348 Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera's Death
Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges

Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera's Death

By Mieke Bal

Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988. 150 Pp. $35.00.

Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges

By Mieke Bal

Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988. 312 Pp. $49.95 ($16.95 Paper).

These two volumes form part of a larger plot-line in the work of Mieke Bal. They are the second and third volumes in a three-book project that began with Bal's Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories. All three are works of biblical interpretation by a literary theorist. Lethal Love crossed narratology with ideological criticism in its interpretations of biblical "love stories." In the volumes reviewed here, Bal's attention shifts from love to murder-without, however, leaving love behind.

Murder and Difference takes the difference between the two accounts of the murder of Sisera in Judges 4:18-22; 5:24-30, as a focal point for the critique of four "disciplinary codes"-the historical, the theological, the anthropological, and the literary. "Code" is a key term used throughout. Part of the basic vocabulary of semiotics, codes are here considered as the "rules of correlation" through which interpreters project onto an object of interpretation the values that both guide and confine their own interpretive practice. A "code" may refer to the

 

349 Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera's Death
Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges

constitutive rules of a discipline, to concepts within that discipline, or to broadly shared "transdisciplinary" beliefs and assumptions.

The often-remarked disparity between the prose and poetic accounts of Sisera's murder enables Bal to observe interpreters at work as they convert "difference" to "coherence" according to the pre-selected values of a code. In the course of the investigation, a critical profile of each disciplinary code emerges, measured by its "capacity to differentiate" the two tales. Throughout, Bal critiques each code and also demonstrates its resources through her own counter-reading. The profile of the "historical code" receives both the clearest definition and the harshest criticism. Unlike many structuralist critics, Bal approves its capacity, via the separation of sources, to stress the difference between the two descriptions of the murder of Sisera. However, when she attends to the rhetoric of this code, she discovers a number of submerged codes-unstated rules bearing connotations of morality, gender, and historicity that go unquestioned in their a priori force. For instance: the understanding of history as a record of public, political, and military events, leads to the characterization of Judges 4-5 as an episode in the acts of Barak, prioritizes Judges 4:10-18 over the account of the murder in 18-22, and thus reinforces the gender code as well as the historical code.

The literary code, on the other hand, presents itself as diametrically opposed to the historical code. Yet, Bal finds that in the literary code the gender bias of the historical code is often confirmed. If larger structural unities are emphasized, Deborah's song once more recedes into the overall cycle of masculine characters. If the difference between epic and lyric is stressed, the lyric account is thereby considered more poetic and less precise. Diverse methods thus effectively support an underlying ideological concord. Nevertheless, as Bal shows, it should also be possible through the literary code to cultivate the singular voice of the lyric as "a poetic form at the source of an entire creative vision."

The term "code" is highly flexible, a trait that is both an asset and a liability. Applied on so broad a scale, it begins to confuse rather than clarify and loses some of its critical force through overuse. I find this to be particularly the case in Bal's discussion of the anthropological and theological codes. Presenting them as self-reliant alternatives in contradistinction to the historical code, she at times overlooks the many points at which they are dependent on prior literary and historical analysis of an ancient text. Moreover, she does not always carry through consistently her distinction between the code of the text and the code of the interpreter. A more precise explanation of the interrelations between codes might have been helpful.

Through critical analysis of the disciplinary codes, subsidiary codes have emerged that surreptitiously influence conclusions and prescribe the content of interpretation. One of these is the gender code. Rescuing it from its surreptitious status, Bal uses the gender code to construct an overtly transdisciplinary reading, utilizing the results of many forms of

 

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inquiry to elicit the gendered subject of the song, and to revalue it against its dominant literary context. In conclusion, she pleads for a truly multidisciplinary approach, which "is by definition differential."

I have devoted most of this review space to Murder and Difference because of its interest in the art and theory of interpretation. In Death and Dissymmetry, Bal applies the transdisciplinary method developed in the earlier book to a gendered reading of the female subject throughout the book of Judges. Against the dominant coherence imposed on historiographic chaos, she establishes a countercoherence through reading the text along the axis of its women characters. Her guiding principle is "the dissymmetry of power: power over the body, over life, over language." The dissymmetry of power is expressed in the text in the oppositions between men and women, mothers and daughters, victims and killers. As Bal recounts the stories of women-from Achsah, Deborah and Jael, through the daughter of Jephthah, the bride of Samson and his betrayer Delilah, to the Levite's concubine whose scattered body becomes a sign of war-a remarkable view from the underside of Judges acquires shape and substance.

Mieke Bal's two books speak directly to the need for creative exchange at several critical crossroads: between synchronic and diachronic criticism, between feminist and traditional scholarship, between historical methods and the post- structuralist approaches just beginning to find their way into the biblical field. She too often assails "pretensions to objectivity" on the part of traditional biblical scholars, only to buttress her own interpretive judgments with historical and linguistic arguments weak by the standards of the disciplines she criticizes. The very broad scope of her project and her less than comprehensive grasp of Hebrew syntax and idiom make for uneven results on points of interpretive detail. Nevertheless, she points the way into as yet little explored territory, broadly engaging literary theory as well as ideological criticism in the still fledgling project of feminist biblical hermeneutics. In doing so, she moves beyond both narrowly historical and exclusively text-centered criticism, integrating both perspectives in order to understand the deep connection between narrative imagination and social reality, and thus suggesting a "third way" for biblical inquiry at large.

MARGARET D. ZULICK

Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois