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The stories of Sitis and Martha exhibit the arrogance of systems of doctrine and interpretation towards the emergencies faced by individuals. The system wants to display private distress as a public example and an accountable event; the individual prefers to regard distress as a shock, unexpectable and therefore beyond the scope of prescription, exemplification, and consolation. These women propose alternative methods of making sudden pain tolerable that depend on practical adaptations of Job's story suitable to complaints made in the first person singular. This chapter argues that such adaptations ignore or undermine the universality of official consolation by developing a relation of the complaining voice to a redeeming voice capable of doing justice to the particulars of the case. They make no gestures towards the fulfilment of norms or law; they accumulate the circumstances of a private and personal grief in an effort of practical vocality determined by self-reference and the unfolding of tautologies. The successful relation of voice to voice and ‘I’ to ‘I’ depends not upon a recovery of innocence and identity but on a redoubled writing, a superscript or a writing upon writing.

The brief foregoing account of the overlapping characteristics of a rhetoric of interruption, embracing personal integrity, historiography, and political eloquence within an unfolding of tautologies that is common both to 18th-century narratives and to the book of Job, will help explain some of the passion invested in the conflicts over the interpretation of Job between the mid-1740s and the mid-1760s. At the centre of this conflict stands William Warburton, who is the focus of this chapter — an ambitious divine with strong political affiliations, both theoretical and practical, who wished to rescue Job for orthodoxy and systematic narrative.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to treat Job as a figure and a name for a recurrent cultural antinomy that emerges in fields as diverse as monumental sculpture and voyages of discovery, as well as in politics and literature, whenever the interpretation and the point of first-person testimonies are at stake. This antinomy is always recognizable in its basic form as a conflict between the law — in its broadest sense of principle, rule, and precedent as well as of statute — and those elements of a personal history, usually painful, for which there is no prescription or parallel. The chapter then discusses the stories of Sitis and Martha — two stories that are rewritings of Job that emerge from resistant readings, both intended to eliminate the scandal of the original and to put a clear moral in the place of its ambiguous outcome.

This chapter argues that Pope's struggle to disintricate his sense of subjective vulnerability from the judgements he directs against a culpable public manifestation of particularity is thrown in relief by studying the parallels that extend between Pope's desire to destroy the sublime of Sir Richard Blackmore's A Paraphrase on the Book of Job and his fascination, growing into disgust, with ‘the Symptoms of an Amorous Fury’ he locates in the literary remains of Sappho. If Blackmore and Balaam strike Pope as the unhappy leftovers of Job's sublime, no less do the writings and person of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu strike him as the noisome detritus of Sappho's.

In the book of Job three forms of the theodicy have been distinguished, each supplying a vindication or justification of the ways of God to suffering humanity. First, there is the justification derived from a belief in an inscrutable deity, whose providence is not searchable and whose dispensations must patiently be borne on the grounds that they are serving ends beyond the grasp of mortal minds. Second, there is an argument founded on a postulate that nothing happens or subsists in the world beyond the horizon of the divine plan; hence the apparently most anomalous and heartbreaking events are dispensations made according to an ultimately coherent system. Third, there is the deixis of the pointing finger, which spells out each item in the creation as part of a stupendous whole and inspires the diffident audience with terror that modulates to wonder and delighted acquiescence. However, it is the second position that dominates the other two because it formalizes the plenary conception of all theodicies by deducing it from an invulnerable first principle linking the divine to the mortal world. This chapter argues that the book of Job develops as a contest between the universal equity posited by the comforters, and the bare particulars of an unresolved personal agony listed by Job. The broad causal sweep of theodicy is measured against a complaint consisting in discrete notations of an actual set of circumstances for which no cause can be found.

This chapter sets Job inside a short history of the epitaph. It considers the practice of redemptive reading as constantly engaged in a struggle to preserve susceptibility towards private intensities, in opposition to the tendency of interpretative redemption to supplant them with communitarian or universal expectations that reduce the probability of personal complaints. In this struggle, practical reading defends a particularity so various and disjointed that it risks disorientation, and even terror, so extreme that they threaten even the limited, serial redemption of one-to-one mimesis. It risks short-circuiting the link between writer and reader, causing a build-up of energy that blocks the transfer of intensity from one to the other, and prevents the paralleling of the unparalleled upon which the series depends. In this respect, the epitaph describes the same rim of fundamental disorder as the sublime, and its reader is as prone to succumb to it. The chapter proposes two images and an instance of this sublime rupture from the later 18th century: The Dead Soldier (1789) by Joseph Wright of Derby; Job Reproved by his Friends (1777) by James Barry; and the tomb that is partly the subject of a collection of poems entitled Sorrows sacred to the Memory of Penelope (1796) by Sir Brooke Boothby. Each arrives at a limit to the possibilities of complaint, which even incorporated readings of the book of Job (attempted by Boothby and Barry) are unable to extend.

