SOURCE: Spargo, Tamsin. “‘I being taken from you in presence’: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and claims to authority.” In The Writing of John Bunyan, pp. 43-67. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 1997.

[In the following essay, Spargo examines Grace Abounding as one of the first texts to explore the subject of liberal humanism, noting that it has often been studied as a founding example of the struggle to define the meaning of authority, authorship, and modern subjectivity.]

I. PRESENCE RESTORED?

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners occupies a unique position within the traditionally agreed canon of texts by John Bunyan. In a literary criticism which takes as its supreme object of knowledge the individual human consciousness, any text which can be read as autobiographical is assured of a double significance. It may be read as itself offering the most immediate access to the originating consciousness of the author, whilst providing an authoritative source of legitimation for other more overtly fictional, less apparently personal, texts. A succinct formulation of this approach within Bunyan studies is provided by one of its earliest advocates, George Offor: ‘The Grace Abounding, or Life of Bunyan, is a key to all the mysteries of The Pilgrim's Progress, and Holy War.’¹

Whilst the majority of critics have acknowledged that Grace Abounding is an example of spiritual autobiography, the meagre historical and social information on the life of Bunyan it provides has been pounced on to flesh out the image of an author who might otherwise remain an elusive figure, eclipsed by his writings. The need to establish a credible founding subject behind and beyond his texts, produced in the image of the reader, has led generations of critics to scour Grace Abounding for the true meaning of the Bunyan deemed to lie beneath the surface of the ‘I’ of the text. There have been, of course, a great many, different, true meanings.

The efforts to restore the perceived subject of Grace Abounding to presence have taken a number of forms. Some critics, following clues in the text, have attempted to piece together a socio-historical identity for the author which might in turn explain or elucidate his writings. This process, given the paucity of factual references in the text, has proved in most cases to be a frustrating one. Those passages which appear to refer to a level of concrete experience outside the text are, for the most part, extremely vague, leaving the critic who wishes to decide meaning by reference to the ‘real-life’ author no choice but to look to alternative documentary evidence. This is, in the case of Bunyan, an extremely limited archive. One example of the undecidability of such references in Grace Abounding is the passage on his providential escape from death whilst serving as a soldier. This is a single paragraph added to the third edition, together with other references to escapes from drowning and from an adder, and interpreted in the text as evidence of God's mercy:

13. This also have I taken notice of with thanksgiving; when I was a Souldier, I with others were drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it; but when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired to go in my room, to which, when I had consented he took my place; and coming to the siege, as he stood Sentinel, he was shot into the head with a Musket bullet and died.²

The identity of the army in which the writer was serving is not specified, but a number of critics and biographers have attempted to uncover the truth of Bunyan's military service and, by extension, of his political sympathies. The majority have accepted the scant documentary evidence available as proof that Bunyan served in the Parliamentary forces garrisoned at Newport Pagnell, but this apparent fact of the life of the author has proved of little help in determining his political beliefs or in resolving the often contradictory political meanings which are evident in the texts.³ The knowledge that John Bunyan served in the Parliamentary army cannot explain the shifting, discontinuous meanings of concepts of authority, obedience and power in his writings. Nor, as the numerous attempts to glean biographical evidence from the texts testify, can a reading of those meanings grant access to the mind of the author.

Other critics have offered alternative, yet equally reductive, readings of the true Bunyan by employing the textual material of Grace Abounding to produce psychoanalytical portraits of the author, which seek to resolve the problems of the text by reference to a founding conflict located within the unconscious of the writer. A typical example of this method of reading presents Grace Abounding as an attempt ‘to settle ego disturbance’, to resolve an ‘intra-psychic conflict’ which lies behind the text and which the critic holds to be the result of the ‘loss or alienation of parental affection’. The reading of Grace Abounding is offered within a framework which takes the symbols of cross and sepulchre within Christian writings to be a ‘reconciliation of father and mother, the formative male and female impulse’.⁴ Setting aside any criticism of these extraordinarily sweeping definitions of male and female ‘impulse’, it is possible to argue that this reading fails to recognise that the subject it has placed on the analyst's couch, is not an individual human being, conscious or unconscious, but a text.

Whilst such readings appear to challenge the notion of conscious authorial control, by locating the meaning of the texts in an extra-linguistic unconscious, they relegate their only source material to a secondary, mediating role, retaining as absolute object of knowledge a source of meaning which is deemed to pre-exist signification. The ‘I’ of the text must remain firmly tied to an ‘I’ behind or before the text. The written ‘I’ of Grace Abounding is thus offered as a means of access to the writing ‘I’ which, in turn, is offered as explanation for the text, an explanation which also serves to guarantee the authority of the reading. Readings which locate the source of meaning in the conscious or unconscious thought of the author rely on a conception of the originating subject which cannot be retrospectively identified in its fully authoritative position within the Bunyan texts. The ‘I’ which conventional literary criticism has attempted to restore to presence, whether it be John Bunyan, Parliamentary soldier and radical, or John Bunyan, disturbed ego, starved of parental affection, can neither explain nor contain the shifting and conflicting meanings of subjectivity evident in Grace Abounding.

First published in 1666, Grace Abounding was written at a time when the subject of liberal humanism was emerging, not fully-formed and sovereign, but produced in conflict with other competing models of subjectivity. Whilst this text has been repeatedly interpreted as a contribution to our knowledge of this subject in its most authoritative guise, that of the creative or creating author, Grace Abounding may instead be read as contributing to an exploration of the contingent meaning of an apparently self-evident subjectivity. As a text which constituted an intervention in the struggle to define the meanings of authority, authorship, knowledge and power, Grace Abounding may be read as participating in the foundation of a recognisably ‘modern’ subjectivity.

It is something of a commonplace in traditional critical assessments of Grace Abounding to emphasise the particular vividness of the portrayal of the narrator's anxiety as a departure from the norm in the established tradition of spiritual autobiography, treating the text as a moment of triumph of the creative individual consciousness, embodied in the author, over the generally impersonal, dehumanising constraints of a doctrine or discourse. But to read the apparent concentration on self-examination in Grace Abounding as evidence of the presence of a single, sovereign identity within, or behind, it is to ignore the complex range of different subject positions and discursive relations established. An examination of the interrelationship of these positions and relations may well indicate some similarity between an emerging subjectivity and that of liberal humanism, but, by attending to the contradictions and discontinuities within the meanings of that subjectivity offered here, it may serve to defamiliarise those all too often taken for granted today.

A close reading of this text must involve an encounter with a complex network of relations of authorship, authority and power which appear to resist any attempt at resolution by reference to a unified or unifying subject. What emerges in Grace Abounding is not a clear authorial persona but a number of conflicting positions within a range of discourses which the ‘I’ of the text can be seen to occupy. Certainly Bunyan here is author, but he is also text; he is Minister, but also Chief of Sinners; he is Father and Servant, preacher and writer, interpreter of the Word and product of the Word. Grace Abounding may be read as making a number of claims to authority. One of these claims bears a close resemblance to that which lies at the heart of conventional literary criticism, namely that it is the creative, meaningful individuality of the author which guarantees the limits of meaning of a text. The repeated reassurances in the frames of the text that these writings are indeed ‘written by his own hand’ or ‘written by himself’ indicate that the concept of an individual author whose authorship of a text must be firmly established was amongst the meanings available in the mid-seventeenth century. Successive additions to the text of Grace Abounding, of which six editions were published during Bunyan's lifetime, would seem to support this assertion.

