One of the things I’m hoping to do, now that things are settled enough in my personal life to allow for more regular blogging, is post book reviews with some degree of regularity. Writing a review of a book often helps me to process the information more thoroughly. What I hope to do is, as I’m reading a book, write a review for each chapter as a way to process the information and interact with it. These reviews will, at times, be less a formal review and more my own musings on what the author(s) say in a particular section of the book.
Fair warning: These kinds of things normally follow a predefined pattern for me. I start reading the book, review the first chapter, and then get so interested in the book that I don’t stop to blog until I’ve finished, at which point it seems somewhat tedious to go back through each chapter and write a review.
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Adele Berlin’s first chapter essentially explains what poetics is (the science that aims to find the building blocks of literature, “poetics is to literature as linguistics is to language” pg 15) and is not (interpretation). For someone who doesn’t have a great deal of background in poetics as a discipline this chapter is quite helpful. In fact, Berlin’s advocacy for a robust poetics in relationship with biblical studies resonates with me. This may be because I already see a great need for taking a step back and studying the Bible before jumping to interpretation. Perhaps this is because of my seminary background, where students (and sadly sometimes professors) wish to jump to interpretation (i.e., what does the text means) before doing the necessary ground work to answer that question. She is also quick to point out that, as the title of the book suggests, she is not writing a book on poetics, but rather a book on the poetics of the Hebrew Bible.
Near the beginning of the chapter, Berlin points out something that I wish I could get every first year seminarian or freshman at Bible colleges to understand. In fact, if I could get everyone who reads the Bible to understand her point, I would die a happy man. Berlin explains, “Above all, we must keep in mind that narrative is a form of representation. Abraham in Genesis is not a real person any more than a painting of an apple is a real fruit. This is not a judgment on the existence of a historical Abraham any more than it is a statement about the existence of apples,” (pg. 13, emphasis original). She goes on to explain this at more length. But these couple sentences truly do the job nicely by themselves. Narrative is representation. To borrow from cultural anthropology, the Bible does not have a 1:1 correlation to reality. Berlin would say that no literature does, because literature is–at its heart–representation, art. She is absolutely correct. Just as a painted portrait of an individual is *not* the person, but merely an artist’s representation of the person, so also with narrative works, including the Bible.
Myself, I see a curious dichotomy here between what Berlin seems to be trying to say, and what she actually says. I think what she’s trying to say is that literature isn’t history. But what she actually says is so numbingly obvious that that even a child would wonder why it’s necessary to say it. A portrait of a thing isn’t the thing itself? Duh.
Mike, I see your point. It is somewhat amusing that one needs to point out what literature is. On the other hand, when we talk about the Bible specifically there is some confusion about whether it is literature or history (e.g., royal annuls). This means that obvious statements are sometimes required. It also means that although she is certainly saying that literature isn’t history, she is also trying to point out (I think) that the former really has no bearing on the latter.
But the problem with Berlin’s statement of the obvious is that it’s antithetical to the very distinction she should be making between literature and history, because what she says applies to both of them (neither one contains the persons it describes). The obvious conclusion, then, is that one is no better than the other. That being so, why shouldn’t one prefer the Bible account?
But I don’t think Berlin is making any statements about Historiography here. The issue, I think, is more one of her trying to explain to readers of the Bible that the Bible represents characters (this is, in essence, what the entire book is about) and that this representation has little or no bearing on something like “the historical Abraham.” One could argue that the literary character may be based on an historical one, and I don’t think that Berlin would have a problem with that. I think her central point has less to do with literature vs. history and more to do with literature as representation.
Thanks for the exchange, Calvin. We could go on and on, but I think we’ve sufficiently sketched out our opposing views of the value of the quoted Berlin material, and whether it supports or unwittingly undercuts what she’s trying to do.