Abstract
Recent literary methods have opened new possibilities in reading and understanding the logic of narratives. The Greimassian approach offers such a possibility. Though Greimas’ approach is by now accepted as part of the canon of narratology, some of its components have not yet received due attention. This is the case with his ‘veridictory square’, a diagram that applies especially to texts where oppositions such as truth-falsehood, hero-villain and subject-anti-subject are prominent themes. This article aims to demonstrate that these kinds of narratives, such as Susanna, do not concern themselves with objective truth but persuasion about truth, that is, veridiction. Truth telling in those stories corresponds to manipulation, exercising a particular cognitive doing or causing to appear as true. In other words, such a manipulation of truth aims at causing people to believe. Using Greimas’ veridictory square built on opposing modalities of being (être) and seeming (paraître), the contrast between reality and appearance, this article provides insight into the games of truth in Susanna and thus offers a new inspiring way of reading these kinds of stories.
Highlights
This article attempts to investigate the games of truth in the book of Susanna1 using Greimas’ veridictory square
Even in the Catholic canon where it does feature, Susanna and other apocryphal books appear as minor scriptures
The researcher will strive to uncover the fundamental values that caused the text. The core of these values is generally expressed implicitly http://www.hts.org.za by a narrative, and the paradigmatic and syntagmatic use of the semiotic square allows us to discover the core of values in a narrative
Summary
This article attempts to investigate the games of truth in the book of Susanna using Greimas’ veridictory square. Susanna is an addition to Daniel that is not included in the Jewish and Protestant canons of sacred scriptures (Tate 1968:340; cf Sundberg 1966). Even in the Catholic canon where it does feature, Susanna and other apocryphal books appear as minor scriptures. According to Mills and Wilson (2002: xvi), ‘Roman Catholics call these books “Deuterocanonical” – secondarily canonical or added latter to the canon’. Susanna is one of the most interpreted and most reproduced stories of the ancient world, from late antiquity until postmodern times. The development of scholarship literature on Susanna follows the same scientific trajectory as all other LXX Apocrypha and can be classified into three main groups as follows:
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