‘Stories are equipment for living.’ – Kenneth Burke

Blog gurus tell you never to blog “off brand,” but this one’s not as off as it might appear.

If you love the Bible and haven’t read Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative, you really need to. One of the reasons for the Reading the Bible in 3D seminar in April was to help people understand that the tools they gain from watching quality movies and TV and reading good fiction should not be shelved when reading the Bible. Sadly, it seems most Christians really aren’t interested in understanding the Bible in a new way. They are taught by ministers who have little idea of what they are actually dealing with in the Bible, and the ministers were trained in Bible academies ruled by men without an ounce of the childlike imagination the Bible requires to be understood. Consequently they miss the beauty, the musical rhythm, the intricacies and the constant use of “plant and payoff”, all of which are understood by the best authors. This includes screen writers, who have to say everything the writer of a novel says but in less words. Robert McKee writes:

From inspiration to last draft you may need as much time to write a screenplay as to write a novel. Screen and prose writers create the same density of world, character, and story, but because screenplay pages have so much white on them, we’re often mislead into thinking that a screenplay is quicker and easier than a novel. But while scribomaniacs fill pages as fast as they can type, film writers cut and cut again, ruthless in their desire to express the absolute maximum in the fewest possible words. Pascal once wrote a long, drawn-out letter to a friend, then apologised in the postscript that he didn’t have time to write a short one. Like Pascal, screenwriters learn that economy is key, that brevity takes time, that excellence means perseverance. [1]

Aaron Sorkin has said that what got him hooked on writing was watching a play and being fascinated by the “music” of the dialogue. John Truby says that plot is not something you make up as you go along, and that all the best stories use the element of surprise. (If you are interested in the hard slog that is screenwriting, there’s a great interview with “script doctor” John Truby here.) In every case, the elements of wonder and surprise are what get people hooked. The Bible was completed two millennia ago, and it is still coming up with surprises. However, it is rarely taught this way, and plenty of good theologians are kicked out or ignored by the establishment because “mature” minds don’t understand story as art. At the heart of narrative surprise (the good ones, anyway) is the “plant and payoff” technique, which is the basis of typology, and I would argue that this is an application of God’s own Covenantal “forming and filling.” The writer plants a single seed which dies in the ground and later produces a harvest. (Here’s an article by a man who may have just lost his job for saying such things.)

One of the reasons I love cinema and good TV, from art house through well-written cable shows right down to blockbusters, is that good storytelling makes excellence possible in any genre. And the best storytelling, for me at least, involves the use of symbol. Lewis and Tolkien understood that the best way to comment on the real world is to view it from another one. All the visions of the Bible do this. They take place in the heavenly court, but of course what happens on the earth is the exposition of the compact types that come from the mouth of God.

I thought I’d lighten up for a bit and write some fiction (for my kids), but fiction with the pace and visual language of images on the screen. The only “world” I really know is Doctor Who, since I grew up with it. It’s one of those shows which had to rely on storytelling since the low budget meant the audience had to use their imaginations for much of what was going on anyway (and I find the fact that it never takes itself seriously very charming as well). It’s a show where anything can happen. When it’s terrible, it’s really terrible, but when it’s good, it’s a vehicle for commenting on the real world in a format that is infinitely flexible. Taylor Parkes writes:

Doctor Who is like pop music: it’s cheap, loud and trashy. And, as with pop music, these are not flaws but strengths – adding power and immediacy, validating everything. Enabling, from time to time, a peculiar transcendence, a particular kind of truth. And, as with pop music, trashiness is a hook, a way for Doctor Who to communicate big ideas without having to bore you; to encourage absolute mental freedom, with all those crazed audio-visual freakouts, all those mind-expanding trips into the abstract, and the absurd, and the extreme. [2]

So, here’s Bible Matrix meets Doctor Who by “James Stoker” [3]. Though it starts with some comedy, it’s quite a serious story. If you are up for it, see how many Bible stories, Tabernacle, Covenant/matrix and James Jordan references you can spot. And if you know Doctor Who, watch out for clues. There’s plenty of surprises.

You can download the ebook here. I’ve attempted to follow Truby’s advice: use a familiar format, give the people what they expect, but also transcend the format somehow, which is what the Bible does every step of the way.