The law — whether it exists, whether it works and, if it does, whether it works justly — is an important issue both for Job himself as he vainly seeks a judgement, and for the participants in the Job controversy, who divide over the issue of providential equity and the existence of a law fit to justify or punish Job's actions. Indeed, it is evident from the oppositional discourses bordering theodicy in the 18th century that the effectiveness of the law, in the broad sense of a universally applicable a priori rule or original principle, is at the heart of all debates concerning the relation of providence to the facts of human unhappiness. This chapter considers some of the mid-century reflections and debates on the law towards the criminals themselves, in order to emphasize the parity between Job's case and the plight of victims of the law in so far as they are all positioned as examples, but resist their exemplary status by demanding alternative narratives of their plight. In this respect, Job and the law point directly at fiction, and specifically at novels about people in breach of the law.

This chapter argues that Richardson's Job, the scriptural centre-piece of Clarissa, is used to introduce a theodicy more akin to Pope's views about the suppression of the particulars of individual suffering than to Blackmore's amplifications of a singular complaint. It is an even greater surprise to find that Lovelace, the Tory Satan in this trial of virtue, seems more sharply sensible of what is involved in Clarissa's reinscription of Job than Richardson. There are five Meditations — fragments of scripture adapted to Clarissa's grievous case — transcribed in the novel, of which three consist largely in quotations from Job. Although Clarissa culls the most passionate of Job's exclamations, such as his longing for death, his curse against the days of his conception and birth, his refusal of spiteful consolation, and his desire that the charges against him might be written in a book or on a rock, Richardson is eager that these should not be mistaken as channels of a personal exasperation, and that they should be understood instead as citations of a general triumph over pain and despair.

This chapter argues that the rising hostility between first-person records of emergencies and a dubious and ill-used readership that can be detected in the writing and reception of Hawkesworth's Account is the analogue of Job's suffering in relation to the consolations of his comforters; of the mute integrity of the patriot to the corruption of placemen and pensioners; of the minute circumstances of the accused person to the written and unwritten law; and, indeed, of all the asymmetries of personal complaint when set against the plenary justifications of theodicy. When readers read in the manner preferred by the singular suffering party, then they will be fit to complain too. Such a transformation occurs when ambitious comforters end up as Job-figures, performing in private what they deprecate in public not because they want to but because they are ambushed by fierce intuitions of singularity. Although this sort of substitution is generally associated with sympathy in the 18th century, and with the indulgence of socially legitimate feelings of pity and compassion, it is emerging as a much more fraught and troubled encounter in the various contexts of Job; for the substitution is neither amiable in its nature nor social in its effect, but breeds irregular and savage intensities.

Cook's circumnavigations begin and end in the book of Job. John Hawkesworth, the editor of Cook's journal of the first voyage to the Pacific, cites Job as the authority for his organization of the material. This chapter shows that whether Job is used as an authority for ordering the account or the cartography of a navigation, his presence in a narrative of discovery betokens the tribulations incident not only to the privations and terrors of going where no European has been before, but also to the labour of transmitting a probable report of these sufferings to the audience at home.

The mid-century is a period when the opportunities for the interruption and unfolding of tautologies begin to multiply, and this unfolding attends the collapse of the public and private spheres into each other. The public sphere is menaced by the increasing instability of principle — both as a word and an ideal governing the prescriptive relation of concept to action — particularly in the practice of politics and law. In the private sphere individuals are actuated by various empiricist or associationist judgements which fail to account for ideas and feelings in terms of causes rationally disclosed, only in terms of a double pulse in the brain which imparts to customary impressions — that is, to the sense of the same thing happening over again — the reverberative force incident to the enunciation of an irrefragable principle or rule. By means of the echo or spectral blur caused by this double pulse, experience seems haunted by its own revenant, so that an impression can mediate itself, comment on itself, and supply its own grounds of credibility, claiming the status of an antecedent idea as well as of an immediate sensation. In this way, experience compensates for the loss of determining principles of action in the world at large by an illusion bred of custom that gives the particular event access to the general scheme, and endows private testimony with a public dimension. This chapter begins with David Hume, whose writings are devoted to supplanting providential deductions (such as the theodicies of Pope and Young) with inductions based on nothing more authoritative than personal experience.

Fielding's comic talent for exhibiting the weakness of precepts often extends to examples themselves, whose singularity is frequently so marked, private, and ungeneralizable as to skirt, and sometimes quite to diverge from the public norms of right and justice they were meant to enforce. This chapter argues that the meshing of the plausible example with the useful moral, driven by the circumstantial chain of a narrative, is one that seldom occurs smoothly in Fielding's fiction or, for that matter, in his reflections upon the law, and for the same reason, namely, that his imagination is dogged by the counterfactuals — the odd particulars, unruly exceptions, and barely possible other cases that refuse to be connected or put into train — which are provoked by his very insistence on the exemplarity of tidy fables. The more he wants to enforce an example, the more he is overwhelmed by the recalcitrant particularity of circumstances.