Hello,
I am Nidhi Jethava and student of MK Bhavnagar University Department of English. In this blog I am going to discuss the well known epigraph ' THE LETTER KILLETH'.
Second Corinthians 3:6 says, “He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” With these words, Paul summarizes the key difference between the Old and New Testaments: the first covenant was based on obedience to the written law (the “letter”), but the second covenant is based on the blood of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit.
There are two parts to this answer, as we look at both the letter and the Spirit.
First, what does Paul mean by “the letter kills”? Simply that the Old Testament Law, which is good and perfect (Psalm 19:7), reveals all people as law-breakers (Galatians 3:10). The law “kills” in that the penalty for breaking God’s law is eternal death in hell (Romans 6:23; Revelation 21:8). As God told Moses the lawgiver, “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book” (Exodus 32:33). Even if you sin only once in your whole life, it’s the same as breaking all of God’s laws (James 2:10), just as breaking only one link in a chain breaks the whole chain.
The written law—“the letter”—was chiseled in stone by the finger of God and is the unchanging standard by which all are judged. The law cannot give us righteousness or eternal life in heaven (Galatians 2:16). It can only condemn us as sinners, and the sentence is death. Heaven is where perfection is required (Matthew 5:20, 48; 19:16–21), and “the law made nothing perfect” (Hebrews 7:19).
Second, what does Paul mean by “the Spirit gives life”? Simply that the Holy Spirit rescues us from our hopeless situation. God saves us from death and grants us eternal life when we are born again through the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said, “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit” (John 3:6), and, later, “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are Spirit and they are life” (John 6:63).
The Holy Spirit was active in the Incarnation of our Savior (Luke 1:35). It was through the Holy Spirit that Jesus offered Himself as a sacrifice to God for our sins (Hebrews 9:14). The Spirit is the cause of the new birth (John 3:3–8). It is the Spirit who lives in believers (John 14:17), seals them (Ephesians 1:13), and sanctifies them (Romans 15:16).
Jesus came to give us an abundant life, or life “to the full” (John 10:10). The Holy Spirit living in believers is how Jesus fulfills that promise. The abundant Christian life is marked by the fruit of the Spirit, which is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22–23). The Old Testament Law could not produce any of that fruit; only the Holy Spirit can, as He lives in us.
The Spirit gives life in that He enables us to reach God’s ultimate goal for us, to be transformed into the glorious image of God’s own Son (2 Corinthians 3:18; also see Romans 8:28–30). Until the day that we see Christ, the Spirit intercedes with God on our behalf, ensuring our continued forgiveness and preserving the promise of God (Romans 8:26–27).
“The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). Elsewhere, Paul teaches the same truth: “But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code” (Romans 7:6).
This Epigraph context with ' Jude the Obscure' :-
The epigraph to Jude the Obscure announces that “the letter killeth”. If we take the word “letter” as meaning “a missive”, the relevance of the statement to the diegetic world of Hardy’s fiction appears striking. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the horse of the d’Urbervilles, Prince, is killed by a collision with the mailcart carrying letters, as Annie Escuret has judiciously pointed out (Escuret 1983, 582). The death of the animal, “the breadwinner” of the d’Urbervilles, will spell disaster for Tess, who will have to look for another “breadwinner” for her family. This scene is echoed by an episode near the end of the novel, when Angel (after re-reading Tess’s impassioned letter) is looking for his wife in Sandbourne: not knowing her address, he goes to the central post-office and, as postmen are coming out with letters for the morning delivery, he is given the address of Tess’s lodging-house. He is now on his way to disaster: the end of the chapter will show him colliding headfirst with a truth that will destroy both him and Tess. A hit or a miss: the course followed by letters in Hardy’s novels ends either in violent collision, or in awkward failure. Indeed there are innumerable examples of letters that miss their targets1 — intercepted, purloined letters, letters that go astray and never reach their addressees, letters that are never written, letters that are read/written too late, or too soon. Intersubjective communication always dysfunctions in the world of tragedy, thus leading the characters onwards to their doom. Every one has in mind the letter to Angel containing Tess’s confession, which will never reach its addressee owing to its having been mistakenly thrust under the carpet. Or the letter from Angel that Tess was so desperately yearning for at Flintcombe Ash (Hardy 1988, 287), and which never came: all she got was some writing in blood on a crumpled piece of paper, “a piece of blood-stained paper, caught up from some meat-buyer’s dust-heap” which was beating up and down the road without the gate of Parson Clare’s vicarage(2892).
