by Leland Ryken
Transformation as a Narrative Principle
It is characteristic of stories that they do not end where they began. Change, growth, and development are the very essence of stories. Without some type of change in character or situation, stories bore us. In fact, one expert on stories theorizes that a “minimal story” consists of “three events, the third of which is the inverse of the first.”10 Aristotle’s principle of a story as an action having a beginning, middle, and end will serve us well here. The middle of the story is that which links the beginning and end and explains the difference that we find between the two situations. That difference nearly always centers on some notable change, usually one that involves the hero.
Change in the Story of Origins
Consider the very first story in the Bible, the story of origins that occupies Genesis 1–3. According to C. S. Lewis this story “fulfills the conditions of great story better perhaps than any other, for, more than any other, it leaves things where it did not find them.”11 The story begins with God’s creation of a perfect world. Then the action narrows to life in Paradise (Gen. 2). The third chapter reverses everything. Life inside the Garden is replaced by life outside the Garden, in a fallen and hostile environment. Unity among God, humanity, and nature is transformed into a world fragmented into warring components. As we read through the first three chapters of the Bible, we fall from the zenith of total bliss to the absolute nadir of corrupting sin.
Types of Change in Stories
The element of change is so central to stories that the best system for classifying stories is based on it. The change in a story can be a change of (a) fortune or situation, (b) character, or (c) a combination of these. The resulting taxonomy of narrative types, with three biblical examples of each, looks something like this, beginning with stories in which the change is one of external fortune.
Change of Fortune Stories
In a tragic plot an essentially good character undergoes a catastrophic change of fortune caused by his or her tragic flaw (the stories of Adam, Saul, Samson). A punitive plot is one in which an unsympathetic or villainous character undergoes an adverse change of fortune as a punishment for misdeeds (the stories of Jezebel, Ahab, Absalom). In a pathetic plot (from the word “pathos”) a sympathetic character undergoes suffering or adversity through no particular fault of his or her own (the stories of Joseph, Job, Jesus). A comic plot is one in which a sympathetic character undergoes a change from misfortune or deprivation to happiness and fulfillment, or who survives the threat of misfortune and comes out all right in the end (the stories of Abraham, Ruth, Esther). A combination of pathetic and comic plots is possible if the suffering protagonist experiences a sudden upturn of fortune at the end (in contrast to the gradually improving fortunes of the protagonist in the typical comic plot). An admiration story is one in which a sympathetic hero successfully masters one threat after another (stories of heroes who always win, such as those of Daniel, Deborah, Elisha).
Change of Character Stories
Stories in which the transformation is primarily a change of the protagonist’s character yield a different system of classification. In reform stories an initially unsympathetic or evil character changes for the better (the stories of Jacob, Saul/Paul, the prodigal son). In degeneration plots an initially good and sympathetic character degenerates (the stories of Adam and Eve, Solomon, Hezekiah). In revelation stories the focus is on the protagonist’s progress from ignorance to knowledge (the story of Abraham, who pursues several dead ends while learning how and when God will fulfill the promise of a son; the story of Job, who learns a great deal about God and himself as a result of his suffering; the story of David/Bathsheba/Uriah in 2 Sam. 11–12, where David gradually learns that not even the king can sin with impunity).
This classification of stories should be used flexibly. It does not cover every story told in the Bible. Some stories combine features of more than one type and should therefore be regarded as hybrids. For example, in the Bible (but not in literature generally) tragic stories are always degeneration stories as well. The story types I have listed are simply useful organizing frameworks for some biblical stories. They are not a literary straitjacket into which we should force every story. I leave it to my readers to discover that there are surprisingly few examples of some of these types and a notable abundance of other types.
We can formulate this further rule for reading and discussing biblical narrative on the basis of narrative transformation: pay attention to the changes that occur between the beginning and end of a story, noting carefully the precise ways in which characters change and the causes of those transformations.
Foils
Storytellers make significant use of foils in stories. A foil is literally something that “sets off” or heightens what is most important in a story. It is usually a contrast, though it can also consist of a parallel that reinforces something else. The commonest type of foil is a character who accentuates the protagonist, but sometimes an event or thread of action can serve as a foil to the main plot.
Characters as Foils
Character foils occur in almost every biblical narrative. The virtuous Abel heightens the villainy of Cain. Ruth’s loyalty to her mother-in-law stands illumined by the contrast to Orpah, who returns to her home and gods. The roll call of such character foils keeps expanding: Abraham and Lot, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, David and Saul, Mary and Martha, the Pharisee and publican.
