[Editor’s
note: The term “conjunctive narrative” means simply “a narrative that proceeds
chronologically from one point in time to the next point in time."]
I am awed by the ingenuity of the authors
of the texts which gave form and direction to the western literary
tradition. The challenge faced by the
authors of the Babylonian epics in the second millennium, BCE, dramatizes the
point at issue here.
Face-to-face communications in orally
transmitted cultures were supplemented by a host of tacit clues which aided the
consensual validation needed to ensure successful communications. The most obvious tacit clues can be easily
identified: Shared life-histories, a
participative existence, concrete occasions, facial expressions, tones of
voice, gestures, and a hidden need for consensual validation.
The Babylonian epics are among the earliest
preserved instances of the passage from orality to literacy as the foundation
of culture. They encode an intriguing
revision of traditional myths designed to validate practices conducive to
survival to acts of deities in a timeless past.
In effect, these epics traced practices conducive to the preservation of
the prevailing culture to acts of heroes and heroines in an equally timeless
past. To accomplish this revision, their
authors had to invent literary conventions to supply for the absence of the
tacit clues which supplement oral-aural exchanges. Today, since we take the functioning of
literary conventions for granted, it is almost impossible to identify
explicitly the conventions involved in their projection of an empty literary
space between the domain of capricious deities and a realm of natural forces as
the place where human culture and agency might flourish. But these conventions remain foundational in
the narrative strand in the western literary tradition.
To appreciate the way that literary
conventions focused inquiries in that tradition, imagine the anxiety of
authorship on the part of authors who hoped to guide and even govern the
reading of texts projecting an original vision or promoting an unfamiliar
agenda. The anxiety can be captured in a
simple question: Will the literary
conventions I invent function as effective replacements for the tacit clues
inherent in oral-aural exchanges? To
diminish this anxiety, authors who dialogued with texts of their literary
predecessors implicitly appropriated literary conventions which freed them from
the need to invent such conventions out of nothing. (NB:
Students experience this anxiety of authorship when they do not know
what conventions an instructor will use in grading a written assignment.)
In the first millennium, BCE, a host of
literary conventions were dictated by the invention of alphabetical
writing. As I note elsewhere, myths were
conjunctive narratives which implied that the deities acted arbitrarily and
capriciously. Alphabetical writing
generated continuous prose which, in turn, required that the gaps between
events in conjunctive narratives be bridged by accounts of interventions of
deities at assignable places and times, of human motivation, or the operation
of natural forces.
In this millennium, as the anxiety of
authorship and the issue of authority coalesced, authors of original
compositions wove literary conventions into distinctive literary forms. On the one hand, they forged these forms
because they generated fruitful inquiries designed to address the concerns of
prevailing cultures; on the other, they
provided an arena in which authors vied with one another for the mantle of
authority over interpretations of the texts of their predecessors and over
projects designed to effect a future state of affairs different from the
present.
To illustrate the point at issue, I note
the different concerns which validated the literary form of the autonomous text
and the literary form of the prose narrative.
The former governs dialogue among philosophers (and, through them,
theologians and scientists) to this day.
Paradoxically, it is also invoked, unwittingly, by fundamentalist
Christians who proclaim the inerrancy of the Scriptures and pretend that they
read this sprawling text literally. In
its purest form, it interweaves conventions derived from (1) the interrogatory
stance inherent in the interiorization of literacy, (2) the rule of a metaphorical
One designed to prevent the threat of endless questioning, (3) the rule of the
principle of logical identity in Logic, the language about language, (4)
metaphysical systems which depict reality as a bounded system, (5) Aristotle's
correspondence theory of reality which promises that a language of clear and
distinct ideas incorporated in a consistent, coherent, comprehensive and closed
system can present a finite reality transparently, in depth and detail, (6)
that this language can be inscribed in an autonomous (changeless and enduring)
text, and (7) that, as a coherent whole, this text would be self-interpreting
and, as a transparent presentation of reality, it would be self-referential.
To hold these conventions together, the
philosophical tradition espoused, as its god-term, a conception which depicted
"reason" as a detached, disinterested, dispassionate, god-like
perspective on language, experience and reality. In so doing, it assumed that inquiries
governed by reason could provide certain knowledge and definitive moral
judgments.