In The Mayor of Casterbridge too, letters wrongly used bring disaster: Henchard becomes estranged from Elizabeth-Jane because of his untimely reading of a letter that reveals she is not his daughter. The love-letters that Lucetta once wrote to Henchard turn into “oral poison” when Henchard reads them aloud to Farfrae (Lucetta’s husband) while Lucetta hears every word of them from another room, standing transfixed as she awaits the moment when the signature shall be read, and her past conduct revealed to her husband — but Henchard relents and stops short of disclosing her secret. The letters however will be read aloud to a boisterous crowd in Mixen Lane, for Henchard has entrusted the badly sealed bundle to Jopp, his worst enemy, not knowing that he meant to take revenge on him. Thus Lucetta will be killed by her own letters, as the populace organize a “skimmity-ride” to bring scandal upon the couple, and she dies of a fit.
An excess of meaning characterizes the experience of the tragic character in Hardy’s fiction. The biblical slogans painted in red on the wall are meant for Tess, unmistakably; they inscribe on the “blank” page of her body the Other’s knowledge about her fault, and to make sure that meaning is properly conveyed to the reader’s heart, the words are hammered in by means of commas placed after each word (“placing a comma after each word, as if to give pause while that word was driven well home to the reader’s heart”, Hardy 1988, 85). In Lacanian terms, that parodic punctuation, which actually bores holes into the reader’s heart, may be understood as a sort of “quilting” operation gone mad — the “quilting-points” being those points in discourse at which the signified and the signifier are knotted together, not on a one-to-one basis (as in Saussure’s view), but by a retroactive effect; for according to Lacan the signified is constantly sliding under the signifier, and the function of the “quilting-points” is to put a halt to what otherwise would be an endless slippage. In the biblical slogan painted in red, the free flow of language is arrested in a coagulation that conflates the signifier (the red letters), the signified (the idea of sin), and the referent (Tess’s “sinful” body) in a solid mass, the commas making the slippage of meaning impossible. There is no escaping the meaning of the words that an omniscient Other paints in glaring red letters for Tess to read.
In the play of poetics, our attention is drawn towards the material part of the signifier: “it is as if the signifier lost touch with the signified, and stood there like a silent cipher” (Paccaud-Huguet 287). For according to Lacan the signifier has two faces: one for meaning, and one for jouissance. The letter is that face of the signifier which is loaded with the affects of a subject, and is “the recipient of burning enjoyment/jouissance” (Paccaud-Huguet 288). It is through the letter that “a fragment of the speechless Real can accidentally be written” — for in the conception of the signifier that Lacan developed after 1971 (especially after the publication of the article “Lituraterre”), the dimension of the Real is present in the Symbolic. The letter in the Lacanian sense could be defined as “a non-semantic bunch of graphemes and phonemes resisting the movement of the signifying chain, addressed to no-one, representing jouissance for another signifier” (Paccaud-Huguet 288). The letter is a useless leftover, an object that comes in excess of meaning: the homophony between “a letter, a litter”, pointed out by Joyce and taken up by Lacan in his “Seminar on the ‘Purloined Letter’” (Lacan 1966, 41), acquires a new resonance in the perspective opened by “Lituraterre”. Like “lalangue”, the linguistic reserve from which it is drawn, the letter is both singular and universal: it is private, and yet a recognizable mark that may be shared with others through a medium like poetry or literature7. It is by essence paradoxical, being situated on the “littoral” between irreconcilable entities, knowledge and jouissance — between the Symbolic and the Real. Its arabesques flourish, to use Virginia Woolf’s words, “round a centre of complete emptiness” (Woolf 193), an idea which Lacan formalized by saying that its lines follow “the edge of the hole in knowledge”, or by the metaphor of writing as what “furrows” the signified in the Real8. To go back to our example from Tess of the d’Urbervilles: the repetition of graphemes and phonemes blocks the movement of the signifying chain and delays the emergence of meaning; it produces a blind spot in signification, a void against which writing becomes resonant. “The artist should let go of sense in favour of sound […] a resonant silence is needed to awaken the echoes asleep in the memory of a language”(Paccaud-Huguet 289). When the artist succeeds in that task, the effect is one of pure pleasure/enjoyment, which may be shared by all readers.
Words : 2003
Characters : 11941
Sentences : 67
Paragraph : 18
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