The Art of Preaching and Pastoral Care in The Faerie Queene 41 suspended—or anchored—as ever, in expectation of the promised end” (173). Critics have always felt ambivalent about such “eschatological longings” and “promised end,” and they see in both history and allegory such tension between the ongoing narratives/history and the possibility of a closure or a transcendental perspective that helps reconcile/explain contradictions and provide meanings. In “The Idea of a Mystery,” Benjamin, for example, sees “history as a trial in which man, as an advocate of dumb nature, brings charges against all Creation and cites the failure of the promised Messiah to appear,” although poets, artists, musicians, and philosophers “all testify the future is coming” (1927/1999: 68). On the one hand, he argues in “The Concept of Time” that “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1940/2003: 392), that history can be seen as “one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” (392); on the other, he believes that “Historicism offers the ‘eternal’ image of the past” and the historical materialist “remains in control of his power . . . to blast open the continuum of history” (396), that “every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter” (397). He does see the possibility that “Now-time, which is a model of messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation, coincides exactly with the figure which the history of mankind describes in the universe” (396), placing the hope of redeeming the past in the present, not in the future. Jameson further points out the importance of “respecting the specificity and radical difference of social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structure, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day” (1981: 18). On the one hand, he believes that “our approach to [history] and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious” (35), that a text needs first be “grasped essentially as a symbolic act,” through the horizon of political history (76). On the other, he argues that such history is “the formal effects of what Althusser, following
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