Hebrew Scriptures and More . . . .

Narratology and Interpretation

Early in the development of the discipline of poetics and narratology, Todorov addressed the perplexing conundrum of the level of interpretation verses description in which the field embroiled itself. Trying to sail between the Scylla and Charybdis, he writes:

Poetics breaks down the symmetry . . . established between interpretation and science in the field of literary studies. In contradistinction to the interpretation of particular works, it does not seek to name meaning, but aims at a knowledge of the general laws that preside over the birth of each work. But in contradistinction to such sciences as psychology, sociology, etc., it seeks these laws within literature itself. Poetics is therefore an approach to literature at once “abstract” and “internal.”¹

Todorov’s both/and approach speaks to what he understands as a yet early stage in the development of the discipline, which he understood would see further vacillation. He writes, “a massive imbalance in favor of interpretation characterizes the history of literary studies: it is this disequilibrium that we must oppose, and not the principle of interpretation.”² This, then is followed by the warning of “over-theorization” in “principles of poetics.” In 1983 Gérard Genette can still write that, “. . . literary studies today oscillate between the philately of interpretative criticism and the mechanics of narratology . . . .”³

Writing in a post-structuralist era, Kindt and Müller have studied the Gordian knot of interpretation and narratological theory. They have rejected the approach that categorically separates narratology from interpretation (the “Autonomist”) because it “contradicts the intuitions of the scientific community concerned with literary texts.”⁴ Furthermore they put aside what they have dubbed “contextualists” and “foundationalists” as having methodological flaws beyond the issue at hand.⁵ Focusing on Genette’s heuritic use of narratology that has been epitomized in his lone quote, “a procedure of discovery, and a way of describing,”⁶ Kindt and Müller bemoan the fact that there is insufficient treatment of this dominant position. They therefore postulate two clarifications to this heuristic model. The first is that the practitioner should remain neutral when it comes to theories concerning the conception of meaning (“the criterion of neutrality“). Secondly (“the criterion of continuity“), the practitioner needs to limit their investigation to those elements that are “characteristics of the narrative texts and are potentially relevant to their interpretation.”⁷

Both biblical and literary scholarship have used an aesthetic analysis of biblical narratives with a differing set of interpretative presuppositions. Jerome Walsh, for example, argues that, “structural arrangement can be an important pointer toward interpretation.”⁸ But he goes no further in enumerating his position. Jacob Licht on the other hand, sticks to a purely aesthetic understanding. In his epilogue to a study of unique biblical features, he argues against an interpretative value to narratology in biblical studies.

“Dealing with Biblical texts, however, we face a radically different situation. Their ideas, values, background information, meanings and significances have been studied over and over again; aesthetics as such can only contribute the consideration of their formal features. It helps to see a story in the round, it may lead to an insight into some not too obvious significance, but it cannot detect an otherwise unsuspected meaning. Armed with its tools one might be able to offer an improved interpretation of some statement or idea in the text, but one can do so only as an interpreter, subject by logical necessity to the laws and limitations of the old established discipline of Old Testament study. This is why one must not expect that the methods and attitudes of literary aesthetics will produce some really fresh and significant meaning of any Old Testament story. An old interpreters’ notion couched in some new terminology, a tortuous twist to some old problem, is all that can be expected.”⁹

Although not as pessimistic as Licht, Shimon Bar-Efrat does not view narratology as providing a clear avenue of interpretation. He approaches his investigation from a structuralist perspective and thereby places emphasis on “techniques, modes of design, types of narration and other matters connected with the shape of the narratives.”¹⁰ He does not necessarily separate the techniques and styles from the meaning of the text. He however, indicates that, “it is through the techniques that the meaning of the facts of the narrative are determined.”¹¹ Nevertheless, the bulk of his work is taken up with a description of biblical techniques. One gets the strong sense that Bar-Efrat’s work is best understood as “autonomist.”

Adele Berlin on the other hand, makes it clear that narratology is “a subdivision of poetics.” And “poetics, the science of literature, is not an interpretive effort – it does not aim to elicit meaning from a text. Rather it aims to find the building blocks of literature and the rules by which they are assembled.”¹² She views the task of narrative poetics is “to extract from the surface structures of the text (i.e., its linguistic structure) indicators of its poetic (compositional) structure.”¹³ Berlin’s aim is not on narrative poetics in general. They are more realistic. She attempts to understand “only a theory of biblical narrative.”¹⁴ Berlin wants to unpack the function rather than the specific meaning attached to biblical narrative features.

