The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists as Biblical Interpreters. By Terry R. Wright.

Abstract

Maria Matilda Penstone's children's hymn still sung in nonconformist Sunday Schools in the 1960s – God has given us a book full of stories that was made for his people of old. It begins with the tale of a garden and ends with the city of gold. – was intended to point us to the ‘best’ and ‘most beautiful story of all’, that of Jesus. Its effect was sometimes less specifically Christocentric: a lasting appreciation of the bible as a book of stories worth reading. That the bible remains a book worth reading is the simplest and most important conclusion of this study of six novelists who have retold narratives from the Book of Genesis. Its primary purpose is to assess the influence of midrash on these novels; it also names them as contemporary secular midrash opening the bible to new audiences. Wright acknowledges the selectivity of his study: these are only six of many from Henry Fielding to David Maine who have written Genesis fictions and, although of special interest as itself a book of fictions, the Book of Genesis is only one of many biblical books to host novelistic treatment. Wright's introductory chapter, giving due credit to Harold Bloom, contextualises this study within a genre of biblical criticism following Gunkel, Von Rad and Westerman that permits the reader to interpret the text at the time of reading. Fortunately for modern-day readers of the bible, especially those whose work is to interpret it in preaching, trends in biblical criticism stand on the shoulders of their predecessors; contemporary response to a bible passage is informed not only by the most recent theory but by the history of development in biblical scholarship. Although, since Fielding's Joseph Andrews, we have always had biblical fictions, they seem to be a current publishing vogue, with American web sites cataloguing them separately as a ready guide for the large religious market in the States. Wright indicates that this follows critical interest in midrash in the 1980s which, I note, came hot on the heels of narrative theology in the 1970s. Perhaps it is no accident of timing that it also coincides with decline in organised religion. Are these novelists fearful of losing the stories entirely? As we no longer hear the stories in preaching, are these novelists their popular interpreters for the twenty-first century?