Biblical Criticism: A Guide for the Perplexed

Eryl W. Davies

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780567145949
• eBook ISBN: 9780567331915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This Guide for the Perplexed will demonstrate how modern biblical scholars have expressed dissatisfaction with a one-sided historical-critical approach to biblical texts and have argued that developments in secular literary theory should be applied in biblical studies. Whereas the historical-critical approach was concerned with the moment of a text's production (authorship, date, place of writing etc), the literary approach is concerned with the moment of the text's reception. Eryl W. Davies shows how and why approaches such as 'reader-response criticism', 'feminist criticism', 'ideological criticism', 'canonical criticism' and 'post-colonial criticism' are now becoming more popular in many quarters. The volume explains to the uninitiated in a readable and accessible form how strategies originally derived from secular literary criticism have been adopted by biblical scholars in order to understand the text of Scripture and to appreciate its relevance.

CHAPTER ONE

Reader-response criticism

If we could have interviewed Shakespeare he probably would have expressed his intentions in writing Hamlet in a way which we should find most unsatisfactory. We would still quite rightly insist on finding meanings in Hamlet . . . which were probably far from clearly formulated in Shakespeare’s conscious mind.

R. Wellek and A. Warren

The study of a literary work should concern not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text.

Wolfgang Iser

For most Biblical scholars reader-response criticism is worn like an overcoat: it is an engaging and currently fashionable garment to wear in public, but it can be shed when the weather changes.

S. E. Porter

Traditionally, the interest of biblical scholars has focused on questions of historical import. Working within the constraints of the historical-critical method, their aim was to analyse the biblical texts as objectively as possible in order to reconstruct the historical events to which they referred. The first step was usually to place the biblical text in its historical context and to raise questions concerning its authorship, date, place of writing and social setting. Once such questions were answered, the text of the Bible could be viewed as a window through which the biblical scholar could glimpse historical reality.

In recent years, however, some scholars have expressed dissatisfaction with such a one-sided, historical approach to the Bible and have argued that it is time for the interest of the scholarly community to move away from the moment of the text’s production to the moment of its reception. Instead of focusing on the text’s author and the complicated issue of authorial intent, biblical scholars should concern themselves with the text’s reader, and the role of the reader in the production of meaning. In this regard, developments in secular literary theory, notably reader-response criticism, are viewed as helpful in suggesting the direction in which biblical interpretation should proceed. The aim of the present chapter is to trace the rise of the reader-response movement in literary criticism, to examine its impact on the study of the Bible, and to demonstrate how the application of reader-response criticism might illuminate our reading of the gospel of Mark.

Reader-response criticism in literary theory

In literary theory, the phenomenon known as ‘reader-response criticism’ emerged as a reaction to the views of the so-called American New Critics who flourished in the 1940s and 1950s. The New Critics had emphasized that each literary work was to be regarded as an autonomous, self-sufficient entity, which was to be studied in its own terms, without reference to its cultural and historical context and without regard to the intention of its author or the response of its reader. Meaning was something that inhered exclusively in the text itself, and any extraneous factors were to be discounted, for they would only lead the interpreter astray. The duty of the reader was to come as close as possible to the meaning embedded in the text. Thus, knowledge of the text’s production, or of the author’s purpose in writing, even if such data could be recovered, were irrelevant, for once the literary work had been composed it led a life completely independent of its author. The matter was stated very succinctly by Wimsatt and Beardsley in their seminal essay, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, which is sometimes regarded as the New Critics’ manifesto: ‘The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power . . . to control it)’ (1946: 70). It was thus a ‘fallacy’ to believe that the meaning of a literary composition should correspond to the author’s intention; on the contrary, once the author had written his text, the umbilical cord had been broken and he or she no longer had any control over how it was to be interpreted. The author became, in effect, just another reader, and could claim no special prerogative of understanding a literary work by virtue of his having composed it. Any attempt to determine the author’s aims and purpose in writing was merely a distraction, for the text was considered to be a free-standing and self-sustaining entity which was regarded as the repository of its own meaning. Every interpretation of a text must therefore find its authentication in the text itself, and not in any extrinsic factors that might be thought to lie behind it.

