![\"Bible](\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/12\/Bible-cartoon-for-blog.jpg\")
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Both Frye and Bloom have written some interesting and even wise things about specific Biblical texts, and I hope my course does them justice, but both of them have a \u201csystem\u201d for reading literature into which Biblical texts are fitted, sometimes in Procrustes\u2019 manner, by main force, and both of them have the habit, common with us professors, of pushing their commentary beyond their specific knowledge base of history and language.<\/p>\n
The Book of J<\/em> is an embarrassment even to those who find Bloom\u2019s other books admirable because he grounds his commentary on a grotesque translation by David Rosenberg rather than on a more reliable English version (the RSV would have been far better) or on the Hebrew original, which he evidently cannot read since he makes such elementary mistakes. His theory of the authorship of the J narratives says more about Bloom himself and his quarrel with the feminists than about the narratives. But I find his analysis of Yahweh as an uncanny character in some of the J stories genuinely interesting.<\/p>\n Whenever Frye alludes to the Hebrew original he is accurate more often than not (his batting average is way ahead of Harold Bloom\u2019s); his mistranslation of hevel<\/em> as \u201cfog,\u201d for which Robert Alter skewered him is not a typical mistake.<\/p>\n And there is nothing wrong with his cyclical vision of Biblical history except that any narrative that includes a number of periods of independence and prosperity alternating with periods of oppression and want can be made into a set of cycles. (Frye wasn\u2019t the only one to employ \u201ccircular\u201d reasoning like this: a different version of Frye\u2019s cycles on p. 171 of The Great Code<\/em> appears in \u201cThe Sacred Center,\u201d an early article by the great Biblical scholar Michael Fishbane. And sports writers do it all the time, of course, with their cycles of \u201cwinning streaks\u201d and \u201closing streaks.\u201d)<\/p>\n And I guess I can\u2019t quarrel with the way everything in the Bible seems to be squeezed into the categories of Anatomy of Criticism<\/em>, since many of those categories sprang in the first place from Frye\u2019s readings of the Bible.<\/p>\n I expect my main problem with Frye is the way he free-associates (or should I say frye-associates) in ways that I simply cannot follow (e.g., Joseph\u2019s \u201ccoat of many colors\u201d suggests to Frye that Joseph is a fertility god). Maybe I\u2019m dim but I don\u2019t see the connection, and whether it would disappear if we were to translate ketonet pasim<\/em> correctly.<\/p>\n In Myth II of The Great Code<\/em>, Frye gives us a moving analysis of the book of Job, much of the time, but we get sentences like \u201cThe reintegration of the human community is followed by the transfiguration of nature, in its humanized pastoral form. One of Job\u2019s beautiful new daughters has a name meaning a box of eye shadow.\u201d<\/p>\n This is not just distracting. The narratives, which are often intricately shaped at the level of incident and the level of language, simply disappear into this network of frye-associations. And Biblical characters, some of whom, like Jacob and David, we can follow from youth through maturity to old age and death, disappear into their other avatars.<\/p>\n Similarly, Frye knows that \u201cha-satan\u201d in OT narratives like Numbers 22 and Job 1-2 is a servant of the LORD and not His demonic adversary as in Mark 1:13 and elsewhere in the NT, but Frye can\u2019t help conflating them, even though he knows better, and even though it totally distorts the Hebrew narratives.<\/p>\n Anyway, I do want to back-pedal a little from my \u201cwhipping boys\u201d quip in the syllabus. Whenever I teach theory, and not just in my Biblical Narratology course, everyone is a hero and everyone is a whipping boy, as we try to see both the powers and the limitations of the method of each critic my students and I read together. It isn\u2019t just Bloom and Frye, we also see Robert Alter and Meir Sternberg and Mieke Bal and Jan Fokkelman in the same critical light, as having questions they can answer and questions they can\u2019t even ask. And I wouldn\u2019t include Bloom and Frye in my syllabus if I didn\u2019t think they had interesting methods and interesting things to say using them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Both Frye and Bloom have written some interesting and even wise things about specific Biblical texts, and I hope my course does them justice, but both of them have a \u201csystem\u201d for reading literature into which Biblical texts are fitted, sometimes in Procrustes\u2019 manner, by main force, and both of them have the habit, common […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[11,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible","category-frye-contemporary-criticism"],"yoast_head":"\n