And you really must read that book by Alter. So many people think the Old Testament writers were dull primitives, but it turns out that the jokes are so subtle they go right over the heads of most Christians.

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[1] Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting
[2] This is a great analysis, and very funny. (Thanks Daniel Stoddart)
[3] James Stoker is an anagram of “Master’s Joke,” a pseudonym once used in the show’s credits to hide the identity of the actor playing a recurring villain who was still in disguise.

The Bible so often seems to be very descriptive when we don’t want it to be (concerning architecture, for instance) and threadbare when it comes to the personal and illustrative detail we have been trained to enjoy and rely upon. When it comes to characterization especially, somehow the authors do a whole lot with very little. In fact, the unfathomable depth of what they do could not be achieved in any other way. What we moderns have often classed as primitive literature is in fact a literary world whose navigation requires one to keep one’s wits every step of the way. What is not said very often speaks volumes, especially when a passage is repeated with minor tweaks, additions or omissions. The Bible is most definitely smarter than we are, and its literary strategy can be traced back to Eden.

Robert Alter asks:

How does the Bible manage to evoke such a sense of depth and complexity in it representation of character with what would seem to be such sparse, even rudimentary means?

Biblical narrative offers us, after all, nothing in the way of minute analysis of motive or detailed rendering of mental processes; whatever indications we may be vouchsafed of feeling, attitude, or intention are rather minimal; and we are given only the barest hints about the physical appearance, the tics and gestures, the dress and implements of the characters, the material milieu in which they enact their destinies. In short, all the indicators of nuanced individuality to which the Western literary tradition has accustomed us—preeminently in the novel, but ultimately going back to the Greek epics and romances—would appear to be absent from the Bible.

In what way, then, is one to explain how, from these laconic texts, figures like Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, Tamar, Moses, Saul, David, and Ruth emerge, characters who, beyond any archetypal role they may play as bearers of a divine mandate, have been etched as indelibly vivid individuals in the imaginations of a hundred generations?

It is true enough to say, as Erich Auerbach and others have done, that the sparely sketched foreground of biblical narrative somehow implies a large background dense with possibilities of interpretation, but the critical issue here is the specific means through which that “somehow” is achieved.

Though biblical narrative is often silent where later modes of fiction will choose to be loquacious, it is selectively silent and in a purposeful way: abut different personages, or about the same personages at different junctures in the narration, or about different aspects of their thought, feeling, behavior. I would suggest, in fact, that the biblical writers, while seeming to preserve a continuity with the relatively simple treatment of character of their Mesopotamian and Syro-Phoenecian literary predecessors [1], actually worked out a set of new and surprisingly supple techniques for the imaginative representation of human individuality.

Since art does not develop in a vacuum, these literary techniques must be associated with the conception of human nature implicit in biblical monotheism: every person is created by an all-seeing God but abandoned to his own unfathomable freedom, made in God’s likeness as a matter of cosmogonic principle but almost never as a matter of accomplished ethical fact; and each individual instance of this bundle of paradoxes, encompassing the zenith and the nadir of the created world, requires a special cunning attentiveness in literary representation. The purposeful selectivity of means, the repeatedly contrastive or comparative technical strategies used in the rendering of biblical characters, are in a sense dictated by the biblical view of man.

Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, pp. 114-115.

Less is more. And God is most certainly in the details.

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[1] I don’t believe the Torah was influenced by other literature, but instead that it influenced these other literary traditions.

Robert Alter, on reading the Hebrew Bible, again:

To understand a narrative art so bare of embellishment and explicit commentary, one must be constantly aware of two features: the repeated use of narrative analogy, through which one part of the text provides oblique commentary on another; and the richly expressive function of syntax, which often bears the kind of weight of meaning that, say, imagery does in a novel by Virginia Woolf or analysis in a novel by George Eliot.

Attention to such features leads not to a more “imaginative” reading of the biblical narrative but to a more precise one; and since all these features are linked to discernable details in the Hebrew text, the literary approach is actually a good deal less conjectural than the histoical scholarship that askes of a verse whether it contains possible Akkadian loanwords, whether it reflects Sumerian kinship practices, whether it may have been corrupted by scribal error.