By abstracting the text from its author and isolating it from its cultural and historical context, the New Critics were able to focus their attention entirely on the literary composition itself. The result of such an approach was inevitably an increased attention to the ‘words on the page’ and a call for a scrupulously ‘close’ reading of the text, for only thus could the literary work be broached in a neutral fashion and an attempt be made to determine its definitive meaning. ‘Objectivity’ was the keynote of the New Critical enterprise, and it was emphasized that there was no place in literary interpretation for subjective impressions or personal intuitions. Only when such intuitive factors had firmly been set to one side could the critic properly begin to analyse the content and structure of the literary text and examine the rich complexity of its meaning. That meaning was regarded as timeless, unchanging and universal; what the text means now is what it had always meant, and the task that faced its readers was to discover, to the best of their ability, what that meaning was.

The text-centred approach of the New Critics, however, gradually came to be viewed as grossly inadequate, for there was an increasing awareness that literary compositions could not be hermetically sealed from history and isolated from the cultural context in which they were written. Nor, indeed, could they be studied in isolation from their readers. The role of the reader could not simply be marginalized or ignored, for readers were active participants in the determination of literary meaning and creative contributors to the interpretative process. Literary compositions should not be prised away from their contexts of meaning and response, for texts meant what they meant to particular people at particular times and in particular circumstances. The subject (reader) and the object (text) were indivisibly bound together, and the relationship between them was a dynamic process, for texts only became alive and meaningful when people became involved with them and responded to them.

This new approach, known as ‘reader-response criticism’, clearly represented a radical departure from the type of methodology advocated by the New Critics.¹ While the latter had exalted the text over both author and reader, the reader-response critics sought to challenge the privileged status of the text and emphasize instead the role of the reader and the profound significance of the reading experience. While the New Critics had dismissed the reader’s response as subjective and hopelessly relativistic, the reader-response critics argued that the interplay between text and reader was of considerable significance for the interpretation of a literary work.

This interplay was particularly emphasized by Wolfgang Iser, who was one of the leading advocates of the reader-response approach (1974; 1978). As the quotation at the beginning of this chapter indicates, Iser argued that the reader must take into account not only the text itself but also the actions involved in responding to that text. Such actions were determined, in large measure, by the literary text itself, for the text was usually full of gaps and indeterminacies, and it was precisely these gaps that activated readers’ faculties and stimulated their creative participation. The reader was invited to engage with the text by filling in the blanks and inferring that which the text had withheld. Reading was a process of anticipation and retrospection which involved the deciphering of words and sentences, the relating of parts to the whole, the modifying of perspectives, the revising of assumptions, the readjustment of perceptions, the asking of questions and the supplying of answers. Instead of looking behind the text for the meaning, the meaning was to be found in front of the text, in the active participation of the reader (Iser 1980: 106–19).

In a similar vein, the American critic, Stanley Fish, another leading figure in the reader-response movement, argued that the object of critical attention should be the experience of the reader, rather than any objective structures or patterns in the text itself. Far from playing a passive, submissive role, readers were active agents in the making of meaning and were encouraged to reflect upon the impact that the literary work had had upon them. The literary text was not so much an object to be analysed as an effect to be experienced. Consequently, the fundamental question that should be asked of any text was not, ‘What does it mean?’ but ‘What does it do?’ and the task of the critic was to analyse ‘the developing responses of the reader in relation to words as they succeeded one another in time’ (1972: 387–8; his italics). Understood in this way, the act of reading involved far more than a perception of what was written; it was rather to be regarded as a dynamic process, an activity, an ‘event’.