The emended editions which survive have the phrase ‘Corrected and much enlarged by the Author’ added to the title-page. A seventh edition, published in 1692, includes an essay, generally attributed to George Cockayne, a fellow minister, entitled ‘A Continuation of Mr. Bunyan's Life; beginning where he left off, and concluding with the Time and Manner of his Death and Burial; together with his true Character, &c.’.⁵ This essay by a ‘true Friend, and long acquaintance of Mr. Bunyan’ is offered as an account of his last days of ‘Pilgrimage on Earth’, a reference perhaps to his most popular text both then and now. It is suggested that this is an account which ‘for want of time; or fear some over censorious People should impute it to him, as an Earnest covering praise from Men; he has not left behind him in writing’.⁶ Reference is made to Bunyan's writings, although only five are named, Of Prayer by the Spirit, The Holy City, Resurrection, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress, Part One, and the essay is followed by a postscript which ends with the remark that after Bunyan's death, ‘his Works, which consist of Sixty Books, remain for the edifying of the Reader, and the Praise of the Author’.⁷

Such passages may be read as indications of the increasing emphasis on the proprietorial relationship between author and text, a relationship stressed yet more clearly in prefaces to the later works in which Bunyan is anxious to differentiate between his own texts and ‘impostors’.⁸ Bunyan is clearly to be understood as the author of these texts in the sense of having written them, but is he presented as being the author of their meanings? The final words of the addition to Grace Abounding quoted above may hint at a notion of immortality through writing which conflicts with the meaning of immortality offered within the discourse of salvation supported by the narrative as a whole, thus raising the problem of the relationship between writing and believing and the subject positions available within alternative discourses. So whilst there are indications that the concept of authorship bore some of the meanings ascribed to it today, it would seem unlikely that the meaning of the term ‘author’ can be read here as identical with that offered by liberal humanism.

For many critics the increased emphasis on individual experience suggested by the conventional reading of Grace Abounding as spiritual autobiography is evidence of the need to make public a personal state, to make external an essentially interior reality. Yet are they in effect reading a text which exists only in their readings? The term ‘autobiography’ does not appear in Grace Abounding, even with the qualifying term ‘spiritual’ which has been employed subsequently to explain the text's failure to satisfy expectations created by the contemporary meaning of autobiography.

In British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century Paul Delany offers his definition of autobiographical texts as ‘(1) primarily written to give a coherent account of the author's life, or of an extensive period or series of events in his life, and (2) composed after a period of reflection and forming a unified narrative’.⁹ Delany's definition of ‘religious autobiography’ or ‘spiritual autobiography’ (the two terms appear to be interchangeable in his text) both relies on, and modifies, his definition of autobiography in general. Such texts are defined as ‘records of the progress of a soul’.¹⁰ Delany sees the unprecedented production of both secular and spiritual autobiographies during the seventeenth century as the product of ‘[s]ome deep change in British habits of thought’ and attributes this, in part, to the ‘unprecedented general social mobility’ during the Civil War and its aftermath.¹¹ He suggests that ‘[t]o undertake an autobiography, the writer must have a sense of his own importance’, although, as his survey of a wide range of such texts reveals, this sense of ‘importance’ takes a number of very different forms.¹² Whilst Montaigne may argue ‘I write not my gests, but my selfe and my essence’, apparently presenting the reader with a glimpse into a human subject whose essence is his property, the stress in many ‘autobiographies’ by members of religious sects is not on an individual or essential self but on the typicality of the author's status and experience, which are presented as exempla.¹³ In such cases the ‘importance’ of the author would seem initially to reside not in his or her individuality but in the subject-author's textual status as example.

Delany suggests that the great outburst of autobiographies among the sectaries from 1648 ‘formed part of an extraordinary welling-up of popular expression, a nationwide extension and democratization of spiritual fellowship’, made possible by the breakdown of government control of the press after 1642 and the failure to enforce the Licensing Act of 1643.¹⁴ He contrasts the number and variety of autobiographical texts produced before 1660, including material by Ranters and antinomians such as Abiezer Coppe and Lawrence Clarkson, with the more conventional texts of the post-Restoration period, including Grace Abounding. Delany's survey of the earlier material would seem to support his argument that the production of such texts may be linked to political and social changes during this period although his decision not to examine prophetic texts by women may suggest that his model of autobiography as ‘unified narrative’ is somewhat exclusive. Indeed an examination of the nature and reception of these prophetic texts by female authors might challenge Delany's somewhat idealistic representation of the era of ‘spiritual fellowship’, as I shall argue in a later chapter. The linguistic subversiveness of much radical writing during the period of 1640-60 is not examined in detail in Delany's study, nor are the different models of subjectivity which operate in the texts of various religious groups. Delany, in effect, employs an overall model both of autobiography and of subjectivity which is ultimately exclusive and rationalist.¹⁵ He does, however, acknowledge that religious autobiographies of the period deviated from this model: ‘Seventeenth-century autobiography in Britain, far from being a lyrical expression of “renaissance individualism”, was the servant of didactic, historical, or controversial purposes.’¹⁶

More recent studies by Nigel Smith (1989), Christine Berg and Philippa Berry (1981), amongst others, have done much to reassert the importance of the radical religious writings during the period between Civil War and Restoration which Delany's survey underplays. Smith's study, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660, suggests that whilst many radical texts shared the concern with language, rhetoric and literal scriptural interpretation of traditional Puritanism, such writings often deviated from the conceptual and textual norms of orthodox religious thought and writing. Prophetic writing, in particular, is seen to have exploited the traditional Puritan endeavour to identify the workings of the divine within the individual human being in such a way as to dismantle a series of oppositions which more traditional texts sought to maintain:

Versions of self were created which moved increasingly towards the merging of the individual with the Godhead, the ultimate claim for perfection. As experience gave way to prophecy so the distinction between expression and behaviour disappeared: writing, speech, and gesture combined in imitations of Old Testament prophetic behaviour. The complications this created, both inside and outside the text, with regard to the dramatic or theatrical way in which existence was conceived, were considerable. An inner world of archetypes, confident in its glorification, was created across the tumultuous central twenty years of the century. Undoubtedly the language of radical religion was founded upon irrationality in theory and in practice as the difference between the internal and the external, the literal and the figurative, disappeared. Self, church, and Godhead became one.¹⁷

Smith argues that ‘the proliferation of extreme theories of divine language and signification’ did not continue in the more restrictive climate of the Restoration, although he does make a persuasive case for the continuing influence of radical writings in later religious and political movements.¹⁸ Certainly, a text such as Grace Abounding may seem initially to bear little resemblance to the linguistically and conceptually transgressive texts of the earlier period, yet an examination of the text may reveal the ultimate instability of its apparently less subversive models of authority and subjectivity.

In his examination of Grace Abounding Delany acknowledges the conventional reading of the text as based on an account of spiritual experiences required for admission to a local communion, and suggests that the published text is a revised version which ‘was no longer primarily a credential of godliness, but had now become a spiritual handbook and personal apologia designed for the edification of fellow Christians’.¹⁹Grace Abounding is seen to conform to the basic pattern of ‘ministerial’ autobiography, with three parts, describing the author's ‘conversion, calling, and ministry’.²⁰ Delany argues that the conversion narrative is paramount in Bunyan's text, with the material on calling and ministry being presented in ‘sketchy’ form in the ‘Brief Account of the Author's Call to the Work of the Ministry’ and ‘A Brief Account of the Author's Imprisonment’.

Roger Sharrock's introduction to the Clarendon Press edition of the text includes a list of contents of the first edition which appears to support this argument. Sharrock divides the text into groups of paragraphs as follows: Before Conversion: 1-36; Conversion: 37-252; Calling: 253-305; Ministry: 319-39. Sharrock suggests that the emphasis on conversion is ‘most personal and least influenced by traditional precedents' and that ‘the uniqueness of Bunyan's treatment lies in its psychological penetration and freedom from rationalization into stock Calvinist formulae’.²¹ This celebration of Grace Abounding as an example of the triumph of the personal and individual over the formulaic or conventional seems to rest on a somewhat fragile base. Bunyan's stress on his lengthy period of despair, in paragraphs 132-252, is selected as evidence of his emphasis on ‘inner conflicts’ and hence of his departure from traditional forms, yet such passages are shown to be typical of texts of the period, with examples cited from the works of Vavasour Powell, John Crook, T. A. and A. I.²² The nature and order of Bunyan's related experiences are viewed as conforming precisely to accepted seventeenth-century norms, yet he is presented as somehow exceeding such constraints through the operation of an ‘inner need’:

This imperious inner need, ultimately stronger than the motive of religious propaganda, has imparted a continuous rhythmical flow to the whole work so that it reads like a single sentence, torrential but not confused, having its changes of tone and tempo that are nevertheless obedient to the overriding music of the whole; the music is that of a speaking voice: it is as if the confession is delivered in a continuous intimate speech to a friend.²³

Whilst this analysis appears to invoke a model of subjectivity which closely resembles the tortured and creative author privileged in modernist criticism, the textual effects, presented as the product of this ‘imperious inner need’, may not be reduced to such a model. Sharrock subsequently, and tellingly, refers to Bunyan as uniting ‘the emotional fervour of the extreme sectaries with a firmer Calvinist framework than they adhered to’ and acknowledges that ‘the mental conflicts depicted in Grace Abounding […], though they are real states of the soul, grow out of quibbling misunderstandings about texts’.²⁴ The critic who appears to invoke a twentieth-century model of unified subjectivity thus implicitly, and grudgingly, acknowledges both the impact of texts which offer competing models of subjectivity on the Bunyan text and the overtly textual and linguistic level at which the author-subject's attempt to secure a legitimate position or identity takes place.

