Comments on: Žižek, Narrative, and Transformation

By: Helene Russell

Helene Russell — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 03:36:31 +0000

Thank you for your video. I think your take is interesting and helpful. I appreciate your explanation and appeal to pastors and others that take texts as important dialogue partners for discerning significant values and meaning. I agree that narratives are particularly powerful ways of communicating values and trying on meanings. I think that listening to the stories from scripture or other paradigmatic texts as they are told as a story teller tells them can be a helpful approach to engaging the narrative approach. One idea I heard from a biblical scholar today that would be interesting to throw into the mix is this. The west tends to take our interpretative framework for stories from the Greeks and not so much the Hebraic sensibilities. The difference is that the Greeks believed that stories should have a moral, a hero that the listeners should identify with and follow as an example. For example, Aesop's Fables. A good moral examplar. Hebraic stories, on the other hand are stories about ancestors. They would be more like stories at family reunions, "Remember Uncle Jake, He was sure full of piss and vinegar–he'd wrestle God himself." In our western world view, we try to impose– or we do impose this Greek hermeneutic to the Hebrew Scriptures and it ends up making our view of the Bible and its values, claims and uses sometimes mixed up.
Any way, thanks for spurning ideas!
Helene

By: Katie Jo

Katie Jo — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:14:21 +0000

The problem is that we have two categories: truth and lie. And occasionally we also have the category of allegory, but even this must be stuffed into one box or the other when we (literary-minded folks) consider history. We have these categories because the medium we use is written (it can be checked, copy-written, verified, dissected and doesn’t have to be committed to memory) But in oral culture, the categories were different because the medium was different. The medium used to convey almost all messages was the oral story.
When we write a story, we consider the events of the story to be facts. The meaning of the facts comes in commentary or reflections written along with it. We have this luxury because we don’t have to remember both the story and the commentary.
In oral culture, the events of the story served a few different purposes. First, they could communicate what we would call a fact (something that actually happened and nothing more). Second, they were used to communicate the meaning the storyteller was trying to get across (they fulfilled what we use commentary for, but within the event itself- thus sometimes they coincided withe reality, and sometimes didn’t because they were used to communicate something considered more important than simple fact- they included the interpretation metaphorically). So, the events of a story in oral culture are more purposefully meaning-laden because those events are responsible for transmitting both the historical facts and the intended interpretation of those facts.
I think of it as the oral-cultural understanding of Marshall McLuan’s “the medium is the message.” If we were to ask the author of Matthew, for example, “Did Jesus really escape from Herod to Egypt when he was a baby? Or did you just lie about it?” His response might be, “It’s really important that you tell the story that way or future generations won’t know that Jesus is the new Moses.” -a response that frustrates the hard-fact-minded, but for the orally-minded, Jesus escape to Egypt is even more true than whatever actually happened in his childhood because the “event” contains a truth about Jesus (which is deemed to be more important than bare facts about Jesus).
All this stuff can be found in a lot of places. A good intro is Tex Sample’s “Ministry in an Oral Culture.” I also learned much from Casey Davis, who’s work is pretty localized to Rochester, NY and is unfortunately hard to get ahold of anywhere else.
So long and thanks for the fish,
Katie Jo

By: Katie Jo

Katie Jo — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:47:44 +0000

Hey folks,
I wonder if some of our questions arise from a literate view of history/facts while the writers/storytellers of the Scripture functioned in a largely oral society.

By: The Image of Fish » Postmodernity, Hermeneutics, and the Second Naïveté

The Image of Fish » Postmodernity, Hermeneutics, and the Second Naïveté — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:37:45 +0000

[...] Paul Ricoeur and the hermeneutic of humility prompted me to add on to some thoughts I started in my comments of the transforming possibility of text. I have been engaged by the work of Paul Ricoeur since I [...]

By: Greg

Greg — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:20:31 +0000

Callid,
You mention J.R.R. Tolkien briefly in this video (The Christian narrative “buried in the text” of LOTR, whereas CS Lewis wrote very much “on the surface”- “parablesque” I believe was the term you used, which I’m sure was a proper word choice, but regardless….) I’m wondering how far you have delved into his notion of subcreation, and its theological implications with regard to narrative.

In addition, the thoughts presented reminded me on Farley Mowat’s famous utterance when under critical fire for the “narrative” alterations made to his book Never Cry Wolf- “To hell with the facts, I want the truth!”

Thanks for posting

Pax,
Greg

By: Callid

Callid — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:50:37 +0000

@Matt Steal away compadre. Steal away.

Also, if you like the theopoetics thing, check out my (more focused) site http://theopoetics.net.

By: Matthew Gallion

Matthew Gallion — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:33:02 +0000

@Callid: I don’t think your suggestions are off-base at all. At least for me, narrative is incredibly transformative. Also, I love this:

I am much more interested in the capacity of the reader to read any text with the understanding it is contingent, composed of many small suppositions, and a place to encounter the other.

Could be another line I borrow in the future.

By: Callid

Callid — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:06:23 +0000

@Ian Booyah brother, this question hits it for me: “Does doubting the truth of something necessarily mean you’re knowingly believing a lie?” Heck no! I think this is the kind of thing I wished had been avoided in that sermon I mentioned. I think Rumi was there with lines like, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing is a field. I’ll meet you there.” That is not to deny that there is wrongdoing or rightdoing, but to invite people into the consideration that beyond those categories there is another (set of categories).

@ Matt I agree whole-heartedly that the distinction between narrative/discourse is a false, mild, dichotomy. I am much more interested in the capacity of the reader to read any text with the understanding it is contingent, composed of many small suppositions, and a place to encounter the other. I think that this can occur with lots of different types of texts, and I only mean to suggest (perhaps incorrectly) that it is easier for folks to encounter that transformation in narrative, not that is an essential quality of narrative.

@ Jesse And, for that matter, what parts of my story are like yours?