One of the effects of such an approach, of course, was to undermine all belief in the objectivity of the autonomous text, and emphasis came to be placed instead on the indeterminacy of the text’s meaning. Since the reader was called upon to co-operate with the text in the production of meaning, and since each text would be actualized by different readers in different ways, allowance had to be made for a broad spectrum of possible readings of the same text. The view cherished by the New Critics that a text contained a single, definitive, authoritative meaning, accessible to all and sundry and wholly resistant to historical change, was abandoned, and texts were made to speak what the reader of the moment wanted them to say. Of course, the reader-response critics were only too aware that, once the burden of meaning was placed upon the reader, the door would inevitably be flung open to a plurality of divergent – and perhaps even conflicting – interpretations. But this was not generally regarded as a problem; on the contrary, the vast range of possible interpretations merely testified to the text’s richness and inexhaustibility. Indeed, this was what made literary texts worthy of the name. Literature thrived on subjective perceptions, and the more interpretations it attracted, the more profound the text appeared to be. Consequently, different readings of literary texts were not merely tolerated but positively encouraged; rival voices were not simply permitted but actively cultivated. The reader-response critics were thus happy to promote the idea that texts were capable of producing an infinite variety of diverse readings and they saw no need to adjudicate between them, for all readings had equal validity and could be regarded as equally legitimate. There was thus no need to be in the least embarrassed by differing interpretations of the same text; on the contrary, they were to be welcomed, for the response of the reader to the text was at least as interesting, if not more so, than the content of the text itself.

Some critics, however, were aware that the phenomenon of reader-response criticism was not without its attendant dangers, and that investing so much authority in the reader could have its potential drawbacks. The main concern was that the strategy might result in a seemingly uncontrollable proliferation of subjective and idiosyncratic readings, and that readers might abuse their new-found authority by arbitrarily imposing their own meaning on the text and riding rough-shod over the aims and intentions of the original author. Surely, it was argued, authors had some moral right to be understood as they had intended? Surely the significance of a text for a reader should not be completely at variance with its significance for its author? One of the most able advocates of this view was the American scholar, E. D. Hirsch. According to Hirsch, to deny the privileged status of the author as the determiner of the text’s meaning was to reject the only compelling normative principle that could lend validity to an interpretation, for without the concept of authorial intent there was no adequate criterion to adjudicate between competing notions of textual meaning.² Hirsch’s concern in this regard was clearly to avoid the vagaries of subjectivism, for he believed that, without the concept of ‘authorial intent’ interpretation would simply degenerate into a chaotic free-for-all in which every reading of a text was as valid as any other and in which readers could find in a text whatever they went there to look for. Such a state of affairs was clearly intolerable in Hirsch’s view, and was merely a recipe for interpretative anarchy.

Like the New Critics, Hirsch believed that the author’s ‘intention’ had been objectified in the text, and that each text therefore had a single, determinate meaning. There was thus only one correct interpretation of any given text, and it was the task of the interpreter to recover it. Of course, this did not mean that different interpreters could not find some new significance in a text; clearly they could, but discovering the text’s ‘significance’ was not necessarily the same as discovering the text’s ‘meaning’. The text’s ‘meaning’ was essentially what it meant for the original author, while the text’s ‘significance’ was what it meant for subsequent readers.³ The latter, according to Hirsch, was susceptible to change; the former, on the other hand, was complete and final, immutable and fixed for all time (1967: 255). Consequently, Hirsch argued that it was the interpreter’s duty to respect the author’s intention, and unless there was ‘a powerful overriding value in disregarding an author’s intention . . . we who interpret as a vocation should not disregard it’ (1976: 90; his italics). Even if the intentions of the original authors were not accessible (since they may be dead or have forgotten what their intended meaning was), the interpreter had an ethical responsibility to reconstruct the probable authorial intent. Just as in everyday situations the intention of the speaker was considered an important determinant of the meaning of his words, so the intention of the author of a literary work should be regarded as the final arbiter of the text’s meaning. So convinced was Hirsch that there must be some congruence between the meaning intended by the author and the significance construed by the reader that he posed the following questions to those critics who cavalierly dismissed the notion of authorial meaning:

When you write a piece of criticism, do you want me to disregard your intention and original meaning? Why do you say to me ‘That is not what I meant at all; that is not it at all?’ Why do you ask me to honor the ethics of language for your writings when you do not honor them for the writings of others? (1976: 91)

Hirsch continued:

Few critics fail to show moral indignation when their meaning is distorted in reviews and other interpretations of their interpretations. But their sensitivity is often one-way, and in this they show an inconsistency amounting to a double standard – one for their authors, another for themselves (1976: 91).

