Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin

240 Pages·1993·14.07 MB·English

by  Walter L. Reed

DIALOGUES OF THE WORD
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DIALOGUES
OF THE WORD
The Bible as Literature
According to Bakhtin
WALTER L. REED
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1993
Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reed, Walter L.
Dialogues of the Word : the Bible as literature according
to Bakhtin / Walter L. Reed.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-19-507997-3
1. Bible as literature. 2. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich),
1895-1975. I. Title.
BS535.R39 1993
220.6'6—dc20 92-36420
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Loree, Seth,
Melissa, and Catherine
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Preface
"The Bible . . . according to Bakhtin?" readers may well ask in dis-
belief. Literary readers may recall the story by Jorge Luis Borges,
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," in which a French Sym-
bolist poet of the late nineteenth century undertakes to write the
Spanish novel of the early seventeenth century already written by
Cervantes. Although he only manages to produce a few chapters
of his own Quixote (verbally identical but "infinitely richer" in
their alien setting), we are assured by Borges's narrator that Menard
has enriched the art of reading by means of a new technique: "the
deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution."1
It is the intention of this study to enrich the art of reading the
Bible, although not by re-creating it in the whimsically demiurgic
manner of Pierre Menard. My aim is rather to apply a particular,
twentieth-century conception of literature and language to an
ancient text, in order to understand and appreciate the way this
text has organized its various verbal parts into meaningful wholes.
In saying that the Bible has organized itself, I am revealing a bias
toward literary formalism. I am not primarily concerned with iden-
tifying the manifold sources of the Bible, in the manner of histori-
cal criticism. Nor am I particularly concerned in this book with
specifying its regulative authority within subsequent communities
of interpretation, which I take to be the task of theological inter-
pretation. Rather I am interested in making contemporary literary-
viii Preface
critical sense of the received and translated text of the Bible, more
or less fixed—though in somewhat different versions—for most of
the last two thousand years.
The contemporary sense that I make in this book is of course
a meaningfulness of my own construction. It is the sense that the
Bible makes to a literary critic trained in the twilight of the New
Criticism and seeking, like a great many of his colleagues today,
to move "beyond formalism" in a way that will not simply con-
sign to the scrap pile the many advances that such formalist criti-
cism has made in techniques of literary interpretation. The great
appeal of Bakhtin for an increasing number of literary critics in the
Anglo-American tradition comes from the way he himself began
to move beyond formalism—beyond Russian Formalism—more
than sixty years earlier, into the wider reaches of philosophical re-
flection and cultural history.
In my own case, and quite by coincidence, I became interested
in Bakhtin about the same time that I became interested in the
Bible itself. It was only in the mid-1970s that I began to read, to
teach, and then to write about the Bible in the context of my study
of literature. And it was in 1977, at the urging of my friend and
then-colleague Michael Holquist and with the aid of his and his
students' translations from the Russian, that I began to read in a
more than casual way the literary theory of this powerful and long-
unknown Soviet thinker. For some time these interests ran on
separate tracks. But as I read more widely in the vast archives of
biblical criticism and as I read more deeply in the growing volume
of Bakhtin's writing being translated into English, I began to see
that the questions I was asking in the one area were finding
answers, or at least more searching formulations, in the other.
I am aware that there will be readers of this book who will want
more explication, perhaps more critique, of Bakhtin's theories
themselves and less attention to the Bible. They are referred first
and foremost to several excellent books by Holquist and others who
have worked with him: the biography Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1984) by Holquist and Katerina Clark;
Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1989) by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl
Emerson; Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge,
1990) by Holquist; and Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) by Morson and Emerson.
My desire in this book is to apply a theory of verbal communica-
Preface ix
tion rather than to explain it in terms of other theoretical (or com-
monsense) approaches.
There may also be readers who would prefer a less peculiarly
mediated presentation of the Bible. They may feel, not without
reason, that to read the Bible in the light of Bakhtin is to hold a
candle in sunshine. Such readers (if they have made it beyond the
subtitle) are asked to reflect for a moment on their own theoreti-
cal assumptions and consider whether it is possible to read any text
without someone's guidance, somewhere along the way. As I can
testify from my own experience as a student and a teacher of lit-
erature over the last thirty years, the Bible is often simply not read
at all these days in American higher education, which is to be
regretted on many counts. Whether the guidance Bakhtin offers to
reading the Bible ("perhaps without wanting to," as Borges says of
Pierre Menard's enriching the art of reading) is appropriate, enlight-
ening, or in some sense true to the text is a question that can only
be answered by those who read on and give the dialogue of this
book a hearing.
In the Afterword, I reflect more generally on the assumptions
that govern a literary reading of the Bible as distinct from those
that inform a historical reading on the one hand and a theological
reading on the other. One of the things Bakhtin's theory of lan-
guage and literature suggests is that a literary reading positions
itself between the fragmenting referentiality of the historical view
and the consolidating authority of the theological perspective. His-
torians tend to regard the Bible as merely a part of a much larger
archive of documents and other cultural evidence of human expres-
sion; theologians tend to consider it as a set of scriptures of
intrinsic and essentially self-contained authority proceeding, in
some manner, from God. Literary critics inevitably treat the bibli-
cal writings as an anthology selected according to various criteria
of aesthetic value and gathered into coherence according to ideas
of literary genre, even as they realize (or should realize) that these
criteria and ideas are not the primary concern of the authors of the
text. Readers who desire more preliminary orientation about the
assumptions behind this and other treatments of "the Bible as lit-
erature" are advised to read the last part of the book first.
One last apologetic and explanatory note. I have written with
"small Greek and less Hebrew" on writings originally composed
in these ancient languages, not from the misguided conviction that
knowledge of these languages is unimportant for understanding the