Week 10 - How to Write a Different Story

Mr. Fox - Helen Oyeyemi

Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium - Robert Funk

Language, Hermeneutic, and Word of God: The Problem of Language in the New Testament and Contemporary Theology - Funk


   According to my schedule March should be "Christian Jesus" month, but I think I'll have to push that back a few weeks....I'm changing my trajectory a little bit. Maybe I can just switch March and April? This week I picked up a couple Funky books, next week I'll see if I can resist the Borg, then to Elaine Pagels, and for the final week in March I'm gonna dive into my dad's commentary on Luke. And maybe some novels in between? somehow?

   Mr Fox! Charming, confusing, arresting, frightening, filled with hope. Oyeyemi is about my age and this is her fifth or sixth novel; plus she's got some plays and short stories running around the shelves. I was as provoked as I was entertained by this tale of tales.
    It's a series of interconnected stories, grounded in the first-person reflections of the three main characters (and story tellers), Mr. Fox, Mary Foxe, and Daphne Fox. Structurally maybe you could compare it to Canterbury Tales? Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler?
     St. John Fox (Mr Fox) is a fiction writer, a half-wild intellectual Herzog type man, a veteran of the first World War, who for some reason feels compelled to kill, maim, or otherwise harass all his female characters. At some point, before his writing career, he imagined a clever, beautiful female muse to keep him company in the trenches of war and loneliness. This imaginary companion, Mary Foxe, who - like any fictional character, Oyeyemi seems to say - has never been completely under the thumb of her author, now has grown in power to the point where she can write her own stories, tell her own tales.
    In the opening pages Mary magically appears in St. John's study and challenges him, "You kill women. You're a serial killer. Can you grasp that?" She then baits him into a duel of stories within stories - which is the bulk of the book. It's like a fugue, two voices, singing overlapping songs, now this one in the lead, now that one. Mary is determined not to follow the classic formulas that require murdered wives, kidnapped damsels, raped sisters, sacrificial daughters to create heroism and romance. 
   Mary and St. John include each other in their stories, take up many of the same themes, and have many of the same characters...they're even described as having the same handwriting, wink wink. About mid-way through the book, however, another voice, I think the most interesting voice, enters the fugue - that of Daphne Fox, St John's wife. Is my husband having an affair? Is he going crazy? What am I doing with my life? I won't spoil the ending, but it's both happy and unresolved. A great book!


   College is a great place to build castles in the sky...it's also a great place to have them knocked down. After one such break-down-take-down I wasn't sure I wanted to stick with a Christian bicycle. Two books got me some new tires and the Holy Spirit pumped them up, Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman and Jesus as Precursor by Robert Funk. Keep that in mind as you hear me complain about Honest to Jesus.
   What a disappointment Funky Funk! A dozen or so years leading the brash and daring Jesus Seminar, decades of brilliant work in theology, philosophy, and New Testament literary criticism, and this is what he writes? When Funk actually gets around interpreting the teachings of Jesus (as identified by the J.Sem), he's full of insight, hope, and creativity, but that's only a third (or less) of this book. The other two-thirds are 1) complaining like a grumpy old man about stale churches, hollow doctrine, stuffy academics, and an ignorant populace, and 2) summarizing the findings and overstating the ability of "honest" research into the real Jesus.
   Maybe I'm exaggerating my own complaints. If this had been the first book I'd read about historical Jesus research, I bet I would have liked it a lot better. In any case, he should have (and could have) written a different story, the story he kept referring to, the story of the "glimpse," the story that takes place on the frontier of "God's domain," the story that is always leaving and never arriving. 
   He writes in his concluding chapter, "In articulating the vision of Jesus, we should take care to express our interpretations in the same register as he employed in his parables and aphorisms...Our interpretations of parables should be more parables...we are invited by his example to be equally bold and innovative." Sweet! That's the book I want to read. I think he had the skills to do it.
   Language, Hermeneutic, and Word of God confirmed my regrets. If only Funk had left the explanations of history and source criticism to his friends and focused his writing energies on parabolic interpretation...booyah, Honest to Jesus would have been awesome, at least as awesome as Language, Hermeneuic, and Word of God. This book is slow reading, quite dense, and I couldn't follow his arguments in the final two chapters because I don't read Greek, but anybody interested in literary criticism should check this out. The central section, concerning parables, is electric.



