Wood on Opacity and Interiority in the Bible
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Georgetown’s Tod Linafelt takes James Wood to task for judging the characters of the Hebrew Bible to be “opaque” and lacking in the sort of richness of interior life that marks the greatness of modern literary fiction. As Wood puts it, the biblical David for example is a strictly “public character”:
In the modern sense, he has no privacy. He hardly ever speaks his inner thoughts to himself; he speaks to God, and his soliloquies are prayers. He is external to us because in some way he does not exist for us, but for the Lord. He is seen by the Lord, is transparent to the Lord, but remains opaque to us. (How Fiction Works, p. 141)
What is strange about this criticism is that in general this is precisely how other persons simply are (“publicly”) given to us: not with spoken soliloquies or any other mode of access to what is being conveyed in their “inner thoughts” and prayers, but rather as often puzzling complexes of words and deeds much of whose mental (and, indeed, decidedly non-mental) lives are left underdetermined by that which is open to view. Publicity simply entails privacy in these ways, and so narrating a character’s thoughts and motivations so as to clear away any of the usual third-personal opacity as to what he is up to and why is not so much a way of making that character “public” as of putting what is usually an essentially private mode of access in place of the truly public one, of violating the structural constraints within which a person ever can exist “for us” and instead revealing how it is that he exists “for himself”. Hence the “publicized privacy” that Wood finds in Macbeth can really be no such thing at all, and the “invisible but all-seeing” audience in Crime and Punishment only knows what it knows because it can do quite a lot more than “see”.
Linafelt sees this, I think, and he also makes the even more crucial point that the mere fact that a character’s private life is not laid out in the open in these sorts of ways is no evidence at all that such a life is supposed to be altogether absent:
Far from presenting characters who exist solely in the public realm and who are solely concerned with God, the Bible exploits to good effect a genuinely private self in its characters, one that is largely unavailable to readers and to other characters. Biblical narrative consistently, though not slavishly, avoids giving access to the inner lives of its characters, to what they might be thinking or feeling in any given situation, even though that inner life is often vitally important to character motivation and to plot development and cannot always be filled in with reference to God.
And again, this time citing Erich Auerbach’s description of biblical narratives as “fraught with background”:
… in The Iliad and The Odyssey both objects and people tend to be fully described and illuminated, with essential attributes and aspects — from physical descriptions to the thoughts and motivations of characters — in the foreground for the reader to apprehend. But with biblical narrative such details are, for the most part, kept in the background and are not directly available to the reader. On the question of the relationship between dialogue and characters’ interiority, for example, Auerbach writes that the speech of biblical personages “does not serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts — on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts that remain unexpressed.” Wood, like many readers, has mistaken lack of access to characters’ inner lives for a denial of the existence of those inner lives.
Having read relevant pieces of Wood’s essay, it’s hard not to feel that this last charge is pretty well motivated. It is true enough that, for example, the biblical David is caught up in a narrative arc that seems dictated by something greater than himself, but surely if we take David to have seen Bathsheba, found her beautiful, inquired about her, called for her, laid with her, and then sent her away, it does not make much sense at all to suppose, as Wood does, that David “does not think”: for he simply must be thinking something if he is to do all of this, and the status of those thoughts is untouched by the fact that we who are reading about him may have some trouble figuring out what they are. Wood proposes that the true genius of the modern novel lies in the way that its capacity to display interiority then invites us to “read between the lines”; but why, one wonders, can we not try to do the same in the case of King David’s actions? Hence Linafelt:
What, then, motivates David’s taking of Bathsheba? Wood assumes that David is “instantly struck with lust” upon seeing her. Perhaps, but in fact the narrator never reveals whether David lusts after Bathsheba or not. And it is possible to imagine his taking of Bathsheba as a calculated political act against a rival faction within the court. Besides, lust and political ambition are far from being mutually exclusive. The point, in any case, is that though we are not told David’s motivations, he clearly has some.
All this is not, of course, to say that the kinds of post-biblical literary advances that Wood cites were anything but that; though it is worth pointing out that Linafelt also argues toward the end of his essay that a quite sophisticated capacity for the use of the free indirect style actually does make itself manifest in the Hebrew scriptures, albeit only on occasion and even then rather briefly. It is, however, entirely possible to highlight the shortcomings of the biblical literary style in comparison to that of the modern novel without making it out as if the Bible’s characters are hollow-headed dolls in the hands of a divine puppeteer. I like Wood’s work quite a lot, and in this particular essay the discussion of Macbeth alone is enough to make it clear why Wood’s reputation as a critic is entirely deserved. But as Linafelt says, the stories of the Bible surely demand a lot more of the close reading and careful literary attention that, even more than his shimmering prose, are usually the things that underlie Wood’s real brilliance.
Might Mr. Wood be committing a genre category mistake? It seem to me that complaining that the Biblical character do not have revealed interior lives like modern novel characters is a bit like complaining that Thucydides’ characters in The Peloponnesian War do not have the same literary depth as Homer’s. The stylistic imperatives of a history are different from those of an epic poem.
I don’t know why one would be surprised to find that David’s inner thoughts are always expressed in the form of prayers to God. From what I understand, quite a lot of the Bible is concerned with the relations between men and God. I’m not quite sure why one should expect the composers and editors of the Biblical texts to care about anything unrelated to religion.
If one wishes to read novels about the inner lives of Biblical characters, I believe such things have been written. If one wishes to read about the relationship between God and His chosen people, the Hebrew Scriptures seem to me to be well suited to that task.
— Ethan C. · Apr 10, 01:54 AM · #
I almost feel that the reticence of the biblical narrative in regard to the inner life of its characters is necessary to its authority (especially in an age of inner thoughts). What devastation of faith would occur if the imagination of the faithful were limited to the vision of an authoritatively explicit interior narrative?
The life of Scripture is not only fraught with background, but also with the anticipation of its own echoing in subsequent literature (all the way down to Jeff Buckley’s rendition of Hallelujah), to say nothing of the the “global” interplay between the Old and New Testaments. Having played the “secret chord” does not fully render humanity in its response to God.
There is some difference between the Wood who would set the standard for literary criticism and the Wood who would rather, in his own words, “go and sit in a cathedral.”
— Tony · Apr 10, 02:13 AM · #
I think there is a point to be made that “interior life” is only shown while a character is thwarting God. Cain had an interior life, while Abel did not; David had an interior life with Bathsheba, but not when striking down Goliath.
This is probably because “interior life” means thought, and thought is not involved in the obedience shown as proper and right in the OT. There is thought only when a character thinks to disobey God.
— bcg · Apr 10, 06:25 PM · #
bcg: Really? How about Abraham and Isaac heading up to Moriah? What were they doing while they walked together in silence, humming show tunes to themselves?
— John Schwenkler · Apr 10, 08:23 PM · #
The above comment is mine.
— bcg · Apr 10, 11:42 PM · #
Sorry about my mispost …
John: Even then, isn’t the “interior life” only active inasmuch as Abraham is considering how much he would like to disobey God, or doubts that God’s plan will bring him happiness?
— bcg · Apr 10, 11:49 PM · #
That certainly doesn’t seem right to me! I mean, even if we grant (as seems implausible to me in the first case, and much less so in the second) that Abraham’s interior life involved the states you describe, there are many others – like, say, trying to figure out why God was doing this, trying to reconcile himself to God’s will, trying to understand what this revealed about God’s nature, reflecting on his love for Isaac and trying to figure out what he would say to him, and so on – that were almost certainly present as well, right? And aren’t these sorts of states every bit as good candidates for “interiority” as the less submissive tendencies you describe?
— John Schwenkler · Apr 11, 12:02 AM · #
I don’t think interior life existed in (western) art until the renaissance. I don’t think there are any examples of stories told just to tell about a particular character until even later. It seems to me that all art prior to the renaissance was about god(s) and rules and character traits and metaphysics. Think about christian icons or medieval tapestries and painting. Flat, full of symbols. Maps or diagrams or fetishes rather than portraits. I’m sure there are some exceptions. I can’t remember gilgamesh very well but from what I do remember he has some personality traits that weren’t necessarily allegorical. And then I hear, but know nothing of, lots of romantic Persian and indian poetry from long ago. THere might be some actual individual humans in that. But I feel fairly confident that until the renaissance individual humans and their thoughts and troubles were not on the Western radar screen.
