The Genesis of Fiction

Modern Novelists as Biblical Interpreters

Terry R. Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754616689
• eBook ISBN: 9781317030751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book considers a range of twentieth-century novelists who practise a creative mode of reading the Bible, exploring aspects of the Book of Genesis which more conventional biblical criticism sometimes ignores. Each chapter considers some of the interpretive challenges of the relevant story in Genesis, especially those noted by rabbinic midrash, which serves as a model for such creative rewriting of the biblical text. All the novelists considered, from Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and Thomas Mann to Jeanette Winterson, Anita Diamant and Jenny Diski, are shown to have been aware of the midrashic tradition and in some cases to have incorporated significant elements from it into their own writing. The questions these modern and postmodern writers ask of the Bible, however, go beyond those permitted by the rabbis and by other believing interpretive communities. Each chapter therefore attempts to chart intertextually where the writers are coming from, what principles govern their mode of reading and rewriting Genesis, and what conclusions can be drawn about the ways in which it remains possible to relate to the Bible.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Wrestling with the Book of Genesis

The Stories of Genesis: Literary and Biblical Criticism

‘In Jerusalem, nearly three thousand years ago, an unknown author composed a work that has formed the spiritual consciousness of much of the world ever since.’¹ These are the opening words of Harold Bloom’s introduction to The Book of J, a new translation and ‘interpretation’ of the oldest strand of the Pentateuch, including much of the Book of Genesis. Bloom, of course, is a strong believer in the originality and power of individual authors of great genius. He therefore plays down the extent to which the Yahwist (distinguished from the Elohist by his name for God, which begins with a J in German) would himself have drawn on earlier oral traditions from his own and other ancient near-east cultures. Unlike another Jewish literary critic who has produced his own translation of the Book of Genesis, Robert Alter,² he also plays down the role of R, the redactor responsible for the final form of the text, who wove together not only J and E but those other hypothetical personages invented by Higher Criticism, P, the Priestly Writer, and D, the Deuteronomist. Bloom is not very keen on the whole documentary hypothesis, which he sees as the product of overconfident German biblical critics, Hegelians to a man, who ‘saw Israelite faith as a primitive preparation for the sublimities of the true religion, high-minded Christianity, a properly Germanic belief purged of gross Jewish vulgarities and superstitions’.³ He is also dismissive of the ‘long, sad enterprise of revising, censoring and mutilating J’ within normative Judaism, beginning with the Priestly Writer and continuing with orthodox rabbis of the present.⁴ This process, by which ‘an essentially literary work becomes a sacred text’ and its reading ‘numbed by taboo and inhibition’, Bloom argues, blinds us to the power of the original text.⁵ Like an art historian, Bloom seeks to scrub away the layers of varnish with which J has been encrusted to reveal the ancient narrative in all its original glory.

Bloom suffered much ridicule from reviewers for speculating, on the grounds of the narrative’s sympathy towards women, that J might have been a woman, possibly the wife or daughter of a member of King Solomon’s court. The misogyny often associated with the Book of Genesis he attributes to ‘a long and dismal history of weak misreadings of the comic J’, who devotes six times the space to Eve’s creation than to Adam’s.⁶ She has Rebecca totally efface Isaac, ‘the first of the mama’s boys’, producing in Tamar ‘the most remarkable character in the book’ and in the attempted seduction of Joseph by Potiphar’s wife one of her ‘most delicious episodes’.⁷ ‘The only grown-ups in J’, according to Bloom, are the women, Sarai, Rebecca, Rachel, Tamar, whose sheer gevurah (toughness) he clearly admires.⁸

J, for Bloom, is not really ‘a religious writer’, certainly ‘no theologian’.⁹ Her central character Yahweh has fierce qualities which make him threaten to murder both Moses and Isaac. Later revisionists would be embarrassed by his sheer ‘impishness’, replacing him with a less obviously anthropomorphic, more abstract figure.¹⁰ It is difficult, Bloom recognises, to classify J’s work generically. But she tells stories, some of them claiming to be partly historical, and she also creates personalities, so the nearest modern equivalent would be a novelist, though not one in the classic realist tradition: ‘There is always the other side of J: uncanny, tricky, sublime, ironic’, which makes her ‘the direct ancestor of Kafka’. It is this ‘antithetical element’, Bloom claims, ‘that all normative traditions—Judaic, Christian, Islamic, secular—have been unable to assimilate, and so have ignored, or repressed, or evaded’.¹¹ She is, above all, a powerful creative writer and this means (for Bloom) that the most appropriate response is further creative writing.