Delany suggests that ‘[a]utobiography had a direct and truthful quality which could be relied on to make a strong appeal to the unconverted’.²⁵ The records of sales of such texts would seem to support the argument for their popularity, yet was their ‘truthful’ quality the reason for their popularity? Did such texts offer the truth of an individual human experience, as modern autobiography purports to, or did they perform a more complex role both for writers and readers? A number of more recent analyses of Grace Abounding have, in different ways, begun to explore the complex interrelationship of models of subjectivity, authority and textuality both within the text and within the discursive frameworks which legitimated its production and circulation. Whilst these texts may be seen to display a shared refusal to explain the text by reference to a pre-existing and controlling author figure, the differences between readings point to different agendas, priorities and critical positions.

II. REREADING THE SUBJECT OF GRACE ABOUNDING

The textual status of the ‘experience’, and of the subject, presented in Grace Abounding are examined in Jeremy Tambling's analysis of the text in Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject, in which he offers a reading of the text as a form of confessional narrative. In contrast to Sharrock's reading, Tambling's focuses on the text as producing rather than reflecting the subject. Grace Abounding is read as the inheritor of a Puritan tradition of internalised confession which substitutes the study, or private space, for the public confession-box, and the processes of writing and reading for the spoken confession. The text's ‘obsession with the self’ is thus ‘the desire to internalise the confessional, to be what is expected of it’ and the central technique in the production of the subject is seen to be ‘to wrest from textual sources a set of happenings that can be claimed to be authentic’.²⁶ The self which Tambling identifies in Grace Abounding is, as he states, ‘quite un-Rousseau-like’, yet the text is poised ‘at the beginning of the change of description from the idea of the person to the individual’.²⁷ Tambling employs Foucault's reading of the nineteenth-century practices of the social sciences in which the ‘daily characteristics of the prisoner’ were logged in a practice which entailed, in Foucault's words:

the examination as the fixing … of individual differences … the pinning down of each individual in his own particularity … [which] indicates the appearance of a new modality of power in which each individual receives as status his own individuality, and in which he is linked by his status to the features, the measurements, the gaps, the ‘marks’ that characterize him and make him a ‘case’.²⁸

Tambling suggests that this is ‘the moment that the word “autobiography” appears’, ascribed an ‘ontological status differentiating it from biography when the issue of the aut(h)o(r) becomes apparent’.²⁹ The writers of earlier texts, which have subsequently been categorised as autobiographical, are seen, in Tambling's analysis, to be engaged in a different practice:

Bunyan has no sense of the difficulty involved in describing himself as though he were a character and not himself. The self is not seen as the occluding difficulty which creates a blindness-and-insight situation in any attempt to give its narration of itself. The question of who or what is the I that can so speak of the self, that part-taken-as-a-whole, is not addressed.³⁰

The subject of Grace Abounding is thus not the individual subject as reliable, or unreliable, source and guarantee of meaning, but rather the nexus of various textual practices which connect human experience with divine reality. In Tambling's reading, Grace Abounding is ‘a history of interpellation’, in which Bunyan responds to voices from the pulpit, from heaven, and interprets voices and signs as ‘a person of the book’.³¹ Bunyan's search for a conclusive sign of salvation is seen as a process of interpretation in which contradictory scriptures are harmonised, a process which is then reinscribed as experience, ‘making it seem that he is the voluntary subject who willingly submits himself to the discourse of the other’.³² This process of resolving contradictory texts is seen to demand the elision of differences and the maintenance of an appearance of passivity, of submission to scriptural authority, on the part of the interpreting subject-writer. Tambling cites as an example the passage by Bunyan in which two conflicting texts are seen to ‘struggle strangely in me for a while’ which ends with one text emerging victorious, a victory interpreted by Bunyan as mercy defeating judgement:

He must show that the struggle of texts is resolvable; if he cannot, he will not appear as the unitary (Christian) subject he longs to be (and which the act of writing finally makes him). To appear this complete subject, he must misinterpret and misread. He ultimately chooses to accept the god of mercy over the Old Testament God of judgement, but writes in such a way that it appears that the struggle was not his, but that he was only the passive agent in it.³³

The passivity of Bunyan's apparent position within this textual struggle is revealed as illusory in Tambling's final example in which Bunyan describes his battle of interpretation with Satan:

If ever Satan and I did strive for any word of God in all my life, it was for this good word of Christ; he at one end and I at the other. Oh, what work we did make! It was for this in John, I say, that we did so tug and strive; he pull'd and I pull'd; but, God be praised, I got the better of him.³⁴

Satan, Tambling argues, may be read as the ‘repressed’ that ‘would read differently, interrupting the monological power of the text’ and whose defeat amounts to ‘the silencing of precisely that part of the self that cannot be interpellated, that cannot be made part of the confessional, unitary self’.³⁵

Tambling's analysis of Grace Abounding as a confessional text, rather than as ‘autobiography’ is persuasive, yet his stress on what he terms ‘the genesis of secrecy’, on the importance of the private space as the primary location of interpellative power, leads to a (deliberately) partial reading of the text. Tambling emphasises the ‘private space where the book is read’ as a significant departure from earlier public confessional practices. Bunyan's account of his own reading of Luther's commentary on Paul's epistle to the Galatians is cited as an example:

I found my condition in his experience, so largely and profoundly handled, as if his Book had been written out of my heart; this made me marvel: for thus thought I, this man could not know anything of the state of Christians now, but must needs write and speak the Experience of former days.³⁶

The experience which Bunyan longs for, Tambling argues, is textual and Luther's book ‘itself commenting on a master-text, contains a power of address the more potent for seeming to be heart-to-heart’.³⁷ Bunyan, as reader, in ‘the space of the silent study’, becomes ‘the confessant as he takes Luther to be describing him and his experiences’.³⁸ In Tambling's analysis this is ‘literary criticism and the practice of reading literature as commonly practised, where the wonder is held to be that timeless texts speak to our condition’, whereas ‘what actually speaks is the reader as confessant, whose experience is formed by an ideology of literature’.³⁹ Bunyan's ‘desire to see some man's experience’ is seen to trust ‘the materiality of print in the face of its labile character as writing’.⁴⁰

Whilst this is a convincing reading of the status of the text in Grace Abounding and of its relationship to a developing approach to reading ‘literary’ texts, including Grace Abounding, the sliding from ‘private space’ to ‘silent study’ in Tambling's analysis is problematic. Although the notion of private reading is clearly important within seventeenth-century nonconformist practices, as within earlier Puritan practices, and may have contributed to the development of the concept of reading as a process of connecting two individual subjects, the seventeenth-century meanings of ‘private space’ may not be identical with those of later eras. Certainly the spaces of reading and interpretation referred to by Bunyan in Grace Abounding bear little resemblance to Tambling's ‘silent study’; Bunyan, the reader, the listener and interpreter, is more often located on a road or under a hedge than in a study, silent or otherwise, and these are spaces offered by him to his readers as the locations for receiving divine communications. Bunyan's list of such places in his preface to Grace Abounding may hold a key to their status. The list includes both literal places and Scriptural locations: the ‘hedge’, ‘Hill Mizar’, ‘the Close’, ‘the Milk-house’, ‘the Stable’, ‘the Barn’.⁴¹ These locations would seem to stand as common ground between writer and readers, as spaces which defy definition as either personal or public and which are to be read as the contemporary versions of scriptural ‘types’. The process of interpretation is thus again paramount in the definition of legitimate space as it was in the definition of a legitimate subject position; scriptural precedent, correctly interpreted, becomes the means of categorising a location as spiritually, and, I would argue, politically, significant. The space of writing in, and of, Grace Abounding is the prison cell, a space which might appear to bear some resemblance to the ‘silent study’, particularly in post-Romantic images of Bunyan's Bedford cell. It is a space which is designed to remove the subject from the public domain, yet it is a space which is itself defined as public, as I shall argue in the next section.

