Epilogue: The Other Side of God: Reading in the Dark

Abstract

The pillar of fire and cloud leading the Israelites out of the desert in the final scene of Moses und Aron presensts a space of conflicting interpretation. To the Israelites, the pillar is the true God of Abraham; to Aron it is a symbol of God; to Moses it is an idolatrous image; and to the opera audience it is a special effect, an obvious illusion. The tension between these four interpretations defines the plural God of modernist literature, a God-idea that exists as presence and as nonpresence, as artistic trope and as superstitious remnant.

To see (and by the same token, to read: “to see letters,” “to see ghosts,”) is therefore paradoxically not only to perceive, but also not to perceive: to actively determine an area as invisible, as excluded from perception, as external by definition to visibility.

—Shoshana Felman (152–153)

For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest.

—Bram Stoker’s (Dracula, XXVIII)