— cw · Apr 11, 01:33 AM · #
cw,
It seems to me that you’re running together the notion of an “interior life” and that of an “individual” in a way that’s not very helpful; I’ll certainly agree that what we understand as the self is pretty much a modern invention (though much credit goes to Augustine), but it’s quite another thing to say that there are no “personality traits” or “thoughts and troubles” evidenced in Western art before the Renaissance. No doubt much more is left below the surface or conveyed by way of symbols or other tools that strike us as odd, but the charge of superficiality seems misplaced to me.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 11, 01:50 AM · #
I think that the portrayal of interior life in literature and painting is tied to the idea of the particular self or individual. The portrayal of interior life—thoughts, motives, history, unique realistic personality, and especially voice—is an artistic tactic used to portray a particular individual. Generic personality traits like bravery or jealousy or avarice or cowardice are used to illustrate descriptions of the world. Guys like moses or THor are allegories for natural forces or cats paws of the gods.
Of course, motives and unique realistic personality can be inferred by actions. And personality traits determine actions. So, maybe we can infer what kind of guy Abraham is. For sure we can infer what kind of guy Jesus was, through his unique voice and actions. Although we are not told much directly about his thoughts. Though I think we are probably told more about his thoughts than we are about the thoughts of other biblical or classical figures. In fact, the bible might have more genuine personalities than most early literature. And the greeks… I don’t know. I don’t remember enough about it. Was Ulysses more than brave and dogged?
But anyway, I think when you use the term interior life in reference to works of art you have to be referring to a specific artistic tactic. And that there is no reason to use it unless you are interested in portraying particular individuals, rather than the doings of gods.
— cw · Apr 11, 04:35 AM · #
WHat I was trying to say there was that I think the dawn of the idea of self creates the need to artistically portray individual unique selves, and that the tactic of showing glimpses of interior lives was developed as a result. This is barely informed speculation on my part, but I’m pretty sure this is a well discussed area of thought.
— cw · Apr 11, 04:44 AM · #
I think we need to make two different distinctions, cw:
- one between the idea of a human being and that of a self or an individual; and
- another between the idea of someone’s having a mental life (thoughts, character traits, etc.) and the idea of that life’s being private or “inner”.
I agree that the second members of each of these pairs are pretty much modern, post-Renaissance inventions – at least in the West. And I also agree that the capacity to portray the kinds of mental states that make human beings the kinds of beings that we are (i.e., to efface the distinction between public and private, etc.) is, at least by and large, a similarly modern innovation, this time with an even more recent pedigree. And finally, I think your conjecture that it was only when we began to conceive of human beings as selves or individuals with private mental lives that the need for those latter sorts of literary innovations became real.
So maybe we’re not all that much in disagreement, really. It just seems to me that, given that we have the (not unproblematic!) apparatus of “interiority”, “privacy”, and so on at our disposal in the way we think of other humans, there’s no reason why we can’t put that apparatus to work in our understanding of biblical characters. Yes, their thoughts are very often kept silent and not laid open to view – but a big part of what I was arguing is that this is the very essence of the interiority that marks the life of the mind; that the Bible’s authors didn’t very often break down the constraints that ordinarily govern observational knowledge of others (though note that they do tend to tell us quite a lot about what people were doing on their own or in secret!) doesn’t mean that the events they described can be reduced to “the doings of gods”, or that their human characters aren’t appropriately understood as having “thoughts and troubles”.
I mean, if Moses really was just an allegory for natural or divine forces, then why did God bother asking for his cooperation?
— John Schwenkler · Apr 11, 02:40 PM · #
To those who think “interior life” is an invention of modernity, I would suggest reading some or all of the following: the meeting between Hector and Andromache in Book VI of the Iliad; Achilles’ guilt-stricken grieving over the death of Patroclus in Book XVIII of the same poem; the book of Psalms; the seventh chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans; and Augustine’s Confessions.
Also note that one of the first full-on allegories, the Psychomachia of Prudentius, is explicitly an allegory of the interior life. This is throughout much of the Middle Ages what allegory is usually for.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 11, 05:26 PM · #
I thought there were probably plenty of examples of the representation of interior life in pre-modern literature. I just don’t have the knowledge of that literature to know for sure.
I think all I’m talking about is an artistic strategy and when it became more common.
About Moses: he definitly has a history but does he have a unique personality? A favorite color, a hobby, a chracteristic way of responding to affection, a psychology? From what I remember, I don’t think so. From what I remember all those prohets were written kind of the same in regards to peronality. I think they filled either an allegorical or a plot-mover role. None of them exisited for their own sake.