Tambling's apparent elision of private space and silent study may derive from his location of Grace Abounding within a history of confessional texts. Tambling does acknowledge that the text might also have functioned in different ways, as a challenge to a secular royalist and reactionary authority, written by Bunyan as ‘a prison-house protest against the authority that has silenced him’, and as a means of validating a call to the ministry.⁴² These functions of the text are, however, seen as subsidiary in Tambling's account. The conventional nature of the textual techniques of Grace Abounding is similarly acknowledged, yet not given particular attention, in Tambling's analysis.

In an article published in 1984, Peter J. Carlton examines the role in Grace Abounding of what he refers to as ‘disclaiming locution’.⁴³ This term, derived from the psychoanalytic theory of Roy Schafer, is employed to describe the use of statements such as ‘that sentence fell with weight upon my soul’ in order to present the writer-subject as a ‘passive locus for the activity of alien agents’ and to present the subject's actions as experiences.⁴⁴ Carlton's reading of the role of such statements in the text prefigures Tambling's reading in many ways. Both readings hinge on the passage in which Bunyan's choice of one scriptural passage rather than another is presented as a passive acceptance of divine agency through the Word as evidence of the imaginary nature of this authorial or subjective passivity; both acknowledge that the emphasis on, and meaning of, experience, differs in texts produced within the various sections of the Puritan and dissenting movements. A significant difference in their readings is identifiable as the emphasis placed by Carlton on the role of authority and convention in the production and function of the texts.

The conventions of Puritan and dissenting writing are, in Carlton's analysis, a substitute for the objective religious authority which had been rejected or lost after the Reformation. ‘Disclaiming locutions’ are seen to fill ‘the void left by that loss’ and, by ‘constituting certain thoughts and feelings as happenings, such statements transformed mental events into direct communications from God, making them implicitly authoritative’.⁴⁵ The Puritan insistence on the scripture as sole, non-contradictory, authority is seen by Carlton to have involved a contestation of objective religious authority in the form of ecclesiastical hierarchy and a link is established between the convention of ‘disclaiming locution’ in texts such as Grace Abounding and an established tradition of polemical Puritan writings on scriptural authority. The technique is also related to the Puritan ‘pastoral method’ in which metaphors and figures of the Christian soul assaulted by alien forces abound in sermons and treatises.⁴⁶

The proliferation of conversion narratives which abide by certain established conventions, including that of ‘disclaiming locution’, is seen as a result of the application of techniques employed in polemical and pastoral writings to subjective experiences in order to afford them an objective or authoritative status. This legitimation could only be achieved through ‘rigorous adherence to a communally sanctioned form’.⁴⁷ Texts such as Grace Abounding may thus be seen to contest ecclesiastical authority, whilst conforming to ‘the authority of convention’. Inspiration, according to this model, is not a quality which denotes authorial transcendence of the constraints of convention, which would seem to be its meaning in many evaluations of Bunyan's achievement in Grace Abounding. It is, rather, a quality whose presence can only be ascertained in statements or texts which conform to a conventional model; inspiration is thus a discursively constituted quality, as it is, albeit differently, within conventional literary criticism.

The argument that the experience presented in narratives such as Grace Abounding is legitimated, even constructed, by a specific cultural framework is extended by John Stachniewski in The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair. Stachniewski, like Tambling, employs Foucauldian analysis of techniques of ‘subjectification’ in his examination of the pervasiveness of Calvinist paradigms of election and reprobation within the texts of English Puritanism. Preachers and books, fathers and their surrogates, are seen by Stachniewski to employ what Foucault termed ‘dividing practices’, both in ‘their constant discursive segregation of the godly from the ungodly and, more subtly, by inducing the replication of that division within the inner consciousness’.⁴⁸

The concept of God is, in Stachniewski's model, ‘a communal construct from which the individual could not easily escape’ and the ‘conceptual frames’ of conversion narratives are seen to operate with a prescriptive force.⁴⁹ In this context, Grace Abounding is read as a textual record of the ‘persisting doubleness of the experiential paradigm’, as a struggle between the elect and reprobate positions outlined in Bunyan's A Map, shewing the order and causes of Salvation and Damnation (1663?).⁵⁰ Reprobation, or exclusion, with its concomitant effects of isolation and alienation, socially and theologically, is seen to act as a constant threat, to be countered by sign of election, of belonging to the community of the saved. Presented as a ‘transcript’ of experience, the text is seen both to accomplish and attest to release from the despair which accompanies fear of reprobation, and to integrate its subject-author into the community of the elect. Bunyan's attempts to decide whether individual scriptural texts place him as elect or reprobate are accompanied by a series of engagements with language and authority, both spiritually or theologically and materially or culturally. His swearing and cursing when young is seen as evidence of ‘self-assertive authority’, produced in defiance of the ultimate authority of God, of the law, and as an effect of his own material and spiritual lack of status. This rebellious phase is followed by his ‘outward Reformation’, in which he borrows the language of godliness, but has yet to occupy a subject position within it. Only in the encounter with the poor Bedford women is Bunyan presented as truly acquiring language, as becoming inscribed as a subject within the discourse of salvation. This symbolic rebirth is seen, paradoxically, to be accompanied by an increased anxiety about language as the subject must become speaker: ‘I could not now tell how to speak my words, for fear I should mis-place them.’⁵¹ The authority conferred on Bunyan by the ‘discourse originating from God's Word’, a product of his ‘submission to an authority higher than the great ones of the world’, will be tested in encounters with other authorities, differently constituted and sustained, in which the meaning of his authority will be challenged.

A parallel, but differently accented, analysis of competing authorities in Grace Abounding is developed in Felicity Nussbaum's article, “‘By these words I was sustained”: Bunyan's Grace Abounding’.⁵² Nussbaum reads Grace Abounding as a text of self-presentation which sets ‘two impulses—one towards the universal allegorical ideal and the other towards the particularized individual—in continual conflict’.⁵³ Two ways of conceptualising the self are seen to compete with and complement each other, as Bunyan tests the limits of ‘divine patriarchal authority’ and ‘substitutes his own personal authority for God's’.⁵⁴ Nussbaum supports her argument by citing the passages added to the third and fifth editions of the text, passages which ‘intensify the separation between the protagonist and the narrator in their emphasis on his loneliness, isolation, and the length of time the process of conversion required’.⁵⁵ The structure of Grace Abounding is seen not as the ‘unified narrative’ required by Delany, but as a series of sections with tentative resolutions which describe ‘a self in process rather than a stable or unified identity’.⁵⁶

Central to Nussbaum's reading of Grace Abounding is her assertion that Bunyan is claiming a position of authority:

Bunyan uses the early conversion to create a temporal and spatial arena for the exploration of a series of possible selves which test the patriarchal authority of God. At the same time that Bunyan explores the possibilities of rebellion against God, of Bunyan the father rather than God the father, the autobiographical text begins to compete for authority with the Scriptural texts. After finding God in the early conversion, he then tests the limits of his own newfound authority. The period of temptation allows for both a mask and a purge; it provides a crisis of authority, but also a safe and secure position from which to struggle, for the narrator, the protagonist, and the reader know the outcome from the beginning of the text. We are certain that the conclusion will find the transgressor safe in the abounding grace of the authority of God. The autobiographer will achieve his goal of becoming God's child and becoming the father of the reader.⁵⁷

Bunyan, the protagonist, is seen to ‘rebel “within” authority’, to confront the limits of divine authority in a text which both competes with and complements the Scriptures. In the struggle between competing figures of authority in Grace Abounding it is words which are seen to ‘take on an authority that God, Christ, and Esau, on the one hand, and the self, on the other, cannot assume’.⁵⁸ Scripture is seen to contain elements of both the ideal and the particular and to provide the material for Bunyan's production of his competing and complementary text. Bunyan questions the authority of the Scriptures, as he does that of God, wondering ‘whether the holy Scriptures were not rather a Fable and cunning Story, then the holy and pure Word of God?’, yet assumes that capturing experience in writing will preclude further uncertainty: ‘Well, I would I had a pen and ink here, I would write this down before I go any further, for surely I will not forget this forty years hence; but alas! within less then forty days I began to question all again.’⁵⁹ Bunyan's own writing, in the form of Grace Abounding may be read as ultimately competing with Scriptural authority, as Scriptural texts form a subtext within Bunyan's text. Nussbaum extends this argument in her chapter on Grace Abounding in The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England, suggesting that:

Through religious discourse, Bunyan is recruited and recruits into being the sovereign Subject of ideology, the Subject in whom all subjects partake. The words of Scripture serve as a corollary text while the autobiographical ‘self’ competes as a substitute textual authority, a devotional guide that replaces the Scriptures and the Absolute Subject.⁶⁰

These rereadings of the subject in, and of, Grace Abounding engage in different ways with the question of authority within the text. It is to the framing of the text, to the presentation of the narrative within a specific textual framework, and to its articulation of a claim to authority within a framework of pastoral power relations, that I shall turn in the next section.

