from a short blog entry i made today.
provoked by:
What about, say, The Phantom of the Opera? Gaston Leroux certainly appeared to be passing off everything as true, as something personally researched. He alludes to documents, to places, even claims to have found the skeleton of the Phantom. And yet his work was political fiction. Does that make him a liar?
from: http://www.christianforums.com/showpost.php?p=22716839&postcount=221
I'm actually a little disturbed by the pretty constant refrain of either literal or allegorical when people are discussing Gen 1-5 (or 1-11). Most of the discussion actually misses the big points entirely. It splits almost straight across party lines: liberals = allegorical, conservatives = literal, neither side really listens to the other and no one seems the wiser during the "exchange" of viewpoints, reminding me more of artillery exchange than a discussion with the purpose of understanding the mind of God on the matter. It is not simply a matter of dividing up the text (like J D E P) with two colors of markers.
I find the metaphor and comparision with the Phantom a useful one:
I've often used the example of "Boston" by Upton Sinclair because of the long thesis i wrote back at Westminster on the topic. The take home message is that there is a continuum between newspaper man's report, (or police report), both eyewitness accounts, to: historical analysis, to: historical novel. But this fragment of a posting interests me because this person is saying the same thing as i do about "Boston" only Phantom is more meaningful to most people. The audience to whom it is written and the author's intentions shape the narrative, much like those short text messages at the end of historical presentations in the movies. (a movie about a mine disaster will end with a black screen and words to the effect: on July 3rd 1948 the countries worse mine cave-in occurred and the following names are engraved on a stone in the town square, or like "The Perfect Storm" end up with a long lingering camera shot of the plaque on the town city hall wall) We come to expect it, i for one really enjoy those technics at the end to make it appear to us as history. Why? because we trust text, we are persuaded by the media, black on white, that the information is historical and we make this subconscious connnection: history is real, history is true.
When i watched the "The Phantom of the Opera" i was aware of these technics directed at me to persuade me that it was right on the line between history textbook and historical novel. It was genre with a purpose, directed at a very specific audience. Does that make him a liar?(as the quote above asks) Only if you insist that pretending to be history when you are not is a lie and not merely just good fictional technic.
But the interesting and the important things are: what are the author's intentions, what audience is he writing to, and this question of genre and audience expectations. And none of these things are really embedded in the novel or even the play, they are in the world surrounding the play, they are in the culture that the novel was written in. The clues that it is not history are in the comparison between the work and the real world it proports to be an accurate reporting of.
There are three distinct time periods that i need to study to understand "The Phantom of the Opera", the time it is talking about, the time it was written and my time. The time it is talking about gives me hints as to the accurateness of its history-->literature mapping. The time period it was written in gives me hints as to the purpose of the literature or as the posting above puts it "political fiction", literature with a purpose. That time period is also that of the audience it is written to, it is their expectations that matter, not the expectations of the time period it is about. Then there is us, our ways of interpreting the literature, and how the movie will modify the original novel to fit changes in expectation between the time it was written and now.
Now what does this have to do with Biblical genres and how we read Gen 1-5? It is much the same technic we need to use on Genesis as a good student will use on Phantom. The key element is not our ideas of what genre it is, nor what the details of that genre mean to us now, but the original first readers, to whom it was first addressed. It is their culture and their expectations that matter, not ours. What matters to ours is the remake, is the plays and movies made after the novel. In the case of Genesis, this is the interpretation, is the body of work written about Genesis in our time, for instance, _The Genesis Flood_ and the rise of modern YECism. They are the equivalent of the remake of Phantom, they form the body of a school of interpretive analysis. But they are not the Genesis account, nor are they the first writers. That is what makes the whole situation so complex, most of my interactions are not with the text, nor with the original hearers but with the YECist interpretation. Equivalent to criticising the screenplay in the metaphor.
anyhow, i like the metaphor with Phantom, thanks to the author of this posting for the fruitful thoughts. it really is a lot more complex then just assigning Gen 1 to either allegory or literal.