Notes
Mr. Fox

• Reynardine, Pizarsky
• "too damn cozy"
• "...I could slip out of my life on a slow wave"
• "The words didn't come easily. She put large spaces between some of them for fear they would attack one another"
• the gathered woman
• "Ordinary life just swerves around him, though, and I run off the sides like an ingredient thrown in too late."
• "I had to stay there, in public, because I didn't know how to get home"
• "I was ten going on eleven. I didn't like what was happening and I didn't know why. He wrote on her back first, kneeling beside her; then he made her turn over and wrote all across her front, pressing hard, and the letters were big and ugly, but she pranced around afterwards,  holding out her arms and saying things like, 'Am I in the poem? Or is the poem in me?' And he just sat in a deck chair as if exhausted by his work and watched her. I thought, Something very mad is going on, she doesn't like this, but she'll never say so..." 

Honest to Jesus

• parables as windows, doors, frontier, set of relationships, deliberately involves the risk of misunderstanding, invites audience participation, normal landscape with weird elements, strange twists, reversals, unresolved endings
• usu only one or two speakers, if at all, often involves an authority figure, hierarchical relationships

Language, Hermeneutic, and Word of God

• Barth: to live with the text until it disappears and one is confronted with divine word
• "whether the language of the proclamation goes together with the reality of faith like new wine and fresh skins
• "Grace remains a mystery: it unveils itself as the ground of faith, but evaporates like a mist before the acquisitive eyes of belief"
• Bultmann "the ground and object of faith are identical"
• Bultmann "God's Word rightly understood is never statement but always address"
• Heidegger - Dasein is already disposed in its thrown-ness...its disposition to the world, which is what it essentially is, involves understanding...understanding the primordial grasp of the totality of involvements which reveals the categorical whole of a possible interconnection of the ready-to-hand...primordial discourse creates language
• Jesus awakening the faith of others in situ, usu crises, "Jesus never calls for faith in general, but faith in relation to a concrete situation, which is so intensified that it serves as a paradigm for the whole of reality"
• "The hermeneuical task, according to Ebeling, is bound by two points: the history of language, and the reality that confronts us
• "The parable, like other works of art, linguistic and visual, can be defined, but only with considerable loss."
• a language event which is the kingdom
• "the parables are the preaching itself" McLuskey?
• Dodd "at its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought"
• parable is argumentative, Dodd
• parable involves "transference of judgment," Bultmann
• Barfield - simile is illustrative of meaning; metaphor is creative of meaning. in metaphor the point is discovered
• CS Lewis - magistral metaphor - invented by master to explain a point for which the pupil's thought is not yet adequate (an optional, helpful image); "pupillary" metaphor - understanding emerges with it, bound up with it, understanding could not be reaching in any other way
• Ramsey - picture model vs disclosure model
• an effective parable/metaphor is translucent - between transparent and opaque
• new meaning must come through old language, but metaphor can "break the grip of tradition on the language" and "discover new meaning"
• language undergoes "deformation" leading to "discovery"
• metaphor is open-ended temporally
• parable: "what it says is minimal; what it intends is maximal 
• "the poet directs attention to B in order to allow A to come into view, for A is not there to be looked at directly (penumbral field)
• parables generally common, secular subject matter
• literal and figurative "concomitant" meanings
• first step "yes that's how it its"
• second step "whats wrong with this picture?"
• third step "transference of judgment"
• parable is a "picture puzzle"
• parables "catch Mr Everyman" in "characteristic" actions
• caught up in the dilemma of the metaphor
• "direct discourse and soliloquy are characteristic of the parable and popular narrative"
• parables "identify [and interpret] their own audiences"
• parable as gesture
• the parable doesn't contain a message, it is a message
• Jungel "the reign of God is as near you as the Samaritan to the one threatened by death."
• "the reign of God is as near as the parable"
• "the parable stands on the frontier of language and mirrors without conceptualizing the kingdom of God
• Ogden on Heidegger, "The world-structure within which the various objects in the world find their places is ontologically prior to the objects themselves"
• Bultmann - theology and anthropology are reciprocal, God-for-human and human-before-God, also christology and soteriology
• epistle - bridging the gap between oral and written speech
• 1 Cor - sophia over against sophia, wisdom of the Cross, hidden in plain view