III. AUTHORITY ON TRIAL

The preface to Grace Abounding takes the form of an address, itself prefaced by the following title: ‘A PREFACE: Or brief Account of the publishing of this Work: Written by the Author thereof, and dedicated to those whom God hath counted him worthy to beget to Faith, by his Ministry in the Word.’⁶¹ An uncertain relation is suggested here between the author, writer of the text as ‘Work’, and the Minister, elected by God to ‘beget’ others to faith through the Word. The preface is dedicated not to a patron as benefactor nor to a general readership, but to ‘those whom God hath counted him worthy to beget to Faith’. The grammatical structure of this dedication is such that it could be addressed to those already converted but also to those who have yet to receive the Word. No limit is specified to Bunyan's intended addressees, nor is it clear whether his ‘Ministry in the Word’, past, present, or future, will take the form of the written or the spoken word. The phrase ‘brief Account of the publishing of this Work’ could be taken to mean a factual description of the production and distribution of a written text or an evaluation of the process of making a text available publicly. Only one phrase in this title appears to carry a single meaning: ‘Written by the Author thereof’, which recalls the statement on the title-page of the first edition in which the text as a relation of the experiences of John Bunyan is described as ‘written by his own hand’.⁶² Yet this apparently unequivocal assertion of authority will itself be complicated, if not undermined, in the address which follows, an address which reveals an extremely complex interrelationship of different meanings of authority, knowledge, power and subjectivity.

The address opens as follows:

Children, Grace be with you, Amen. I being taken from you in presence, and so tied up, that I cannot perform that duty that from God doth lie upon me, to you-ward, for your further edifying and building up in Faith and Holiness, &c., yet that you may see my Soul hath fatherly care and desire after your spiritual and everlasting welfare; I now once again, as before from the top of Shenir and Hermon, so now from the Lions Dens, and from the Mountains of the Leopards (Song 4. 8), do look yet after you all, greatly longing to see your safe arrival into THE desired haven.⁶³

This opening passage would seem at first glance to answer some of the questions prompted by the title to the preface. The address would appear to be that of a minister to his congregation, an attempt to continue in his duties towards them whilst he is unable to be with them ‘in presence’. It has already been established on the title-page that Bunyan is in prison. As A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan, also called A Relation of My Imprisonment, written by Bunyan but not published with this text (Grace Abounding) until 1765, indicates, Bunyan was arrested and imprisoned in 1660 for preaching without a licence, under the provisions of the Elizabethan Act against Conventicles (35 Eliz. cap.1, An Act for Retaining the Queen's Subjects in their Due Obedience).⁶⁴ The passage establishes a type of relationship between minister and congregation, ‘father’ and ‘children’, which was commonplace in nonconformist, as in other, Christian discourse. This figure of the familial relationship between minister and congregation which implies both material and spiritual dimensions and a dialectic of power and duty, both between and within the individual members of the group, can be read as connecting with a particular form of what Michel Foucault termed ‘pastoral power’.

In the essays ‘Politics and Reason’⁶⁵ and ‘The Subject and Power’⁶⁶ Foucault argues that Christianity initiated a new set of power relations whose particular characteristics are as follows:

1) It is a form of power whose ultimate aim is to assure individual salvation in the next world. 2) Pastoral power is not merely a form of power which commands; it must also be prepared to sacrifice itself for the life and salvation of the flock. Therefore, it is different from royal power, which demands a sacrifice from its subjects to save the throne. 3) It is a form of power which does not look after just the whole community, but each individual in particular, during his entire life. 4) Finally, this form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people's mind, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it.⁶⁷

The language of the prefatory address would certainly seem to indicate a relationship between Bunyan and his readership within the framework of pastoral power. The ultimate aim is clearly to ensure salvation: ‘my Soul hath fatherly care and desire after your spiritual and everlasting welfare’. The exercise of such power as is implied by the authoritative position granted by God is viewed as a ‘duty’ to be fulfilled even at great personal cost. Most significantly it is a relationship which demands continual scrutiny of the individual soul:

My dear Children, call to mind the former days, the years of ancient times; remember also your songs in the night, and commune with your own heart, Psal. 77. 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12. Yea, look diligently, and leave no corner therein unsearched, for there is treasure hid, even the treasure of your first and second experience of the grace of God toward you. Remember, I say, the Word that first laid hold upon you; remember also your terrours of conscience, and fear of death and hell: remember also your tears and prayers to God; yea, how you sighed under every hedge for mercy.⁶⁸

It is this process of self-examination which Foucault locates at the heart of the ‘pastoral modality of power’, a self-examination whose end is not, significantly, the discovery of the truth of the self identified with subsequent techniques of self-analysis, but rather the acknowledgement of the necessity of total obedience to the will of the shepherd. This submission is not the result of rational decision on the part of an individual subject, nor of a legal compulsion; it is the only tenable position for the subject within the discourse of salvation whose aim is the ‘mortification’ of the self, the renunciation of worldly presence in order to attain an eternal position within the full presence of God.

In an essay called ‘Grace Abounding and the new sense of the self’, Roger Pooley has suggested that Bunyan is ‘demanding a space in which he can exercise pastoral power, leading others into his interpretations’.⁶⁹ Pooley interprets Bunyan's challenge to the authorities, related in A Relation of My Imprisonment, as deriving not simply from a notion of ‘individual freedom confronting state power’ but ‘from another conception of power, more overarching yet more tricky to interpret than the rule of law’.⁷⁰ This suggestion would appear to be supported by the text. Bunyan, as ‘father’, acknowledges a ‘duty that from God doth lie upon me’ to guide his ‘children’ into ‘THE desired haven’. The preface clearly locates the rewards of suffering elsewhere, as in the final words ‘The Milk and Honey is beyond this Wilderness: God be merciful to you, and grant that you be not slothful to go in to possess the Land.’⁷¹

It is in the temporal interval on earth before this repossession of a divine home, I would argue, that the public places which Tambling subsumes under the category of ‘silent study’ are presented as having a special significance. Mundane, marginal locations such as the hedge, the barn and the stable, which stand literally and metaphorically outside the limits of conventional ecclesiastical territory, are to be restored to a central position within a different map of the realm of the spirit. The prison cell in which Bunyan writes is similarly reinterpreted, relocated within this map, as a space saturated not by state power but by divine power, or grace. This redefinition of the meaning of space, achieved through the identification of literal locations with scriptural types, provides a new map of the ‘real world’ which challenges the validity of existing maps or interpretations. Although it lacks the clear binary structure of Bunyan's published map of salvation and damnation, which presents two parallel linear paths which individual subjects are destined to follow, this fragmentary map begins to challenge the accepted meanings of what constitutes a powerful or authoritative position, both in terms of location and relation.

