The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter

Author:Robert Alter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

It will be noted that the two ends of this schema of structuring devices, the Leitwort and the type-scene, reflect distinctively biblical literary conventions (though of course one can find approximate analogues in other narrative traditions), while the three middle terms, motif, theme,6 and sequence of actions, are abundantly present in the broadest spectrum of narrative works. The uses of repetition, then, that we have been reviewing are to an appreciable degree shared by the Bible with other kinds of narrative literature. What most distinguishes repetition in biblical narrative is the explicitness and formality with which it is generally employed, qualities that, to return to our initial difficulty, support an unusual proportion of verbatim restatement. In order to appreciate the artfulness of this kind of repetition, a modern reader has to cultivate the complementary opposite of the habits of perception he or she most frequently puts to use in reading. That is, in narratives where there is a great density of specified fictional data and some commitment to making the mimetic elements of style and structure more prominent than the poetic ones, repetition tends to be at least partly camouflaged, and we are expected to detect it, to pick it out as a subtle thread of recurrence in a variegated pattern, a flash of suggestive likeness in seeming differences. (The obvious exception to this tendency in Western literature would be extreme fictional experiments in stylization, like those of Gertrude Stein or Alain Robbe-Grillet, where formal repetition is made an obtrusive structural principle.) When, on the other hand, you are confronted with an extremely spare narrative, marked by formal symmetries, that exhibits a high degree of literal repetition, what you have to look for more frequently is the small but revealing differences in the seeming similarities, the nodes of emergent new meanings in the pattern of regular expectations created by explicit repetition.

Perhaps the conceptual matrix for this way of using repetition is to be sought in biblical poetry, which, as in most cultures, antedates prose as a vehicle of literary expression. Such connections are bound to be conjectural, but what I have in mind is essentially this: the parallelism of biblical verse constituted a structure in which, through the approximately synonymous half-lines or versets, there was constant repetition that was never really repetition. This is true not just inadvertently because there are no true synonyms, so that every restatement is a new statement, but because the conscious or intuitive art of poetic parallelism was to advance the poetic argument in seeming to repeat it—intensifying, specifying, complementing, qualifying, contrasting, expanding the semantic material of each initial verset in its apparent repetition. Biblical prose, of course, operates stylistically in exactly the opposite way, word-for-word restatement rather than inventive synonymity being the norm for repetition; but in both cases, I would suggest, the ideal reader (originally, listener) is expected to attend closely to the constantly emerging differences in a medium that seems predicated on constant recurrence.

Such attention is particularly crucial to the understanding of a major narrative convention of the Bible to which I should now like to turn.

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