The following section of this chapter will develop the argument (also to some extent indebted to Harold Bloom) that in rabbinic midrash and modern intertextual fiction we have precisely such an imaginative response. For the moment, however, I want to focus on the Book of Genesis in its final form as a collection of the most powerful and influential fiction in world literature. This is not, of course, to deny that it contains elements of other genres, including myth, saga, history, folklore, poetry, genealogy, and even theology, but to recognise with Robert Alter that ‘prose fiction is the best general rubric for describing biblical narrative’.¹² There may be significant differences between the Bible and other ancient forms of narrative. Erich Auerbach’s pioneering study of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature analysed some of these differences between the Bible’s mysterious secrets, for example, and Homeric epic, in which ‘a clear and equal light floods the persons and things with which he deals’.¹³ In the biblical narrative of the sacrifice of Isaac, as Auerbach demonstrates, we are given very few details about the main characters and events, ‘only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative’:

Time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal…remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background’.¹⁴

This, according to Auerbach, forces readers to engage with this mystery, to penetrate the surface of the text and thus to supply the ‘secret’ meaning of a God ‘hidden’ in history: ‘Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world’.¹⁵ If it is fiction, then, it is fiction of a very special kind. ‘What we witness in Genesis and elsewhere’ in the Bible, Meir Sternberg argues, ‘is the birth of a new kind of historicized fiction’ whose ‘very raggedness and incoherence forces the reader into an extra effort of imagination’.¹⁶ It is certainly not easy reading.

It is possible perhaps to make too much of the art of biblical narrative. Robert Alter, in his influential book of that title, constantly compares the effects of biblical story-telling with that of the great novelists. As in Flaubert, he argues, there is minimal narrative intrusion; literary effects are achieved through dialogue and unspoken contrasts of character.¹⁷ Elsewhere, for example in the focus on ‘blessing’ and ‘birthright’ in the Jacob tales or on ‘master’ and ‘slave’ in the Joseph stories, a word or word-root ‘recurs significantly in a text’, along similar lines to Fielding’s playing with the word ‘prudence’ in Tom Jones or Joyce’s repetition of the word ‘yes’ in Molly Bloom’s monologue in the final part of Ulysses.¹⁸ Such subtle effects are clearly suggestive of a designed artfulness in these stories. But Alter recognises that it is sometimes the very terseness of biblical narrative that requires readers to supply details: ‘we are compelled to get at character and motive, as in Conrad…through a process of inference from fragmentary data’. Key information is ‘strategically withheld’, forcing us to read psychological complexity into surprising changes of character.¹⁹ In Genesis 42, for example, Joseph recognises his brothers without in turn being recognised by them; in ‘a rare moment of access to a character’s inward experience’, he recalls his earlier dreams before accusing them of being spies. ‘No causal connection is specified….The narrator presumably knows the connection or connections but prefers to leave us guessing’.²⁰ Here, as in some of Alter’s examples of sophisticated techniques of ‘montage’, where the redactor of Genesis is attributed with extraordinary subtlety in weaving together the separate documents at his disposal, I would be less confident than Alter how much is produced by the art of the narrator and how much by the subtlety of the reader, trained to pick up the nuances of later and more sophisticated narratives. It is clear nevertheless that biblical narrative in general and the Book of Genesis in particular display ‘a surprising subtlety and inventiveness of detail’, a delight in ‘imaginative play…deeply interfused with a sense of great spiritual urgency’. By learning to enjoy the biblical stories as stories, as Alter argues, we can ‘come to see more clearly what they mean to tell us about God, man, and the perilously momentous realm of history’.²¹

Biblical critics themselves, at least in recent years, have also come to recognise the power of these stories as they stand (rather than seeking behind the text for their original life-contexts or place in ancient cult). For Wellhausen and Graf, originators of the documentary hypothesis in the late nineteenth century, the main interest was historical. The point of Wellhausen’s Geschichte Israels was ‘to understand, evaluate and use the sources available in order to present a picture of Israel’s history in the Old Testament period’. To that end he used criteria of vocabulary, style, theology and local colouring to identify the sources.²² Even for Hermann Gunkel, sensitive as he was to the generic qualities of oral and written story-telling, the goal of Gattungsgeschichte (form or type criticism) was primarily historical: ‘to uncover from the Old Testament writings a picture of the spiritual life and ideals of early Israel’.²³

Gunkel’s analysis of The Stories of Genesis, however, along with the other powerful German commentaries on the Book of Genesis by Gerhard von Rad and Claus Westermann, are worth close attention for their recognition of the nature and power of the stories to be found in this opening book of the Bible. For Gunkel they were Sagen, ‘popular, poetic narrative handed down from of old’ and collected (rather than written or even significantly redacted) by J, E and P.²⁴ Gunkel goes out of his way in his opening chapter to explain the value and purpose of stories: ‘story is not life’, he insists, ‘it is rather a particular type of poetical writing’. He draws on contemporary literary criticism of secular folk-tales to demonstrate that such ‘poetical narrative is much better suited than simple prose to convey ideas’; they are also ‘deeper, freer and truer than chronicles and histories’.²⁵ Stories of this kind are not about great political events but about ordinary people; they are not realistic, often involving implausible events narra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Wrestling with the Book of Genesis
• 2 Adam, Eve and the Serpent: Mark Twain
• 3 Cain and Abel: John Steinbeck
• 4 From the Flood to Babel: Jeanette Winterson
• 5 The Sacrifice of Isaac: Jenny Diski
• 6 Rachel and Her Sisters: Anita Diamant
• 7 Joseph and His Brothers: Thomas Mann
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index