Some attention has been paid to Bunyan's status as a dispossessed subject, whose family had once occupied a more secure social position, and who had resorted to an itinerant occupation as a tinker. Stachniewski, in his analysis of the alternation between the assumption of reprobate and elect identities in Grace Abounding, suggests the existence of a ‘collective imagination’ which ‘registered a congruence between the Calvinist God and arbitrarily discriminatory market forces’.⁷² He traces the interconnection, throughout the text, of scriptural and commercial-legal metaphors of birthrights, of selling Christ, and suggests that there is a ‘social basis’ for Bunyan's ‘vulnerability to a reprobate identity’.⁷³ The young Bunyan is deemed to have lacked ‘a strategy for relativizing the dominant ideology’ and, consequently, to have ‘internalized the worthlessness ascribed to him’ as a poor, uneducated subject.⁷⁴ His subsequent inscription as a subject within a redemptive discourse is seen to afford a relative freedom from the dominant ideology and to provide a different position from which to view his social status. It also, I would argue, provides a vocabulary and a redefinition or realignment of existing meanings, which affords him an authoritative position within a different framework of power relations. This pastoral framework does not confront the state directly, but rather threatens to destabilise the oppositions between public and private, legitimate and illegitimate, powerful and powerless, upon which it rests.

Bunyan's claim to an authoritative position as father and minister within the prefatory address is reinforced by a number of scriptural quotations and references in the first person which were originally attributed to Solomon, Paul and Samson. Bunyan is also linked by analogy with Moses and with the greatest of human shepherds within the Christian narrative, David. References to the lions' den, the ‘Philistians’ who ‘understand me not’ and to ‘the Wilderness’ may be interpreted either as allusions to the world which is to be renounced or as veiled or coded references to the persecuting authorities against whose established regime of pastoral power the dissenting sects defined themselves. The fact of Bunyan's imprisonment for preaching the Word without licence, under the provisions of an act originally designed to counter the activities of conventicles deemed to pose a threat to the state power embodied in the sovereign person of Elizabeth I, may indicate that the practice of preaching and interpreting the Scriptures without the constraints of the authorised church was interpreted as offering an unacceptable challenge to the existing social and political structure.

Bunyan's repeated protestations of loyalty to the throne and statements condemning subversive or revolutionary political activity have been the subject of much critical debate, often in order to identify his overall political sympathies. In Of Antichrist, and His Ruine, probably written in the early 1680s and first published in 1692, Bunyan presents a forceful condemnation of those around the King who promote ‘wicked Antichristian Penal Laws’ and ‘the abominable filthiness of that which is Antichristian-Worship’,⁷⁵ whilst declaring his own loyalty to the King and calling on his readers to pray for the King:

Let the King verily have a place in your Harts, and with Heart and Mouth give God Thanks for him; he is a better Saviour of us than we may be aware of, and may have delivered us from more Deaths than we can tell how to think. We are bidden to give Thanks to God for all Men, and in the first place, for Kings, and all that are in authority.⁷⁶

Pray for the long Life of the king. Pray that God would always give Wisdom and Judgment to the king. Pray that God would discover all Plots and Conspiracies against his Person and Government. Pray also that God would make him able to drive away all Evil and evil Men from his presence; and that he may be a greater Countenancer than ever, of them that are holy and good, and wait and believe, that God has begun his quarrel with Babylon, Antichrist, the mother of Antichrist, the Whore; would in his own time, and in his own way, bring her down by the means which he has appointed.⁷⁷

Loyalty to the monarch is offered as a Christian duty, established in the Scriptures, for kings are to be God's agents in the destruction of Babylon and Antichrist. Individual monarchs may appear to have done more to further this divine plan: ‘noble’ Henry VIII, ‘good’ Edward VI and ‘brave’ Elizabeth I are all praised by Bunyan for ‘casting down’ Antichristian laws and worship. Yet even a monarch who appears hostile to the ‘church of God’ is to be prayed for, rather than condemned. No reference is made to Charles II (or to James II who may have succeeded to the throne at the time of writing) by name, but warnings against blaming the King for the persecution of the godly clearly differentiate between the current monarch who is ‘a better Saviour of us than we may be aware of’ and his, named, predecessors:

Take heed, I say therefore, of laying of the Trouble of the Church of God at the doors of Governours; especially at the doors of Kings, who seldom trouble Churches of their own Inclinations; (I say, seldom; for some have done so, as Pharaoh:) But I say, lay not the Cause of your Trouble there; for often-times they see with other Mens Eyes, hear with other Mens Ears, and act and do by the Judgments of others: (Thus did Saul, when he killed the Priests of the Lord; and thus did Darius, when he cast Daniel into the Lyons Den:).⁷⁸

Here, as later in the treatise, reference to the contemporary political situation is combined with indirect allusion to Bunyan's own suffering at the hands of the authorities, suggested by the reference to the ‘Lyons Den’ which Bunyan had offered as his place of writing in the preface to Grace Abounding. Scriptural analogies locate both monarch and subject within a narrative whose divine author has pre-ordained the role and status of each character, a narrative which allows Bunyan simultaneously to condemn Antichristian and Babylonian persecution and to distance himself from those who explicitly attributed such actions to the person of the monarch. Bunyan sums up his position as follows:

I do confess my self one of the old-fashion Professors, that covet to fear God, and honour the king. I also am for blessing of them that curse me, for doing good to them that hate me, and for praying for them that despitefully use me, and persecute me: And have had more Peace in the practice of these things, than all the World are aware of. I only drop this, because I would shew my Brethren that I also am one of them; and to set them right that have wrong Thoughts of me, as to so weighty Matters as these.⁷⁹

This opaque statement of the author's position in relation to the ‘weighty Matters’ of obedience to God and King, which is presented to ‘my Brethren’ as a proof of being ‘one of them’ and as a counter to ‘wrong Thoughts of me’, implicitly acknowledges the force of persecution in shaping the lives of the persecuted, but turns a position of passive subjection into active subjection. What form the ‘wrong Thoughts’ had taken remains uncertain, but in the context of a treatise which calls for the destruction of Antichrist and in so doing calls for obedience to a monarch frequently associated with ‘Antichristian’ activities, it seems likely that Bunyan had been associated with plots against the king.

Of Antichrist, and His Ruine and Grace Abounding stand near the end and the beginning, respectively, of Bunyan's pastoral ministry, yet both texts involve a series of negotiations with competing models of authority. By the 1680s Bunyan had achieved relatively authoritative positions as both minister and author, but in the 1660s his authority was, literally, on trial. The disruptive power of the sects lay not in encouraging individuals to disobey an unjust or persecuting ruler, but rather in insisting that ruler, judge and tinker alike are all required to act in obedience to an absolute authority whose true meaning is inscribed not in any constitution or law of man but in the living Word, the Scriptures as the visible and audible transcription of the ever, and everywhere, present deity.

It is the emphasis on the Scriptures as sole material means of access to God's truth which enables nonconformists such as Bunyan to claim interpretative authority on a par with the Established Church. When challenged by the justices at the Bedford quarter sessions in 1661 for refusal to conform to the practice of using the Book of Common Prayer, Bunyan returns to the Bible to defend his position:

I said that those prayers in the Common Prayerbook, was such as was made by other men, and not by the motions of the Holy Ghost, within our Hearts; and as I said the Apostle saith, he will pray with the spirit and with understanding; not with the spirit and the Common Prayerbook.⁸⁰

I said, shew me the place in the epistles, where the Common Prayer-book is written, or one text of Scripture, that commands me to read it, and I will use it. But yet, notwithstanding, said I, they that have a mind to use it, they have their liberty; that is, I would not keep them from it, but for our parts, we can pray to God without it.⁸¹

Similarly, it is to the Scriptures that Bunyan looks for justification of his claim to the right to preach, to follow a calling from God, when challenged by Justice Kelynge who, Bunyan reports in A Relation of My Imprisonment, ‘asked me where I had my authority?’. Bunyan responds by citing Scriptural exhortations to those who have received ‘the gift’ to exercise it, to ‘speak as the oracles of God’. Kelynge attempts to limit the application of the Scriptures in order to exclude Bunyan and to reinterpret gift as material calling, in Bunyan's case, ‘the gift of tinkering’. Bunyan refuses to accept this different interpretation and is returned to prison, under threat of banishment or death. As Stachniewski notes in his reading of this passage, the justices, who share Bunyan's basic Protestant commitment to the authority of the Word, must acknowledge the base of his claim to authority, if not the actual claim, which is rejected as being couched in alien language, ‘pedlers French’. When the justices fail to induce Bunyan to accept their interpretation of his position, they are presented as being ‘reduced to expletives’ and his claim to spiritual authority, despite protestations of due obedience, provokes the repressive reaction of institutional power.⁸² The passage ends with a claim that the encounter and the imprisonment served only to reinforce Bunyan's assurance of his divine calling: ‘So that I found Christ's words more than bare trifles, where he saith, he will give a mouth and wisdom, even such as all the adversaries shall not resist, or gainsay. And that his peace no man can take from us.’⁸³ In a parallel textual move, the justices are later renamed by Bunyan as ‘the Adversaries of God's Truth’.⁸⁴