One thing I like about that old writing style is that it gives you so few clues that the ones you do get become precious. They’ll write something like:“He was lyth and lean; wore a sky-blue tunic; could ride better than a horseman seasoned in a hundred battles; and after battle loved to play and wrestle with his dogs.” They will slip a little personal detail in there and it can feel more revealing than a hundred pages about his feelings for his mother. It’s all about technique: how the author creates an image in the readers mind.
But anyway, maybe you could say that—in general—it is current practice to describe individual characters and in the past they invoked archetypes. Of course we still invoke archtypes all the time. But then, like in Marvel comics, we dip them in a layer of “feelings” to signal that theyhavce an interior life. An external interiority.
It might be interesting to look at that chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses where he imitates the writing styles down through the ages. I don’t have a copy but I rememeber finding that chapter really interesting and amusing. Of course, who knows if his representations were accurate.
— cw · Apr 11, 08:52 PM · #
Alan’s right about interiority, but there’s still a difference. The ancients saw the body as the battleground where various impersonal forces clashed for supremacy.
With modernity, the interior battle morphed into interior dialogue. Wars for control and prayers for deliverance became dialogues and arbitrations and cavernous searches for place and identity.
Ancients attended to their lines; we study the mirror between acts.
— JA · Apr 11, 09:02 PM · #
JA, my last two books are mostly on these issues, which means that I don’t stand much of chance of being brief about these things — but if you were to read those books, especially Original Sin, you’ll see why I think you couldn’t be more wrong. The sense of being a self buffeted about by powerful external forces — none of them “impersonal” in any meaningful sense of that term — is common to Paul, Augustine, Luther, and, yes, Hamlet, and is absolutely central to the psychodynamics of Freud. The only way to support the kind of claim you’re making is by very selective quotation. One example: you want a model of the interior life in which “impersonal” forces clash? Okay, here you go:
Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet:
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness: if’t be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d;
His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.
Psychodynamically, no different than Paul being beset by “sin in his members.” This is because modernity is the child of Paul and Augustine — and, I would argue, the Psalmist (try 73, for one) — not a rival to them.
Here endeth the sermon.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 11, 11:52 PM · #
Glad to see you joining this discussion, Alan.
Do you think there are important differences between OT and NT in these respects? Wood’s analysis – which I’m beginning to think is even more off-base than I’d thought at first! – purposefully focuses just on OT narrative, I think, at leaves out both NT and the Psalms and other OT poetry, and of course Charles Taylor – who’s certainly the biggest influence on my own thinking about this stuff – fingers Augustine (the consummate Pauline) as a key innovator in this respect.
Oh, and what’s wrong with being long-winded? Isn’t that why they gave you your own blog?
— John Schwenkler · Apr 12, 01:13 AM · #
Alan, I’m trying to figure out how to respond. In one sense, I agree with everything you wrote. Clearly you’re right about interior-life commonalities. The body as the playground of external forces goes all the way back in time, and all the way forward. As you say. Dueling deities, humors, passions, drives like todestrieb, etc. — these are mainstays of literature no matter the era.
But I can’t shake the feeling that what we’re dealing with in modernity is qualitatively different, not an X versus Y but an X versus X+Y, with Y being this “new thing”.
Anywho, Happy Easter. I’m leaving to go hiking, and I’ll try to think harder about what I’m trying to say.
— JA · Apr 12, 03:14 PM · #
I read Alan citations and they definitely represent inner life. But were these exceptions? Was there a characteristic view of the self that was reflected in literature and figurative painting, during say, biblical times? This is all very interesting ot me.
— cw · Apr 12, 11:57 PM · #
The irony of Woods’critique lies in a summary dismissal of the Psalms, at
least any vestige of Davidian authorship. This apes the scholarly
consensus, but rejects the traditional Jewish understanding and the specific biblical references directly ascribing seventy-three to David himself. Psalm 18 for example appears in total in Second Samuel (ch. 22).
One can say a lot of things about the Psalms, but the emotions they express range from despair to smug confidence to confusion capture much
of the human condition. It ain’t existential angst ala Sarte or Camus, but is hardly opaque.
— BH · Apr 15, 03:26 PM · #