Reading Ecclesiastes

A Literary and Cultural Exegesis

Mary E. Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351906616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Reading Ecclesiastes explores the literary style and themes of the Book of Ecclesiastes, investigating its overall theological messages and the cultural perspectives which readers bring to bear on their act of reading. Examining the meaning found in Ecclesiastes through the use of two important contemporary reading methods - narrative criticism and cultural exegesis - Mary E. Mills breaks new ground. Highlighting the range of theological meaning attached to the book of Ecclesiastes as a result of treating the text as a form of narrative and a story told in the first person, this innovative book will appeal to all those interested in narrative criticism, literary studies and interpretation and Wisdom tradition and the ancient world more widely, as well as biblical scholars.

PART I
NARRATIVE CRITICISM

Chapter 3

Narrative Fiction as Social Commentary

The scene has now been set for the major part of this treatment of Ecclesiastes, in its broadest categories. The foundation for a reading methodology has been established under the heading of ‘biblical imagination’. Within this setting both literary criticism and cultural exegesis have been given a preliminary exploration with regard to reading Ecclesiastes. Following the introductory section of this work, which began to consider the use of literary critical methods of reading as exegetical tools for the book of Ecclesiastes, it is now appropriate to consider these matters in greater detail. It was established above that Ecclesiastes can be examined as a narrative work, in which a narrator relates a first person account within the framing borders of editorial, third person comments made at the start of chapter 1 and at the end of chapter 12.¹ The establishment of this point allows for the work to be explored through the sub-themes of characterization, plot and time setting.

Wayne Booth and the Rhetoric of Fiction

Before any such detailed examination takes place, it is important to return to the broader aspects of narrative criticism and to consider some features of narrative fiction. One important aspect of this is the perspective that stories are works of commentary. The root of this concept is the manner in which stories are narrated. As an internal narrator tells a story, the reader is provided with extra information with regard to characters and events, which helps to shape his/her response to the narrative. But these extras are not so readily available in daily life story-events. They are, instead, a feature of narrative fiction, according to Wayne Booth. ‘In life such views are not to be had. The act of providing them in fiction is itself an obtrusion by the author.’² By both ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ the reader how the story is evolving the narrative voice provides extra dimensions of understanding with regard to the manner in which events build up complex systems of relationships between persons. In this way narrative fiction operates as a form of social commentary.

In pursuing this concept of narrative fiction as social commentary it is important to consider the social role of fiction. The symbolic world of a literary work lies alongside the real world of a reader’s experience. The relation between these two worlds is a symbiotic one. The reader brings everyday experience to the act of reading a story and applies ideas formed via that act of reading to the daily world of social interaction. Reading a story and responding to it provides a space for the interaction of these two worlds of character, plot and setting, on the one hand, and persons, events and contexts, on the other hand.

Narratives create social worlds, which are in themselves explorations of the nature of human relationships and the quality of human experience. At the same time they offer tools for evaluating life experience. It is not, however, the case that there is any exact, ideal geometrical measurement of the distance between these two worlds of text and reader. The connection between these worlds is not precisely calculated by author or reader: ‘the closer we look at the concept of distance the more complicated it appears.’³ If critics regarded all criticism as tending towards one kind of involvement only, then rules could perhaps be formulated to govern such involvement. ‘But is our experience with actual works ever as simple as this approach suggests? Every literary work of any power – whether or not its author composed it with his audience in mind – is in fact an elaborate system of controls over the reader’s involvement and detachment along various lines of interest.’⁴

The type of social commentary novels offer is diverse and varied, according to the way in which the telling of the story impinges upon the human interests of readers, potential and actual. For Booth, a high point here is the ability of a given narrator to combine intellectual and aesthetic interests with those of the imagination. ‘If he is clear about where his focus lies, a great artist can of course do some justice to the complexities of the world and still achieve a high degree of emotional involvement.’⁵ At the centre of this ability to engage the reader while exploring deeply lies the role of the narrator. Every narrator ‘must either report dialogue alone or support it with “stage directions” and description of setting’.⁶ But each narrator evidences a personal style in carrying through this necessary activity. Booth suggests that this individual act of narration occurs as part of a four-way relationship between author, narrator, other characters and the reader. ‘Each of the four can range, in relation to each of the others, from identification to complete opposition, on any axis of value, moral, intellectual, aesthetic and even physical.’⁷ It is this complex interrelational system which creates the category of fiction as social commentary.

