Readers of the LAW AND POLITICS BOOK REVIEW will find little
that is new in Vincent Crapanzano's book regarding the on-going debate over constitutional
interpretation. Moreover, readers who
are not already interested in the political anthropology of fundamentalist
churches will find Crapanzano's treatment of the Biblical literalism of these
sects excessively detailed and, at times, somewhat patronizing. However, readers who appreciate
thought-provoking - if somewhat opinionated - comparison of two interpretive
contexts and attendant theoretical speculations will find
Crapanzano's book
worthwhile, if ultimately unsatisfying.
Crapanzano begins with the thesis that literalism has a
growing and pervasive significance in American social and cultural life. He states up front that he intends to offer
a critical perspective on two uses of literalist interpretive methods:
Christian Fundamentalism and originalist legal thinking. His claim is that both modes of literalism
are potentially dangerous because of the way both stress "original
meaning" and privilege
its moment of origin, while failing to realize that meaning
is porous and always susceptible to contemporary
significance and application (p. xxv). Crapanzano
thus reveals himself to be a post-modernist, but of the kinder and gentler
variety.
Our contemporary society's conventional understanding of the
written word, Crapanzano begins in his
introduction, gives to texts an illusory stability and independence.
He says "illusory" because the interpretation of texts is
always contested, and what is at stake is the control of meaning and the power
that comes with that control. Literalism,
then, is tied to an uncritical reaffirmation of frames of knowledge, as a way
of controlling textual meaning.
Crapanzano offers a ten-point definition of literalism (pp. 2-3), and goes on to link the literalist
approach to interpretation to positivism and to its instrumentalist
understanding of language (p. 15).Yet the real significance of literalism lies
in its "therapeutic import" as a mode of social governance and in promoting social order (p. 16),
for it is here that literalism's "questionable assumptions" about
textual meaning,
interpretation and
objectivity (p. 19) are yoked to the effort to restore a single set of moral or
spiritual values. Not one to mince
words about the negative implications of such social "therapy," Crapanzano
laments that an "open and creative discussion of aspirations is replaced
by a stale hermeneutics, which argues repetitively the niceties of methodology,
promotes fixed meanings, fetishizes texts, and idealizes the original" (p.
23). There is no mystery as to where
his argument is headed.
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I must admit that I found Part I of the book, "The
Pulpit," tough-going. Those with a
more zealous interest in conservative evangelical Bible seminaries and the ethnography of American
Protestantism may find more appeal in these chapters. However, I was able to muster only a passing concern for Crapanzano's
lengthy discussions of evangelicals' reports of the transformative nature of
God's Word. I am not trying to be
dismissive, or
smugly superior (as the NEW REPUBLIC'S reviewer of SERVING
THE WORD accused its author of being) - rather, I am simply registering what I
think may be the reaction of the typical reader of the LAW AND POLITICS BOOK
REVIEW: the Fundamentalist distinction between meaning and significance, and
its faith in and procedures for deriving unitary meaning - the aspects of
theological literalism most pertinent to students of legal literalism - fade
into a long-winded and, at times, preachy narrative about the naive convictions
of Crapanzano's subjects.
Part II, "The Bench," is more germane for students
of law and courts but, unfortunately, offers little that is really new to the
discussion (or the condemnation) of the
interpretive ideology of original intent.
The best, and most stimulating, of its chapters is that on
intention. Continuing the author's use
of the heuristic device of the Bork hearings, "Intention" is a fresh
consideration of legal literalism's conflation of intent and
understanding, and the rhetorical purposes of such conflation. Crapanzano surveys the developmental history of "textualism" versus "intentionalism" in American legal theory, asserting that the latter (which resembles contemporary originalism) developed rather recently in constitutional law. In a veritable tour de force, Crapanzano links such interpretive theories to the rise and demise of the "New Criticism" in literary studies, to post-modern discussions of "authorship," to Posner's pragmatism and back to Fundamentalism. I found a fascinating, if unintended (no pun intended), meditation on the difference between the legal and the attitudinal model in Crapanzano's assessment of the personalization of authorship in law. Arguing that legal discourse is at once personal and impersonal, Crapanzano observes that, "rarely is the name of the judge who wrote a decision given when that decision is cited is later opinions" (p. 297). True, except with respect to the attitudinal study of a judge's decisions, and then it is the written decisions themselves which recede, instead of the author. Continuing with this trope, Crapanzano concludes that judicial authorship does not serve the lawyer or the judge in understanding why a particular decision was made. True, perhaps, but it does so serve the political scientist.
It is in these chapters also that Crapanzano shows his
post-modern anthropologist stripes - for instance, when he discusses the
Constitution as a foundational document.
After an impassioned sally against Antonin Scalia's "spiritless"
textualism in his dissent in MARYLAND v. CRAIG (1990), Crapanzano dismisses the objective authority
which literalism gives to legal texts,
observing that how we interpret them is always "subject to our desire and
to the plays of power that are inevitably attached to it" (p. 276). All interpretations,
in other words, have moral and political consequences, and are therefore moral and political
themselves. Yet, neither the
interpreters nor the ritualized context in which they interpret acknowledge
this fact. Indeed, Crapanzano says at
an earlier point in the same chapter that legal argument is a "ritualized
genre.[whose] rules must be
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followed if the argument is to be effective. Like all such genres, while they are
recognized … their rules, certainly their presuppositions, their artifice, cannot
normally be acknowledged by people communicating - arguing and interpreting -
within them" (p. 245). There is a
limit to ironic self-reflection, even post-modernly. This is an interesting speculative aside, but what are its
implications for the normative responsibility of the law? We are not told.
It is in the conclusion to his book that Crapanzano really disappoints
the reader. Aside from its too numerous
and tiresomely partisan references to the Clinton impeachment proceedings,
Crapanzano's conclusion tellingly but unsurprisingly discloses his ideological
viewpoint with this revelation: he found the Fundamentalists, but not the
originalist law professors, distinctly "other." He despairs at the
authoritarianism he sees as running through both literalisms, but it is only
for the Fundamentalists that Crapanzano seems to feel pity regarding "the
capacity for taking a grim satisfaction in dreariness" (p. 324; the phrase
is a quotation from Henry James). It is
this undisguised, judgmental viewpoint that mars the conclusion and,
ultimately, the entire book, for Crapanzano declines to elaborate upon such
statements as, "what characterizes American literalism is its moral
commitment" (p. 341). Nor does he do more than sketch illustrative
examples of the pervasiveness and authoritativeness of the literalist style in
other domains of American thought, like literary criticism, psychology, and
genetics. Rather, he claims to be
content with "the disquieting effect of description to the complacency of
explanation." (p. 350) Perhaps Crapanzano is content, but the reader feels
a bit cheated: was the project of SERVING THE WORD simply to describe?
In the end, Crapanzano is not even being fair about his own
agenda in writing the book. His
conclusion posits that, "any understanding requires a suspension of your
own view in order to grasp the other's" (p. 350), and that democracy
presupposes both this suspension as well as the honest effort to consider
others' views. Literalists, he laments,
those who have surrendered to the absolute truth of a text, are incapable of
representing the other's
truth and so are, by
implication, incapable of a prerequisite of democracy. However, the author should perhaps be
putting this same question to himself.
CASE REFERENCE:
MARYLAND v. CRAIG,
497 U.S. 836 (1990).
Copyright 2000 by the
author, Nancy Maveety.