 1: Job and the Practice of Writing: This chapter contains Lamb’s reading of the Book of Job itself, in which he pulls out the textual evidence for many of the points he outlined in the introduction, expanding much more deeply on some. In particular, the dialogues between Job and his comforters are analyzed particularly closely; while Job’s complaints are “practice” (they do not analyze or universalize his suffering, they merely act it in the way described in the introduction), his comforters constantly try to make his suffering into something universal, something other than suffering itself. Lamb also looks very closely at the nature of the bet between God and Satan. One can’t help but find it curious that God, who is omnipotent and ominiscient, would enter into such a wager; thus, you can read Satan as betting not just on Job’s fallibility, but the fallibility of God’s universe as a whole. If things don’t happen exactly as God says they will, then Satan wins. Job is supposedly utterly unique (as Lamb quotes, there is “none like him in the earth”), but he is forced within the narrative to act as a symbol of the entirety of God’s creation, which clearly he is not. Finally, Lamb once again emphasizes the uninterpretability of Job; as a reader of Job, one has two choices: either enter into the mimetic repititions of Job’s plight in full, first-person intensity or simply not understand the text.

Chapter 2: Public Theodicies and Private Particulars: Lamb begins by examining the three different types of theodicies, concluding that only one of them really seems coherent, which is this one:

There is an argument founded on a postulate that nothing happens or subsists in the world beyond the horizon of the divine plan; hence the apparently most anomalous and heartbreaking events are dispensations made according to an ultimately coherent system.

Lamb then analyzes Leibniz’s Theodicy and Kant’s criticism of it in On the Failure of All the Philosophical Essays in the Theodicee (English title). In Kant’s essay, he attempts to support (contrary to Leibniz) that universalizing consolations are ultimately unsatisfactory to those who suffer, as they view their complaints as “a record of contingencies.” Throughout the essay Kant identifies complaint as being just and right, while most ways of justifying God’s will to man end up being both illogical and ineffectual. From there, Lamb illustrates how Kant’s ideas are borne out in two other 18c theodicies, Pope’s Essay on Man and Young’s Night Thoughts, arguing that the universilizing of morality that the poets do in their work ultimately rests on tautology (”Whatever is, is RIGHT”) and proves ineffectual when the two men encounter suffering in their own lives (Pope loses 500 pounds in the south sea bubble, Young’s daughter-in-law dies).

Chapter 2: Hume and the Unfolding of Tautologies: Lamb argues that the mid-18c is a particularly fruitful time for the scholar of unfolded tautologies, as during this time period many authors reach these unavoidable tautologies when attempting to reconcile the evidently ordered, created universe and particular complaint. For Lamb, many of Hume’s writings are “devoted to supplanting providential deductions (such as the theodicies of Pope and Young) with inductions based on nothing more authoritative than personal experience” (83). Like Kant, Hume can see the hubris in attempting to reason a cause from an effect of that cause and, further, that cause to a first cause. Hume comes to the same conclusions about the benefit of the mimetic chain of complaint described above, but instead of locating this just in re-vocalization or re-writing, Hume finds it in empiricist epistemology. Specifically, when we see something (for instance, a scene that is supposed to be instructive) it is copied to our mind and becomes an idea in much the same way that Job’s complaints are copied (without losing their intensity) by those who re-write his story. Lamb then ends the chapter by showing how this conflict is dramatized in Voltaire’s Candide, Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes and Rasselas and Richardson’s Clarissa.

Chapter 5: Political Principles and Patriotism: Lamb argues that political rhetoric operates on the same kind of axis of general applicability and particularity as the other modes of discourse he has identified earlier in the book. However, one gains the status of “patriot” not by concealing one’s particularities in order to conform to the general principles, but by brandishing them and drawing them into political rhetoric. As Lamb puts it, “the patriot merely combines the public role of historian with the private role of the afflicted individual in a manner that is both legible and audible” (107).

Chapter 6: The Job Controversy: Lamb examines the controversy surrounding William Warburton’s attempts to reclaim Job for “orthodoxy and systematic narrative” (110), noting how, in the wake of reading Job in such an intensely purposed manner, Warburton became, in essence, a Job himself.

Chapter 7: Fictions of the Law: In this chapter Lamb makes the leap from talking about generalities and particulars in the broadest sense and moves to talking about how the law works in novels as a site for tension between the desire for uniformity and generality and the particularity of the individual case. Lamb analyzes both non-fictional accounts of criminal cases and executions as well as works of fiction in which the criminal justice system deals prominently: The Beggar’s Opera, The Vicar of Wakefield and Caleb Williams in particular. Throughout the chapter Lamb also notes the similarities that many of these works of legal fiction have with Job’s story, such as Caleb Williams’s identification of himself with his gravestone at the end of the novel.

Chapter 8: First Persons Singular in the South Pacific: This chapter centers around literary accounts of Captain Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific, in particular John Hawkesworth’s first-person retelling of Cook’s tales. Lamb examines two main aspects of the text. The first is Hawkesworth’s invocation of Job at the beginning of the book when describing a sudden calm that kept the ship from destroying itself against the Great Barrier Reef. Hawkesworth noted that it was no more logical to ascribe the calm to salvation than it was to argue that God was the one who had sent them into the reef in the first place. Lamb looks at a number of responses to this passage in periodicals, most of which are extremely angry and take issue with Hawkesworth’s intepretation of Job (and, as in other debates over Job, one party takes the role of Job and one of the comforters). Secondly, Lamb delves into the idea behind Hawkesworth having re-written Cook’s story in the first person, drawing connections with other parts of his argument in which he talked about the transmission of particular suffering, etc.

Chapter 9: Sympathy, the Sublime and Sappho: Lamb begins the chapter by analyzing Smith’s theory of sentimentality against his opposition of first and third-person suffering. He finds that since Smith uses the relationship between the players on a stage and their audience for this metaphor (rather than a text and its reader), Smith’s version of human interaction regarding suffering as little more than make-believe. In other words, Smith comes at the problem from the point of view of the spectator, and as a result for his system to work properly the sufferer must act like his suffering is much less than it is in order for the sympathiser to be able to understand it. This is contrasted with Hume, who puts his emphasis on the sufferer and hence argues that it is the responsibility of the sufferer to invoke the proper reaction from his sympathizers. From there, the chapter moves into a reading of Burke’s treatise on the sublime, looking specifically at the contrast between “real” suffering and its portrayal on the stage. In the first edition of his Enquiry…, Burke priveleges the former in his example of staging a tragedy and, just before the play’s climax, telling the audience that there is an execution about to happen on the public square; Burke argues that the entire audience would leave because the real experience of terror is superior to an “imitative” one. However, when Burke revises the Enquiry… he pays far more attention to the way that the power of terror is harnessed and organized within a text, so much so that others call Burke callous because he is more moved by artistic representations of suffering than real suffering happening before him.

From there, the book examines several readings of Job in the 18c by authors such as Pope and Richardson. However, since those readings are not as relevant to my research I will stop taking notes here.

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