Hebrew Scriptures and More . . . .

Background to Narratology

Not long after Tzvetan Todorov coined the word narratologie,¹ a pan-narratological² movement began that ultimately has diffused and made the delimiting of the term next to impossible. Although Mieke Bal can begin her work on Narratology by defining it as “the theory of narratives, narrative texts, images, spectacles, events; cultural artifacts that ‘tell a story’,”³ a specialist such as Gerald Prince can still argue that a consensus has not been reached and that he himself wavers between different definitions.⁴ This definitional impasse has in no wise slowed down the application of narratology to the study of the Bible by both biblical and literary scholars.⁵ It has been suggested by Paul House that the use of many of the historical critical methods had reached a supersaturation point where something new, an inter-disciplinary approach was necessary⁶ and here, literary criticism seemed to be the answer.⁷ However, this may only partially explain this renewed interest on the part of biblical scholarship and it does not explain the flood of literary scholars analyzing the Bible.⁸ For example Northrop Frye’s The Great Code was written in one sense to deal with “creative imagination” that richly influenced Western literature.⁹ Or Robert Alter in his 1999 Rosenzweig Lectures at Yale University proposed a “double canonicity of the Hebrew Bible,” i.e., a “doctrinal canonicity” and a “literary canonicity,” in which beginning with the linguistic sensitivity of the postbiblical Hebrew literature a trajectory developed that ultimately influenced the works of such writers as Kafka, Bialik and Joyce.¹⁰

Adele Berlin, commenting on the use of “literary exegesis” has argued in 1989 that the “field is young, growing rapidly, and still rather undisciplined, its rules and procedures have yet to be spelled out.”¹¹ In up-coming posts I will attempt to address these issues. There are at least three areas of narratology that need to be enumerated before investigating the approaches taken by scholars in recent times. First, is the level of interpretation in which narratology or poetics can be involved. Second is a summary of some of the analytical components that literary scholars have proposed. Third is the role of history and history-like literature.¹²

1 Although it is generally claimed that Todorov named narratology, its history and development is more complex. See Anja Cornils and Wilhelm Schernus, “On the Relationship between the Theory of the Novel, Narrative Theory, and Narratology,” in What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, ed. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 137-74.

2 Phelan claims that we are now “living in the age of Narrative Turn, an era when narrative is widely celebrated and studied for its ubiquity and importance.” Robert Scholes, James Phelan and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative, Fortieth Anniversary edition, revised and expanded (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 285.

3 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, second edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 3. I prefer Scholes and Kellog’s more straight forward definition: “By narrative we mean all those literary works which are distinguished by two characteristics: the presence of a story and a story-teller.” Scholes, Phelan and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative, 4.

4 Gerald Prince, “Surveying Narratology,” in What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, ed. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 1-2.

5 See Phyllis Trible, Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah (Minneapolis: Fortress, Press, 1994), 62-80, where she presents a summary analysis from the 1960s up to the beginning of the 1990s.

6 Paul House, “The Rise and Current Status of Literary Criticism of the Old Testament,” in Beyond Form Criticism: Essays in Old Testament Literary Criticism, ed. Paul House (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1992), 3-4. House refers to David Clines, The Theme of Pentateuch, JSOT Supplement 1 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1978), 7-15 as his support.

7 Different forms of literary methodologies have been used to analyze the Bible from the time of Philo to the works of Gunkel. See Trible, Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah, 13-23.

8 See Steven Weitzman, “Before and after The Art of Biblical Narrative,” Prooftexts 27, no. 2 (2007), 192. Weitzman argues that the a “lingering influence of the New Criticism” and “some of the trends that displaced it had the effect of reinforcing interest in the Bible as literature: the impact on American scholarship of Russian formalism, structuralism and semiotics, the ‘linguistic turn’ in historiography. . . .”

9 Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (San Diego, New York & London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983 originally 1981), xii, xxi.

10 See Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000).

11 Adele Berlin, “Literary Exegesis of Biblical Narrative: Between Poetics and Hermeneutics,” in “Not in Heaven” Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative, ed. Jason P. Rosenblatt and Joseph C. Sitterson, Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 120.

12 Robert Alter, “A Peculiar Literature,” in The World of Biblical Literature (San Francisco: BasicBooks, 1991), 1-2, writes, “Any modern effort to look at the Bible from a literary perspective must grapple with two fundamental difficulties: the peculiar circumstances of the composition and evolution of the biblical text; and the peculiar aims, even the peculiar objects of representation, toward which the literary art of the Bible is directed.”

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