The Via Negativa

Abstract

During our reading of ‘The Minister’ we discovered that the relationship between the narrator and the reader was an uneasy one. Readers are unsure of what they are expected to bring to the reading of the text. The narratorial voice is constantly shifting between various positions; sometimes it is authoritative, sometimes interrogatory, often unreliable. The reader can at no time afford to be passive, but always must be making judgements and assessments as the reading proceeds. A similar process pertains in the shorter poems. They are, perhaps, less self-reflexive texts than ‘The Minister’, but often they lack the movement towards closure which has generally been supposed to be the project of the religious text. If we consider some of Thomas’s poems on prayer, we note how he complicates the relationship between the narrator and the reader, and how this becomes almost a critique of the act of prayer itself. Inscribed in the reading, of course, is the relationship between the narrator or implied persona and God.