Berlin does not limit her understanding of biblical narratology to a strictly structuralist confession. She moves more in the direction of Genette’s heuristic model when she argues, “poetics aids interpretation. If we know how texts mean, we are in a better position to discover what a particular text means.”¹⁵ In a relatively recent paper, she has proposed a “new biblical hermeneutic,” that takes seriously both the diachronic and synchronic elements in a text, along with the developing concept of textual pluriformity.¹⁶

Robert Alter and Meir Sternberg represent the analysts who view the study of biblical narratology or poetics as having a strong interpretative component, even beyond a heuristic model. For Alter, the study of biblical narrative art can illuminate beyond “the analysis of formal structures to a deeper understanding of the values, the moral vision embodied in a particular kind of narrative.”¹⁷ The reason for this is that the Hebrew Bible intermingles the “literary art with the theological, moral, or historiosophical vision. . . .”¹⁸ Although, Alter wants to be careful not to dogmatize his interpretation of any given pericope, he believes that a conscientious attention to the narrative art can assist “anyone who wants to come to terms with the significance of the Bible.”¹⁹

Meir Sternberg, like Alter, has also viewed biblical narratives as a complex combination of several elements. He summarizes his position when he states that, “biblical narrative emerges as a complex multifunctional discourse. Functionally speaking, it is regulated by a set of three principles: ideological, historiographic, and aesthetic.”²⁰ Although Sternberg does not directly address the interpretative issue per se, he obliquely answers the question by offering the “drama of reading”²¹ as what takes place in response to the co-mingling of the aforementioned three principles. His work, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative is replete with examples of this “drama of reading” that is beyond the pale of a descriptive methodology.

All in all the scholarly response to the issue of interpretation and the use of narratology in the analysis of the Hebrew Bible ranges from a rigid formalist/structuralist position to those who hold to an interpretative significance.

1 Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction to Poetics, Theory and History of Literature, Volume 1, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 6. See also Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum, 1968, reprint, Princeton University Press, 1957), 7-8, where Frye argues that literary criticism can be compared to the social sciences.

2 Todorov, Introduction to Poetics, 12.

3 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 8.

4 Kindt and Müller, “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theology of Interpretation,” 210.

5 Kindt and Müller, “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theology of Interpretation,” 210-11.

6 Kindt and Müller, “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theology of Interpretation,” 208. The quote is from Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 265. It is part of the “afterwards” and is not fully discussed in this volume.

7 Kindt and Müller, “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theology of Interpretation,” 214.

8 Jerome T. Walsh, Style & Structure in Biblical Hebrew Narrative, (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2001), 191. Edward L. Greenstein, “How does Parallelism Mean? in A Sense of Text: The Art of Language in the Study of Biblical Literature, ed. Leon Nemoy, Supplement to the Jewish Quarterly Review (Philadelphia: The Dropsie College, 1983), 70, concludes his study of biblical poetic parallelism with the following statement: “Although parallelism as a structural artifice has no meaning in and of itself, by controlling the ways by which words reach their destination parallelism always has meaning.”

9 Jacob Licht, Storytelling in the Bible, 2d ed. (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1986), 148-49.

10 Shimon Bar-Efrat, Narrative Art in the Bible (Sheffield: The Almond Press, 1989), 10.

11 Shimon Bar-Efrat, Narrative Art in the Bible (Sheffield: The Almond Press, 1989), 10.

12 Adele Berlin, Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (Sheffield: The Almond Press, 1983; reprinted, Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 15.

13 Adele Berlin, “Point of View in Biblical Narrative,” in A Sense of Text: The Art of Language in the Study of Biblical Literature (Papers from a Symposium at The Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, May 11, 1982), Jewish Quarterly Review Supplement, ed. Stephen A. Geller (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983, 85. Also in Berlin, Poetic and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative, 55.

14 Berlin, Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative, 19.

15 Berlin, Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative, 17.

16 Adele Berlin, “A Search for a New Biblical Hermeneutics: Preliminary Observations,” in The Study of the Ancient Near East in the 21st Century: The William Foxwell Albright Centennial Conference, ed. Jerrold S. Cooper and Glenn M. Schwartz (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 1996), 195-207. See especially pages 201-7.

17 Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1981), x.

18 Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 19. See also Robert Alter, “Introduction to the Old Testament,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, ed. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 17 and Robert Alter, “The Literary Character of the Bible,” in The World of Biblical Literature (San Francisco: BasicBooks, 1991), 56, where he states, “the literary impulse in ancient Israel was quite as powerful as the religious impulse or, to put it more accurately, that the two were inextricable, so that in order to understand the latter, you have to take full account of the former.”

19 Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 179.

20 Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 41.

21 Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 41-57.

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