Contrasting Events as Foils
Events can also function as foils. In Genesis 18, Abraham and Sarah entertain angelic visitors with ideal hospitality in a rural setting, and they are rewarded with the promise that their long-awaited son will be bom the following spring. In the very next chapter, the angels visit Lot to pronounce God’s judgment against the wicked city of sexual perversion where Lot has made his home. Instead of sitting down to a leisurely meal, they have to be rescued from attempted homosexual rape. Again, in the story of Saul and David, the tragic decline of Saul stands silhouetted against the rise of the youthful David.
Parallel Events as Foils
Plots can also be highlighted by parallel events that reinforce a main action. The story of Jacob provides good examples. The sibling rivalry Jacob perpetrated so well in his own childhood home is reinforced by the rivalry between Rachel and Leah after they become the wives of Jacob. Jacob’s character flaws as the deceitful trickster are all the more obvious when he is thrown into a twenty-year-long encounter with his equally tricky Uncle Laban.
Storytellers love to work with heightened contrasts and (less often) parallels. By means of such foils, they draw our attention to what is most important in the story.
Dramatic Irony
Storytellers are also addicted to a narrative device known as dramatic irony. It occurs whenever the reader knows something that a character in the story does not know.
Irony in the Gospels
For example, we read the Gospels knowing that the story ends with the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The Gospel writers wrote their accounts from the superior (postresurrection) knowledge that Jesus was the Messiah. But as we go through the action narrated in the Gospels, we can discern irony all over the place as the disciples and enemies of Jesus portrayed in the story operate in ignorance of who Jesus is and of his ultimate triumph.
Irony in the Story of Job
The most sustained piece of dramatic irony in the Bible is the Book of Job. As readers, we know from the prologue that God is not the cause of Job’s suffering (Satan is), that Job is blameless and upright, and that God is not punishing Job. The principal actors operate in ignorance of what has happened in heaven, and almost everything they say is permeated with dramatic irony. As we read Job’s early speeches we know that Job’s accusations against God as a sadistic deity are untrue. In the speeches of Job’s “comforters” we observe the irony of orthodoxy: they mouth orthodox doctrine (suffering is punitive, wicked people bring calamity on themselves, God is just), but all this orthodoxy i
s wide of the mark because it does not apply to the specific case of Job.
Localized Irony
Dramatic irony is usually more localized than it is in the Gospels and the Book of Job. Much of the emotional voltage of the concluding chapters of the story of Joseph stems from our knowing, as the brothers do not, that they are unwittingly fulfilling the destiny prophesied in Joseph’s youthful dreams. Again, since we know that the crafty, lefthanded Ehud carries his sword on the unexpected right side, the storyteller in effect exchanges a grim wink with us at the expense of the doomed Eglon, with the result that virtually every detail in the story (Judg. 3:15–25) is electrified with hidden meanings. In a famous story from the New Testament we hear the approaching footsteps of the young men returning from the burial of Ananias even as we listen to Sapphira’s doomed attempt to pull off the same hoax that cost her husband his life (Acts 5:7–10).
Dramatic Irony and Reader Involvement
Dramatic irony is one of the most predictably effective ways of eliciting reader involvement in a story. It activates a reader to recognize a discrepancy. Once activated, we are “hooked.” This may account for the fact that it is hard to find a story that does not include some irony, however subtle. But in the Bible irony is more than a bit of effective storytelling technique. In a universe where God’s ways transcend human understanding and in which an unseen spiritual world is portrayed as being just as real as the physical world, it is inevitable that discrepancies in perception will keep entering the action.12
Poetic Justice
Poetic justice is also common in stories. It consists of the narrative situation in which good characters are rewarded and bad ones punished. Such justice is what we usually get in biblical stories before the final curtain closes on the action. The boy-hero David triumphs and the blasphemous giant loses his head. The villainous Haman is hanged on the gallows that he himself built, while Mordecai basks in his promotion. Job’s fortunes are restored, his tormenting “friends” are rebuked, and Satan has fled from the scene in total defeat.
Why Storytellers Use Poetic Justice
Such poetic justice is all but inevitable in stories. As readers, we intuitively expect it, even though we recognize that such justice is often absent in real life. Poetic justice is simply one of the conventions of storytelling. It is a way to round off an action with a note of finality (without it storytellers would hardly know how to end their stories). It is the storyteller’s way of clarifying how he feels morally and perhaps emotionally about the characters and events that have been presented, and, to use Aristotle’s great phrase, it satisfies our moral sense.
Is the prevalence of poetic justice in the stories of the Bible a sign that the writers have added a bit of fiction to make the story “turn out right”? It is more likely to be a matter of selecting stories that did turn out right. After all, what type of story gets told and retold in our own culture? And what type of story is offered as a testimony of God’s goodness or as the prototypical Christian life? Stories in which justice wins, good people are rewarded, and scoundrels get their comeuppance. In the Bible, poetic justice is more appropriately called God’s justice.