It may be argued that the Established Church had failed to maintain control of the meaning of the Word, of truth, resorting in many cases to enforcing the silence of dissenting voices by banishment or death having failed to achieve what Foucault has defined as essential to the operation of power in contrast to force, namely causing an individual with the potential to resist to behave in a certain way. If a relation of power may be defined as the ability of one party to subjugate, to govern or direct another, then the failure of the attempt to obtain Bunyan's agreement to follow a certain course of action, attending officially sanctioned church services and abandoning his own ministry, can only result in what may be termed the operation of force, the prolonged incarceration of the body and removal of the troublesome subject from the public sphere. The results of such an action reveal both the limitations of the attempts to silence by force, but also the complex relationship between different models of power and their implications for the development of alternative subjectivities. There is apparently incontrovertible evidence that in the early stages of his imprisonment Bunyan was allowed to attend the meetings of dissenting sects both locally and in London and that when his confinement was more rigidly maintained from 1664 to 1668 the influx of nonconformist prisoners provided him with a captive audience. The years of imprisonment were also to prove Bunyan's most prolific writing period.

The writing of Grace Abounding in prison may indeed constitute an attempt to continue a ‘Ministry in the Word’ which had proved to be an unacceptable challenge to church and state, yet the very fact of writing has effects which explicitly and implicitly disrupt any single purpose or effect which might be ascribed to the text. The text may be read as a defence of Bunyan's claim to authority as interpreter of the Word, but this can only be maintained by analysing the effects of the Word upon him as well as his continual efforts correctly to interpret his position in relation to individual scriptural statements and thus within the discourse of salvation as a whole. Bunyan's position must shift between active interpreter of the Word and obedient subject of the Word, between spiritual father of his children and child of God the Father. He is in effect writing a text in order that his own life may be read as God's text: ‘Wherefore this I have endeavoured to do; and not onely so, but to publish it also; that, if God will, others may be put in remembrance of what he hath done for their Souls, by reading his work upon me.’⁸⁵

The insistence on God as the one true author stands alongside a series of statements which seem to betray an uncertainty about the role and authority of the text's human author. While it is confidently argued that it is the operation of god through the Word which has constructed Bunyan as an authorised text in which others may read the true meaning of the relationship of man to God, Bunyan the author of Grace Abounding can be allowed only an uncertain and incomplete authority. In transcribing his experience of the power of the Word, Bunyan is offering an example to others of ‘the great grace that God extended to such a Wretch as I’.⁸⁶ The text is to act as a supplement to the Word, not as a substitute. But as with all supplements there is a risk of supplanting the original. It is possible to identify in the preface to Grace Abounding an anxiety about the process of relating the effects of the Word in other words:

I could have enlarged much in this my discourse of my temptations and troubles for sin, as also of the merciful kindness and working of God with my soul: I could also have stepped into a stile much higher than this in which I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things more then here I have seemed to do: but I dare not: God did not play in convincing of me; the Devil did not play in tempting of me; neither did I play when I sunk as into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me: wherefore I may not play in my relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was: He that liketh it, let him receive it; and he that does not, let him produce a better.⁸⁷

The association of ‘higher’ style and adornment with playing and the assertion of the need to be ‘plain and simple’ in relating ‘the thing as it was’ would seem to suggest a desire to eliminate the dangers inherent in representation. This echoes an anxiety about the process of signification, the plurality inherent in the metaphoric qualities of language, which is evident in many other texts of the period. But here it is closely linked to a number of potentially conflicting claims on the part of the author. Bunyan is claiming interpretative authority, asserting the legitimacy of his divine calling to preach the Word and, as the final sentence of the above passage indicates, in so doing he is producing a text which must itself participate in a contest to establish its own legitimacy of meaning. Bunyan does not, and cannot, claim to be the source or guarantee of that meaning, but just as he must adopt the position of spiritual father in order to assume authority as a minister, so he must adopt the position of author of this text, attempting to control the meanings contained within it, to express ‘the thing as it was’ without adornment or invention. He must, in effect, try to control the deferring, differentiating effects of language, to imitate in the words of man the assumed singularity and transcendence of meaning of the Word of God. The possibility of incorrect interpretation, of misreading, which informs the narrative section of Grace Abounding is the cause of a profound anxiety about the narrator's spiritual condition. Yet in offering that narrative as a representation of his struggle to achieve true knowledge of his position within the discourse of salvation, Bunyan must run the risk of inviting similar misreadings. Chief amongst these in recent years has been the tendency, identified earlier in this chapter, to read the text as the story of an inner life, a glimpse into the tortured soul of the author.

Grace Abounding may then, in conclusion, be read as a text which actively engages with the problems of authority, interpretation and knowledge within a logocentric framework of metaphysics, a text whose avowed intent to bear witness to the absolute authority of the transcendental signified must continually be frustrated by the deferring, differentiating processes of its own written materiality. In writing the narrative of God's capacity to write the life of his subjects, to produce men and women as texts which bear the imprint of the Logos, Bunyan cannot exclude the potential disruption to the clear hierarchy of authority implied by his own writing. Just as the attempts to silence Bunyan by incarceration failed to contain the voice of dissent in seventeenth-century England, so the author's attempt to arrest the production of meaning is inevitably doomed to failure. Authority is always on trial.

Notes

1. George Offor, The Works of John Bunyan, Vol. I (Glasgow and Edinburgh: Blackie and Son, 1860), p. lxix.

2. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 8.

3. John Brown, John Bunyan: His Life, Times and Work includes a section on different opinions about Bunyan's military service in which he notes that ‘[t]he side on which Bunyan was arrayed in the great civil conflict of the seventeenth century, Parliamentarian or Royalist, has long been a matter of dispute’ (p. 37). Brown presents the conflicting views of Lord Macaulay, who held that Bunyan enlisted in the Parliamentary army, and John Froude, who argued that Bunyan would have supported the Royalist cause. Macaulay, on the one hand, is seen to base his judgement on the resemblance between Bunyan's military characters, such as Greatheart, Captain Boanerges and Captain Credence, and the ‘military saints’ in Fairfax's army. Froude, on the other hand, cites the facts of Bunyan's father being of the ‘national religion’ and the Royalist sympathies of John Gifford, Bunyan's minister at Bedford, as evidence that ‘probability is on the side of his having been with the Royalists’ (p. 37). Brown accepts the evidence that Bunyan's father may have displayed Royalist sympathies, noting that he ‘had a son christened Charles on the 30th of May, 1645’, but denies that Gifford's allegiances would have had any bearing on Bunyan's actions as ‘these two men did not even know of each other's existence till years after the Civil Wars were over’ (p. 37). Brown's own analysis takes the form of a survey of the political trends in Bedfordshire as a whole. The county was overwhelmingly Parliamentarian and Brown eventually concludes not only that Bunyan would have served in the Parliamentary army, but suggests the name of a possible commanding officer, Sir Samuel Luke of Cople Wood End. Brown also presents conflicting interpretations of the events apparently referred to by Bunyan in his account of a siege in Grace Abounding. Again, Brown refutes the evidence of earlier critics whilst appearing to rely on a degree of conjecture in his own analysis. In an addendum to the 1928 edition of Brown's text, the editor, Frank Mott Harrison, argues that Brown's ‘conjectures were sound’ and reproduces a Muster Roll of the Newport Pagnell Parliamentary garrison of 1647, which includes the name ‘John Bunion’. This textual evidence is seen by Harrison to be conclusive (pp. 46-51). A more recent survey of the evidence about Bunyan's military service is provided by Anne Laurence in her essay, ‘Bunyan and the Parliamentary army’, in Laurence, Owens and Sim (eds), John Bunyan and his England 1628-88, pp. 16-29. Laurence examines the evidence that Bunyan may have served with the Royalist forces and finds it unconvincing, yet notes that although the majority of Bunyan scholars, such as Brown, William York Tindall, Roger Sharrock and Christopher Hill, now agree that Bunyan's service was with the Parliamentary army, a contribution to the New York Review of Books (2 March 1989) suggested that he was a Royalist soldier. Although there would now appear to be a general consensus that Bunyan served with the Parliamentary army, the inconclusiveness of the evidence appears to continually question the certainty of any conclusive judgement of Bunyan's military career.

