Who Knows?: Readers and Horizons in "Journey of the Magi"

Abstract

T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” is a poem so utterly saturated in Biblical reference and Biblical intertext, that it is impossible to form any coherent reading of the text without engaging with it. This article attempts to meet this problem head on: I will attempt to classify the different kinds of Biblical intertext present in the poem—retellings of Biblical stories, direct references to Biblical ideas or imagery, and conspicuous distortions of Biblical stories—and work out their theological and philosophical significance. In doing so, I will also argue for a reader-response based understanding of this significance: using Gadamer’s idea of the horizon, the sum of the understanding any individual can bring to an interpretation as prejudice or forestructure, I shall demonstrate that these intertexts can only fully signify to the reader who is capable of relating these intertexts to their Biblical sources, as opposed to the speaker who produces them without understanding, being incapable, because of their necessary temporal priority to it, of catching these references to the Bible. Thus, I can counter readings of the poem which treat the Magus as a direct analogue for the reader, that treat his defeat as the reader’s, and allow for a new, positive reading, one that promises the attentive reader a kind of answer to Eliot’s perpetual question, the question of how to deal with the state of lostness produced by modernity.