SUMMARY
The prevalence of such standard narrative conventions as foils, dramatic irony, and poetic justice in the stories óf the Bible can be formulated into a principle of interpretation: be alert for the presence of foils, dramatic irony, and poetic justice in biblical narrative, both for what they add to your response to the story and what they contribute to the meaning.
Stories Are Comments on Life
The storytellers of the Bible do more than entertain us. They interpret as well as present the characters and events that make up their stories. “To tell a story,” writes John Shea, “is to create a world, adopt an attitude, suggest a behavior.”13 Storytellers even choose their stories partly on the basis of their significance and ability to embody truth. They are always on the lookout for stories that are striking and gripping, but they also choose stories in which, to use the French writer Baudelaire’s words, “the deep significance of life reveals itself.”14
The fact that storytellers mean something by their stories affects how we should approach their stories. A leading literary scholar speaks of “the rule of significance” as “the primary convention of literature”; by the rule of significance he means reading a work of literature “as expressing a significant attitude to some problem concerning man and/or his relation to the universe.”15 In reading the stories of the Bible we need to balance the descriptive question “What happened next?” with the interpretive questions “What does it mean? What is the author driving at?” At both levels, stories are at least a distant literary relative of the riddle, teasing us into a process of discovery.
What Stories Are About
The rule of significance is especially relevant to the Bible, a sacred or religious book in which the authors claim to be revealing religious truth for the faith and practice of their readers. We should look upon biblical stories as making implied assertions about the three great issues of life:
Reality: What really exists?
Morality: What constitutes good and bad behavior?
Values: What really matters, and what matters most?
Biblical storytellers make these assertions, not directly, but by embodying them in setting, character, and action. Flannery O’Connor once remarked that the storyteller speaks “with character and action, not about character and action.”16 If this is true, about what to do storytellers speak by means of their stories? The same thing other thinkers speak about more directly: life, reality, truth. There is, in other words, a discourse level to these stories: they are the means by which the author communicates something important to the audience or reader.
The Need to Interpret Stories
There is an obvious indirection about the storyteller’s approach to truth. Instead of stating ideas propositionally, the storyteller presents living examples of one principle or another, one aspect of reality or another, leaving the reader to infer those themes. In other words, stories impose the obligation of interpretation on their readers in a way that sermons and essays do not.
The Dual Task in Interpreting Stories
How, then, can the reader know what a given story means? Readers do not always agree on what a story means, though often it is possible to find a consensus. Keeping in mind that the storyteller both presents an experience and offers an interpretation of it, we can profitably pursue our quest to find the themes of a story by dividing the process into two phases: identifying what the story is about (the topic or subject of the story) and how the writer wishes us to view the experience that is presented (the theme of the story).
Repetition as a Guide to What a Story Is About
The most reliable guide to what a story is about is the principle of repetition. What keeps getting repeated in a story invariably becomes the central focus—the thing toward which everything points. The most important requirement for a story, commented the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, “is that it should have a kind of focus, . . .some place where all the rays meet or from which they issue.”17 Such focus is usually provided by repetition. Generally speaking, a story will partly interpret itself by repeating that which is essential to its understanding.
Repetition in the Story of Gideon
For example, in the first half of the story of Gideon (Judg. 6–7), virtually every incident is a variation on the theme of the hero’s feelings of inadequacy. Gideon beats out wheat in secret to avoid detection (6:11). When the angel ironically greets him as “thou mighty man of valour” (v. 12 KJ), Gideon responds with defeatism (v. 13). When God promises to be with him, he asks for a confirming sign (vv. 16–18). Given the command to tear down his father’s pagan altar, Gideon does it by night “because he was too afraid of his family and the men of the town to do it by day” (v. 27). This story, we quickly learn, is going to be about what God did with a reluctant hero suffering from acute insecurity.
H
ighlighting or Foregrounding
In addition to repetition as a device to tell us what a story is about, biblical storytellers use various techniques of highlighting or foregrounding to direct a reader’s attention to what is most important in a story. Anything that stands out from a common ground can become a signpost for the reader.
Character Transformation as a Form of Highlighting
In a story that centers on character transformation, for example, we rather automatically pay attention to what caused the transformation. The story of Esther is typical. During the early part of the story, Esther conceals her Jewish identity and fits in perfectly with a pagan lifestyle. After her crucial decision in the middle of the story to unmask her concealed identity before the king, she becomes a national heroine, no longer sliding with circumstances and taking the easiest way out of a situation. What is the story about? It is about the identity crisis of the protagonist, an identity crisis very much tied up with the religious themes of the Old Testament.