THOMAS H. LUXON zyxw Galvin and Banyan on Word and Image: rs There a Text in Interpreter> y o u s e ? EARLY everyone who has written about The Pilgrim’s Progress believes that Christian’s visit to Interpreter’s House is a crucial step in Bunyan’s allegorization of the way of salvation.’ All agree that Interpreter’s House represents a sort of curriculum in herme- neutics from which Christian must graduate before he can shed his burden and get on with his pilgrimage. Underlying this agreement, however, there is an unquestioned assumption-that the emblematic lessons in Interpreter’s House somehow represent the Bible and that what Christian learns to interpret in this curriculum is the Word of God? This assumption, I believe, is too easily made. None of the seven emblem scenes in Interpreter’s House represent specific Bible passages. Only the last one, the dreamer, comes close to representing a biblical 1. After nearly twenty years, U. Milo Kaufmann’s chapter on Interpreter’s House in “The Pilgrim’s Progressl’and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (New Haven, Conn., 1966) is still the best and most thorough discussion of the episode (pp. 61-79). David 0. Alpaugh’s “Emblem and Interpretation in T h e Pilgrim’s Progress” (ELH[1966], 229-314) makes the important contribution of relating Bunyan’s allegory to the tradition of the English emblem book, but Alpaugh confines his discussion to emblematic episodes other than those in Interpreter’s House. David Robinson repeats Roger Sharrock’s suggested identifications of Interpreter with John Gifford, Evangelist, and the Holy Spirit [See Sharrock’s “Commentary” in T h e Pilgrims Progressfrom this World to that which is to Come, James Blanton Wharey, ed., 2nd ed. by Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1975), pp. 316-191, but Robinson’s chief argument is that Interpreter’s “Significant Rooms” foreshadow later events in the narrative. Finally, Dayton Haskin’s “The Burden of Interpretation in The Pilgrim’s Progress” (Studies in Philology 79 [1982], 256-78 helpfully focuses attention upon the role of hermeneutics in Puritan soteriology, but devotes only a paragraph to the episode in which Christian apparently becomes “a competent interpreter himself” (p. 272). 2. Roger Sharrock sees Christian’s “sight-seeing” tour “round a treasury of emblematic pictures’las an allegory of Bunyan’s own “intensive study of the Bible,”and although he remarks that “not all the pictures in the Interpreter’s House are biblical, zyxw . . . all are supported by texts” oohn zyxwvutsrqp Bunyan[ London, 19541, p. 79). Kaufmann explicitly identifies Interpreter’s House as “the Word”and Interpreter as “the Holy Spirit”(p. 62). although he later refers to the emblem lessons themselves as “doctrines dramatized” (p. 66). Scripture, says St. Paul, is “profitable . . . for doctrine,” but Bunyan’s Talkative (PP. pp. 75-85) is a fine example of what becomes ofone who “W