In marked contrast, the Hebrew literary
tradition forged a distinctive literary form, the prose narrative, because this
literary form, and this form alone, enabled honest searchers to use stories to
process intensely personal experiences shared by newly self-conscious
individuals. The stories which
formulated the concerns and issues addressed by later storytellers were
composed in the tenth century, BCE. In
them, the Yahwist and the Elohist offered distinguishable accounts of the entry
of an incomprehensible God into human history at assignable places and times in
words addressed to unique individuals.
As the tradition evolved, the literary conventions inscribed in their
stories generated inquiries designed to discern the activity of this deity
hidden in events in the lives of individuals and to offer definitions of
Israel's positive and distinctive identity as this God's Chosen People.
During the Babylonian Exile, scribes
(redactors) stitched together stories written over the course of four centuries
and supplemented this sprawling text with psalms, dramas and the recorded
utterances of Israel's great prophets.
To lend coherence to the whole, they forged a literary form with a
narrative structure whose workings differ dramatically from the workings of the
structure which supports the abstract conception of an autonomous text, and
they filled the hollow center of that structure with fictive narrative voices
rather than a fictive voice of reason.
Earlier, I identified some of the sources
of the literary conventions which disguised the will to power at the core of
the pretense that reason spoke in a voice of authority. Here, to dramatize the difference between a
narrative voice and a voice of authority, I merely note (1) that conventions
designed to endow reason with the power to compel assent and consent to its
judgments were designed to nullify the threat of endless questioning inherent
in the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance and (2) that the
stories of the Yahwist, in particular, explored the significance of an eruptive
self-consciousness rather than an interiorized interrogatory stance.
The Yahwist's story of Adam and Eve reveals
the role of a narrative voice in a story which gave form and direction to a
series of stories designed to process Israel's historical experience over the
course of the next four centuries. (Note
well: Any reader who respects details in
the story must recognize that it cannot be read as history or theology. And Alter* suggests that the Yahwist was more
interested in articulating the mystery of human freedom than in Yahweh.
*One of JJ’s favorite authors
In that vein, I read the story as an effort
to articulate the felt experience of a literate readership at a time when literacy
was displacing orality as the foundation of culture in Israel. From this perspective, Yahweh is the voice of
orality's resistance to the questioning evoked by the detachment inherent in
literacy. The story, then, addresses
issues of origin raised by emerging distinctions among past, present and
future. In this regard, the narrator
implanted in the story speaks as a detached observer who was present at the
event, privy to Yahweh's inner monologues, aware of Adam's loneliness in an
existence centered in a power-structure, and sympathetic to Eve's desire for
wisdom.
Since the disembodied voice which tells the
story speaks as a quasi-omniscient narrator, Christians have often read the
story as history rather than literature.
In this vein, Augustine's reading of the story of Adam and Eve as the
history of an original sin must assume that a single transgression severed a
natural relationship between Creator and creatures and disrupted the entire
natural order. But the narrative
structure of the story subverts any pretense that the story can be read as
history or literally in the simplest possible way. In short, a narrative structure guarantees
that any story can be re-told in ways that take the story back to a different
point of origin, attribute different motivations to characters in the story,
add characters ignored by the story, and suggest different consequences. And such retelling can raise significant
questions concerning the interpretation anyone might seek to impose on the
original story.
Since the narrative voice is itself a
literary construct, storytellers can fill its hollow center with the range of
voices heard in everyday conversations.
As an obvious example, Jane Austin's Pride
and Prejudice is narrated by a voice whose understated irony is every bit
as penetrating as the voice of irony honed by Nietzsche. And since I find that reading the Scriptures
as literature is more fruitful than any alternative, I merely note that
contemporary novelists utilize fictive voices which speak as unreliable
narrators, playful critics, literary virtuosos, didactic pedants, champions of
Nihilism, and the like. In short, they
fashion narrative voices which speak in the myriad ways that flawed individuals
converse with one another.
To conclude: In everyday arguments and in the polemically
structured dialogues which constitute the philosophical and theological
traditions, authors pretend to tell the authorized version of an historical
event. Quite obviously, there are no
authorized versions.
(Since this entry has already violated my
hope of speaking succinctly, I hope to return with an analysis of the workings
of the literary conventions encoded in the two literary forms forged by
Nietzsche, the Archaeology of Knowledge and the Genealogy of Morals.)
__________________
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