Corresponding Sanctity: Extending Presence and Negotiating Distance in a Nineteenth-Century Saintly Epistle

The existence and presence of non-perceptible beings in our world constitutes one of the most important definitions of religion. Religion seeks to mediate interaction and communication between human and intangible entities, be they God[s], angels, demons, spirits, or the potent dead. Their perceptual absence calls for certain communicative acts and practices to render them present. Language as forms of action is paramount to the distancing, absencing, and presencing of different ontological and temporal planes. Pragmatic orientation of language is central to the negotiation of distance, and in establishing the presence, engagement, and identity of intangible participants in a communicative setting.

This article examines the negotiation of distance brought about by a letter of admonition written by a Ḥaḍramī saint to a Javanese Sultan. Specifically, I look at the ability to construct and extend saintly presence through space and time. Formal properties of the letters have the ability to precipitate, generate, and complicate contexts of utterance. Pragmatic considerations arbitrate each context of utterance and the meaning that emerged from such interactions as ongoing social transaction. As social action, epistolary not only allows the extension of authorial presence through geographical and temporal distances, but also prefigures and diversifies its context of reception. On the one hand, distance was conducive to and allowed for forms of objectification and reflexivity, which explains why the letter advanced a charged moral discourse. On the other hand, formal properties permitted the preservation of authorial voice and the immediacy of presence by delegating it to other actors. As such, epistolary texts should be seen as ongoing practices that generated its context of reception. Recontextualized as speech event, the letter registered force, situating their audience in the middle of actuality and simultaneity, while allowing entanglements with other voices that sought to enrich and alter the original speech events.