In any case, the fact that the text is ancient and that its characteristic narrative procedures may differ in many respects from those of modern texts should not lead us to any condescending preconception that the text is therefore bound to be crude or simple. Tzvetan Todorov has shrewdly argued that the whole notion of “primitive narrative” is a kind of mental mirage engendered by modern parochialism, for the more closely you look at a particular ancient narrative, the more you are compelled to recognize the complexity and subtlety with which it is formally organized and with which it renders its subjects, and the more you see how it is conscious of its necessary status as artful discourse. It is only by imposing a naive and unexamined aesthetic of their own, Todorov proposes, that modern scholars are able to declare so confidently that certain parts of the ancient text could not belong with others: the supposedly primitive narrative is subjected by scholars to tacit laws like the law of stylistic unity, of noncontradiction, of nondigression, of nonrepetition, and by these dim but purportedly universal lights is found to be composite, deficient, or incoherent. (If just these four laws were applied respectively to Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, Tristram Shandy, and Jealousy, each of those novels would have to be relegated to the dustbin of shoddily “redacted” literary scraps.) Attention to the ancient narrative’s consciousness of its own operations, Todorov proposes, will reveal how irrelevant these complacently assumed criteria generally are.

And this from a scholar who doesn’t even believe the texts are divinely inspired. How embarrassing!

The Bible Matrix is founded in the structures laid down in Genesis 1, but in no way is the Bible repetitious. James Jordan observes that the Bible is “front-loaded” with an incredible amount of information that we deem mostly obsolete, and yet we don’t understand the Bible because we haven’t taken the time necessary to become familiar with this material. What occurs later always acknowledges what has gone before, not just in content but in form as well, in literary and historical structure.

But what makes the later Scriptures diverse from the earlier ones is God’s process of communicating with familiar forms but using them in new ways. For instance, the visions of Zechariah follow the Creation week, yet the order of the Tabernacle furniture in this new visionary “week” has been shifted around to make a point, a point we miss if we aren’t familiar with the original form. Jesus and Paul and John do exactly the same thing. And so does all good literature. Robert Alter writes:

“The process of literary creation, as criticism has clearly recognized from the Russian Formalists onward, is an unceasing dialiectic between the necessity to use established forms in order to be able to communicate coherently, and the necessity to break and remake those forms because they are arbitrary restrictions and because what is merely repeated automatically no longer conveys a message.

‘The greater the probability of a symbol’s occurrence in any given situation,’ E. H. Gombrich observes in Art and Illusion, ‘the smaller will be its information content. Where we can anticipate, we need not listen.’ Reading any body of literature involves a specialized mode of perception in which every culture trains its members from childhood. As modern readers of the Bible, we need to relearn something of this mode of perception that was second nature to the original audiences. Instead of relegating every perceived recurrence in the text to the limbo of duplicated sources of fixed folkloric archetypes, we may begin to see that the resurgence of certain pronounced patterns at certain narrative junctures was conventionally anticipated, even counted on, and that against that ground of anticipation the biblical authors set words, motifs, themes, personages, and actions into an elaborate dance of significant innovation. For much of art lies in the shiftin aperture between the shadowy foreimage in the anticipating mind of the observer and the realized revelatory image in the work itself, and that is what we must learn to perceive more finely in the Bible.” (The Art of Biblical Narrative, p. 62.)

This is the reason that the New Covenant was just like every previous Covenant, and at the same time nothing like every previous Covenant. Those enlightened by the Spirit of God could see the historical, literary and spiritual continuity, and they became the historical, literary and spiritual continuity, the Covenant Succession. Those who were enlightened but blasphemed the Light were cut out of history with a sharp knife, like a foreskin, like Jericho.

Modern literary critics fail to realize that God’s making and breaking isn’t limited to literary forms. The familiar forms of “Jewish thought” were made to be broken and remade in Christ, and now utilized by God in an ever-increasing number of new ways as He brings humanity to the wisdom of maturity. The Word never returns void.

To use a musical analogy, if we go back to the Torah to practice our scales, we will better understand the rich symphonies in the prophets and the apostles — and not just the fragmentary allusions, but also the significance of the allusions in flow of the structures. That is what the Bible Matrix is all about.