provoked by:
What about, say, The Phantom of the Opera? Gaston Leroux certainly appeared to be passing off everything as true, as something personally researched. He alludes to documents, to places, even claims to have found the skeleton of the Phantom. And yet his work was political fiction. Does that make him a liar?
from: http://www.christianforums.com/showpost.php?p=22716839&postcount=221
I'm actually a little disturbed by the pretty constant refrain of either literal or allegorical when people are discussing Gen 1-5 (or 1-11). Most of the discussion actually misses the big points entirely. It splits almost straight across party lines: liberals = allegorical, conservatives = literal, neither side really listens to the other and no one seems the wiser during the "exchange" of viewpoints, reminding me more of artillery exchange than a discussion with the purpose of understanding the mind of God on the matter. It is not simply a matter of dividing up the text (like J D E P) with two colors of markers.
I find the metaphor and comparision with the Phantom a useful one:
I've often used the example of "Boston" by Upton Sinclair because of the long thesis i wrote back at Westminster on the topic. The take home message is that there is a continuum between newspaper man's report, (or police report), both eyewitness accounts, to: historical analysis, to: historical novel. But this fragment of a posting interests me because this person is saying the same thing as i do about "Boston" only Phantom is more meaningful to most people. The audience to whom it is written and the author's intentions shape the narrative, much like those short text messages at the end of historical presentations in the movies. (a movie about a mine disaster will end with a black screen and words to the effect: on July 3rd 1948 the countries worse mine cave-in occurred and the following names are engraved on a stone in the town square, or like "The Perfect Storm" end up with a long lingering camera shot of the plaque on the town city hall wall) We come to expect it, i for one really enjoy those technics at the end to make it appear to us as history. Why? because we trust text, we are persuaded by the media, black on white, that the information is historical and we make this subconscious connnection: history is real, history is true.
When i watched the "The Phantom of the Opera" i was aware of these technics directed at me to persuade me that it was right on the line between history textbook and historical novel. It was genre with a purpose, directed at a very specific audience. Does that make him a liar?(as the quote above asks) Only if you insist that pretending to be history when you are not is a lie and not merely just good fictional technic.
But the interesting and the important things are: what are the author's intentions, what audience is he writing to, and this question of genre and audience expectations. And none of these things are really embedded in the novel or even the play, they are in the world surrounding the play, they are in the culture that the novel was written in. The clues that it is not history are in the comparison between the work and the real world it proports to be an accurate reporting of.
There are three distinct time periods that i need to study to understand "The Phantom of the Opera", the time it is talking about, the time it was written and my time. The time it is talking about gives me hints as to the accurateness of its history-->literature mapping. The time period it was written in gives me hints as to the purpose of the literature or as the posting above puts it "political fiction", literature with a purpose. That time period is also that of the audience it is written to, it is their expectations that matter, not the expectations of the time period it is about. Then there is us, our ways of interpreting the literature, and how the movie will modify the original novel to fit changes in expectation between the time it was written and now.
Now what does this have to do with Biblical genres and how we read Gen 1-5? It is much the same technic we need to use on Genesis as a good student will use on Phantom. The key element is not our ideas of what genre it is, nor what the details of that genre mean to us now, but the original first readers, to whom it was first addressed. It is their culture and their expectations that matter, not ours. What matters to ours is the remake, is the plays and movies made after the novel. In the case of Genesis, this is the interpretation, is the body of work written about Genesis in our time, for instance, _The Genesis Flood_ and the rise of modern YECism. They are the equivalent of the remake of Phantom, they form the body of a school of interpretive analysis. But they are not the Genesis account, nor are they the first writers. That is what makes the whole situation so complex, most of my interactions are not with the text, nor with the original hearers but with the YECist interpretation. Equivalent to criticising the screenplay in the metaphor.
anyhow, i like the metaphor with Phantom, thanks to the author of this posting for the fruitful thoughts. it really is a lot more complex then just assigning Gen 1 to either allegory or literal.