4. Andrew Brink, ‘Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the secular reader: a psychological approach’, English Studies in Canada, 1 (1975), pp. 386-405. A far more persuasive and productive use of psychoanalytic theory is to be found in Elspeth Graham's essay, ‘Authority, resistance and loss: gendered difference in the writings of John Bunyan and Hannah Allen’, in Laurence, Owens and Sim (eds), John Bunyan and his England 1628-88, pp. 115-30. Graham employs the theories of Lacan and Freud in her study of authority and resistance, desire and obedience, which focuses on language and subjectivity.

5. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, Appendix B, p. 169.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. 175.

8. See especially prefaces to Bunyan's The Holy War and The Pilgrim's Progress, Part Two.

9. Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 1.

10. Ibid., p. 55.

11. Ibid., p. 19.

12. Ibid., p. 18.

13. Ibid., p. 33.

14. Ibid., p. 81.

15. Even Delany's guarded definition of the prophet Arise Evans as ‘a visionary rather than an out-and-out madman’, is based on his privileging of the rational aspects of his writings: ‘His style is usually clear, and his opinions on matters unrelated to his obsessions are reasonable’, ibid., p. 83.

16. Ibid., p. 174.

17. Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 18.

18. Ibid., p. 348.

19. Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century, p. 88.

20. Delany employs William York Tindall's analysis of the conventional structure of Grace Abounding from John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), see Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century, p. 89.

21. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, pp. xxxi, xxxii.

22. Ibid., pp. xxxi-xxxii.

23. Ibid., p. xxxii.

24. Ibid., pp. xxxii, xxxiii.

25. Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century, p. 81.

26. Jeremy Tambling, Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 92.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., p. 93.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., p. 94.

33. Ibid.

34. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, pp. 67-8. Partially quoted in Tambling, Confession, pp. 94-5.

35. Tambling, Confession, p. 95.

36. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 41, quoted in Tambling, Confession, p. 95.

37. Tambling, Confession, p. 95.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., pp. 95-6.

41. ‘Remember, I say, the Word that first laid hold upon you; remember your terrors of conscience, and fear of death and hell: remember also your tears and prayers to God; yea, how you sighed under every hedge for mercy. Have you never a Hill Mizar to remember? Have you forgot the Close, the Milk- house, the Stable, the Barn, and the like, where God did visit your Soul?’ (Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 3).

42. Tambling, Confession, pp. 94, 91.

43. Peter J. Carlton, ‘Bunyan: language, convention, authority’, English Literary History, 51 (1984), pp. 17-32.

44. Ibid., p. 18.

45. Ibid., p. 20.

46. The Holy War would seem to typify this genre.

47. Carlton, ‘Bunyan’, p. 27.

48. John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 85.

49. Ibid., pp. 158, 131.

50. Ibid., p. 129.

51. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, pp. 26-7, quoted in Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, p. 149.

52. Felicity Nussbaum, “‘By these words I was sustained”: Bunyan's Grace Abounding’, English Literary History, 49 (1982), pp. 18-34.

53. Ibid., p. 19.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid., p. 20.

57. Ibid., p. 21.

58. Ibid., p. 29.

59. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, pp. 31, 30.

60. Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 66.

61. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 1.

62. Ibid., p. xliv.

63. Ibid., p. 1.

64. Ibid., pp. 104-31.

65. Michel Foucault, ‘Politics and reason’, Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984 (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 57-85.

66. Michel Foucault, ‘The subject and power’ in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), pp. 208-26.

67. Ibid., p. 214.

68. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 3.

69. Roger Pooley, ‘Grace Abounding and the new sense of self’, in Laurence, Owens and Sim, John Bunyan and his England 1628-88, pp. 105-14.

70. Ibid., p. 114.

71. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 4.

72. Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, p. 139.

73. Ibid., p. 141.

74. Ibid., p. 145.

75. Bunyan, Of Antichrist and His Ruine, Misc. Works, Vol. XIII, p. 440.

76. Ibid., p. 488.

77. Ibid., p. 489.

78. Ibid., p. 428. Christopher Hill's Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London and New York: Verso, 1990) includes comment on Of Antichrist and His Ruin, pp. 31, 80, 118, 147-8, 162, and offers a useful survey of the diverse deployments of the figure of the Antichrist in seventeenth-century theological and political writings.

79. Ibid., p. 489.

80. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 114.

81. Ibid., p. 117.

82. Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, p. 149.

83. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 119.

84. Ibid., p. 129.

85. Ibid., p. 2.

86. Ibid., p. 3.

87. Ibid., pp. 3-4.

Bibliography

Editions of Bunyan's Writings Cited

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, R. Sharrock (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

The Holy War, R. Sharrock and J. F. Forrest (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

The Life and Death of Mr Badman, J. F. Forrest and R. Sharrock (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, R. Sharrock (gen. ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976-89) comprising:

Vol. I, T. L. Underwood (ed.) (1980); Vol. II, R. L. Greaves (ed.) (1976); Vol. III, J. S. McGee, (ed.) (1986);

Vol. IV, T. L. Underwood (ed.) (1989); Vol. V, G. Midgley (ed.) (1986); Vol. VI, G. Midgley (ed.) (1980);

Vol. VII, G. Midgley (ed.) (1989); Vol. VIII, R. L. Greaves (ed.) (1979); Vol. IX, R. L. Greaves (ed.) (1981); Vol. X, O. C. Watkins (ed.) (1988); Vol. XI, R. L. Greaves (ed.) (1985); Vol. XII, W. R. Owens (ed.) (1994); Vol. XIII, W. R. Owens (ed.) (1994).

The Pilgrim's Progress, J. B. Wharey and R. Sharrock (eds) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960).

Other Works Consulted

Brink, A. (1975), ‘Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the secular reader: a psychological approach’, English Studies in Canada, 1, pp. 386-405.

Brown, J. (1928), John Bunyan: His Life, Times, and Work, London and Glasgow: Hilbert Publishing.

Carlton, P. J. (1984), ‘Bunyan: language, convention, authority’, English Literary History, 51, pp. 17-32.

Delany, P. (1969), British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Foucault, M. (1986), ‘The subject and power’, in H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester.

———. (1988) ‘Politics and reason’, in L. D. Kritzman (ed.), Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 57-85.

Graham, E. (1990), ‘Authority, resistance and loss: gendered difference in the writings of John Bunyan and Hannah Allen’, in Laurence, A., Owens, W. R. and Sim, S. (eds), John Bunyan and his England 1628-88, London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press, pp. 115-30.

Hill, C. (1990), Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England, London and New York: Verso.

Laurence, A. (1990), ‘Bunyan and the Parliamentary army’, in Laurence, A., Owens, W. R. and Sim, S. (eds), John Bunyan and his England 1628-88, London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press, pp. 16-29.

Laurence, A., Owens, W. R. and Sim, S. (1990), John Bunyan and his England 1628-88, London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press.

Nussbaum, F. (1982), “‘By these words I was sustained”: Bunyan's Grace Abounding’, English Literary History, 49, pp. 18-34.

———. (1989), The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Offor, G. (1860), The Works of John Bunyan, 3 vols, Glasgow and Edinburgh: Blackie and Son.

Pooley, R. (1990), ‘Grace Abounding and the new sense of self’, in Laurence, A., Owens, W. R. and Sim, S. (eds), John Bunyan and his England 1628-88, London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press, pp. 105-14.

Smith, N. (1989), Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Stachniewski, J. (1991), The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Tambling, J. (1990), Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Tindall, W. Y. (1934), John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher, New York: Columbia University Press.