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285 - The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading |
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading
By Meir Sternberg
Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1985. 580 Pp. $37.50.
Modern study of the Bible has largely revolved around two poles of concern, history and theology (for example, the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith), and proposals for negotiating the relation between
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286 - The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading |
them. Recent developments in biblical studies and in theology promise new means of negotiation through re-contextualization of the issues. Increasingly, theologians are exploring the relevance of imagination and the resources of metaphor and story for theological understanding; and biblical scholars are attending to the final form of the text as a complex whole. Now the task is to negotiate the relations between historiography, ideology, and aesthetics.
In such a context, Sternberg's book is a first systematic attempt to map the unknown territory ahead, so far as a poetics of biblical narrative bears on it. His guiding principle is that the Bible presupposes "a system of relationships where historiography mediates between ideology and aesthetics." If his map bears topographic names and legends unfamiliar to biblical and theological inquiry (gaps, ambiguity, redundancy, exposition, temporal ordering, reading process, patterns of analogy, forms of reference, indirect characterization, omniscient narrator, implied author/reader, etc.), his claim that "here lies the future of biblical studies as a whole" is made plausible and inviting through careful and varied exposition of terms and copious examples of Bible reading by means of this new kind of map.
The irony (to this reviewer) is that, Sternberg's guiding principle notwithstanding, ideology often not only mediates but controls his discussion. The historiographic relation (between text and history), and the aesthetic relation (between text and reader), are controlled, for example, by classic views of divine omniscience and omnipotence. (By a further irony, those views classically were developed in the face of contrary biblical portrayals of God explained away as anthropomorphisms.) As a result, the significance of the interval of freedom, both in history and theology and for the act of reading, is underplayed or negatively construed. Again, discussing the demands that attention to biblical poetics places upon the reader, Sternberg asks whether the biblical narrative addresses itself to an elite of initiates or insiders (Kermode). However it may be in the Gospels, he answers, such "hidden" discourse is totally alien to biblical (that is, Hebrew) narrative Yet, on the question of polemics against mythology and heresy, he contrasts the Gospels' open polemics with biblical narrative in which "all the narrative battles against pagan tradition take place underground, by way of allusion and parody detectable by the initiate alone." Such variable evaluation of a given narrative strategy, and the repeated use of New Testament poetics as a foil for the poetics of the Bible, betray the ideological control (not to say open polemics) in his aesthetic analysis.
If aesthetics were allowed to mediate between historiography and ideology, and if Sternberg would avail himself of some current reconceptualizations of omniscience and omnipotence, his book would contribute even more centrally to the future of both biblical studies and theology. Even as it stands, however, it opens a rich prospect. Of obvious
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interest to literary students, it is equally important for history and theology.
J. GERALD JANZEN
Christian Theological Seminary
Indianapolis, Indiana