The role of the narrative voice is thus key to the consideration of social commentary. As well as matters of distance, identification with and opposition to other characters in the novel, the narrator must be examined for reliability or otherwise. A reliable narrator provides a clear line of social commentary on persons and events. One example of this is an obtrusive narrator, who intervenes in the telling, interrupting events to guide the reader as to what to think about characters and events involved in the story.⁸ But even an unobtrusive narrator is giving some slant to the story simply by the manner of showing the successive scenes to the reader. How far can these commentaries be taken at their face value by the reader? How far might a narrator ‘lead a reader up the garden path’ to an understanding of events which is later revealed as an illusion. Booth argues that ‘if impersonal narration had been limited to ambiguous heroes who narrate or reflect their own lives, our problems would have been great enough’.⁹ He continues by pointing out extra complications, as evidenced in the works of Henry James. James, in The Turn of the Screw, pursuing a desire for ‘ “gradations and suppositions of effect” that will produce “a certain fullness of truth”, seeks to give us one character’s “troubled vision” as “reflected in the vision, also troubled enough”, of an observer’.¹⁰

It is possible that the narrator may not be omniscient with regard to the events and persons in a story and may thus produce a meaning for events which is itself limited or ‘unreliable’. In Ecclesiastes the role of the narrator is central since the narrative voice and the main character are one and the same. It could seem, at the opening of the story, that Qohelet will be a thoroughly reliable commentator since his views have been personally synthesized and his search has constantly been for a unitive meaning to human existence. This aspect of the narrator produces a social commentary which is pessimistic in tone, because the first and very strong line of commentary in the text is that of hebel.¹¹ This term offers mystery, ambivalence and potential lack of meaning as a social commentary on life. But the reader then comes to passages where this viewpoint appears to be challenged by a second line, which encourages readers to engage more optimistically with events. Thus, in chapter 2, Qohelet describes a test of pleasure he underwent. He tried out all the physical delights and found them wanting. In verse 11, for instance, Qohelet announces ‘and I myself looked at all the works which my hands had made and at all the toil at which I had laboured to carry out and behold the whole thing was hebel and chasing after wind and there was no yitrôn taḥat ha ššemešš’. Yet in chapter 2: 24 he asserts ‘there is no good for man except to eat and drink and to give pleasure to his self through his toil. This also I saw that it was from the hand of Elohim’. What is more the term aʿmal, which he has previously used to indicate worthless labour and toil, now operates as a positive concept, something to produce contentment.

The second narrative voice undermines the first and shows it to be less than totally reliable. This mixture of two narrative moods leads to a complex depth in the social commentary. Any attempt to hold the two voices together needs great negotiation on the part of the reader. But the failure to contain the two narratorial approaches in a single view leads ultimately to a fragmentation of the story as a whole into two different, opposing social commentaries on the world ‘under the sun’.¹²

While the narrative voice appears to deconstruct itself in Ecclesiastes it can also be argued that it is this voice which brings together the random collection of experiences, traditional knowledge¹³ and personal evaluation which form the material content of the narrative. In this regard Qohelet may be compared with Montaigne in his Essais. Here is an example of studying ‘commentary when it has no function other than to be itself’.¹⁴ Booth states that Montaigne, as a character within his own story, is a consciously constructed narrator who reveals his own self-development as a foundational part of the social commentary contained within the autobiographical narrative. ‘It is this created fictional character who pulls the scattered thoughts together. Far from dispersing otherwise coherent materials, as intrusive commentary does in Charlotte Summers, in this work it confers unity ... on what would otherwise be intolerably diffuse.’¹⁵

Ecclesiastes, then, can be explored as a work of narrative fiction in which the narrator offers his own kind of social commentary on the meaning of life. As Qohelet tells his story he provides the readers with perspectives on daily life – in the royal household, in families, in matters of commerce and cult. The reader’s imagination is engaged as a series of ‘snapshot’ scenes pass before the eyes of the mind. But as the social commentary in this text gathers force and the narrator produces meaning, so the process of narration erodes its own conviction and the reader finds a choice opening up between two apparently opposing ‘Qohelets’,¹⁶ each of whom offers an intellectual view on social reality. This may be seen in the area of the family, for example, where two views are evidenced. The first view points to the pains of family life while the second stresses the family as the main focus for a man’s happiness. Thus in Ecclesiastes 6: 3,...