One of the problems with Hirsch’s argument, however, was that the critics whom he was addressing were presumably alive and well and able to respond indignantly to any misinterpretation or misrepresentation of their words; but in the case of authors who were long dead there was no one to chastise readers for going down the wrong path, and consequently they could never be certain whether they had correctly understood the author’s meaning. To speak of ‘authorial intent’ merely brought literary critics to an inaccessible hypothetical realm, which they had no means of reconstructing with any confidence.⁴ The process of recovering authorial intent required the critic to enter into what Hirsch called ‘the author’s mental and experiential world’ and this increasingly came to be seen as an unrealizable ideal. Nor was the critic’s task made any easier if, perchance, authors had thoughtfully provided their readers with explicit evidence of their intentions, for it by no means followed that they had provided a reliable commentary upon their own work.⁵ Writers were not always in full possession of their own meaning, and they were as liable to errors and misinterpretations of their own work almost as much as any other reader.⁶ Moreover, authors sometimes failed to frame their message correctly and to express precisely what they meant, and in such cases the critic was better placed than the authors themselves to elucidate the meaning of what had been written.

This meant, of course, that the meaning of a work was by no means exhausted by its author’s intentions, and that texts may have layers of meaning of which their authors were unaware and which they did not intend or foresee. Once the text had been released by its author it may reach an audience for whom it was not originally intended and may generate readings that differ from those that the author had in mind as the work had been composed. Consequently, Hirsch’s argument that any given text had a single determinate meaning came to be regarded as naïve and misguided, for texts by their very nature lent themselves to be read in different ways and were far too rich and multifaceted to be exhausted by a single interpretation. Indeed, if literary texts were worthy of the name, they ought to be able to accommodate a number of different meanings. Hirsch’s distinction between a text’s ‘meaning’ (identified with the author’s intention) and its ‘significance’ (i.e. its meaning-to-the-reader) was regarded as disingenuous, and it was argued that it was doubtful whether any literary text would (or was even intended to) convey one and the same meaning to every reader.⁷ But even if Hirsch’s distinction was allowed to stand, and that ‘meaning’ was equated with authorial intention, it was most unlikely that any two readers would agree as to what exactly that intention was. The reason for such disagreement was that the ‘intention’ discerned by the interpreter was itself the product of interpretation, and consequently there was more than a whiff of suspicion that the process advocated by Hirsch could only result in a vicious circle: the supposed intention reconstructed by interpreters was then being used by them in support of the meaning which they claimed to have discovered in the text.

The main problem with Hirsch’s argument, therefore, was that authorial meaning was not as stable or determinate as he would have liked to suppose. Claims to know what the author must have intended, or even how a particular text would have been understood by the original audience, were regarded as extremely speculative and unproven. Moreover, Hirsch’s argument forced the literary critic to enter the unfamiliar realm of psychological analysis, for if one were to speak of ‘authorial meaning’ it became necessary to clarify what the meaning of ‘meaning’ was in such a context. If meaning was confined to that which passed through the reflective conscience of the author, was not the critic ignoring the fact that at least part of a text’s meaning may derive from the author’s subconscious? Thus when literary critics referred blandly to ‘authorial intention’ did they have in mind the author’s conscious or unconscious intention, and in any case, were they in any position to distinguish between them? The problem of discerning authorial intent, or even probable authorial intent, came to be regarded as so difficult and complex that most literary critics began to wonder why they should bother to undertake such an intrinsically impossible task.

But having decided that the issue of authorial intent was deeply problematic and could not provide the basis for judging the validity of a given interpretation, literary critics were faced with a problem that seemed equally intractable, namely, that of deciding whether a particular interpretation represented a true understanding of a text or a distorted one. For if the author’s role as the supreme arbiter of the text’s meaning was to be discounted, what could possibly take its place? What other criteria could be used to decide whether a particular interpretatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• 1 Reader-response criticism
• 2 Feminist biblical criticism
• 3 Ideological criticism
• 4 Postcolonial criticism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Biblical References
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Modern Authors