Double Narrative

Double Narrative September 19, 2006

Can we say that Hosea had Jesus in mind when he wrote “out of Egypt I call My Son”? Does it matter whether he did or not? If not, does this mean we can do anything we like to texts, find in them whatever we care to bring? Historian David Steinmetz (in Ellen Davis and Richard Hays, ed., The Art of Reading Scripture ) has considered this question, particularly as it relates to patristic hermeneutics, by working out an analogy with detective fiction.

Detective stories, he points out, have two narratives:


“The first is a sprawling, ramshackle narrative that does not seem to be leading any place in particular. It is filled with clues, false leads, imaginative hypotheses, and characters who frequently seem overmatched by what appear to be quite ordinary criminal minds . . . . No one knows for certain where this apparently rudderless ship is drifting, not even (for several chapters, at least) the persons charged with bringing the ship safely to harbor. The principal characters, like the readers of the story (of whom they are oblivious), are often in deep puzzlement.”

But there is also a second narrative, offered by the detective in the final chapter. By contrast with the first narrative, this one is “crisp and clear and explains in considerable detail what was really occurring while the larger narrative was unfolding.” This is not a subplot, but instead “the disclosure of the architectonic structure of the whole story,” a “compelling and persuasive disclosure of what the story was about all along.”

Once the second narrative is given, the reader cannot go back to the first narrative; the second completely overshadows it, and suddenly “conversations between characters that seemed on first reading to be of no very great significance now appear to be charged with unmistakable importance. How could I, the reader wonders, have overlooked the Irish wool cap in the closet, the old newspapers on the front steps, the half-smoked cigar in the ashtray, or the chipped vase on the side table.” Earlier, the story seemed “an almost random succession of events” but not appears as “a complex and intelligible narrative guided unerringly to its destined end by the secret hand of its author. Under the circumstances, reading backwards is not merely a preferred reading strategy; it is the only sensible course of action for a reasonable person.”

Steinmetz is an historian, and is suggesting an analogy between detective fiction and the process of historical explanation, not merely literary explanation. Historians are faced with a welter of facts, and from that they construct a second narrative that attempts to “save the appearances” by accounting for all the relevant data. One of the implications of this is that historians must necessarily write from their own perspective, in which the story presents itself as a finished product: “It would, of course, be anachronistic to ascribe to the characters in a story a knowledge of how things would turn out as the events themselves were unfolding. But it is not anachronistic for historians to write history in the light of their knowledge, not only of how it unfolded, but also of how it ended.”

Thus, for instance, Steinmetz does not believe that “Second Isaiah” (who is really just plain old Isaiah) “had an explicit knowledge of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth” when he wrote the servant songs: “Like many of the characters in a mystery novel, Isaiah had something else on his mind. But the meaning of his work cannot be limited to the narrow boundaries of his explicit intention. Viewed from the perspective of the way things turned out, his oracles were revealed to have added dimensions of significance that no one could have guessed at the time. It is not anachronistic to believe such added dimensions of meaning exist. It is only good exegesis.”


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