The Fantastic in Religious Narrative from Exodus to Elisha

Laura Feldt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317543831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Fantastic in Religious Narrative from Exodus to Elisha argues that perspectives drawn from literary-critical theories of the fantastic and fantasy are apt to explore Hebrew Bible religious narratives. The book focuses on the narratives' marvels, monsters, and magic, rather than whether or not the stories depict historical events. The Exodus narrative (Ex 1-18) and a selection of additional Hebrew Bible narratives (Num 11-14, Judg 6-8, 1 Kings 17-19, 2 Kings 4-7) are analysed from a fantasy-theoretical perspective. The 'fantasy perspective' helps to make sense of elements of these narratives that - although prominently featured in the stories - have previously often been explained by being explained away. These case studies can illuminate Hebrew Bible religion and offer wider perspectives on religious narrative generally. In light of the fantasy-theoretical approach, these Hebrew Bible stories - with the Exodus narrative at the centre - read not as foundational stories, affirming triumphantly and unambiguously the bond between the deity, his people, and their territory, but rather as texts that harbour and even actively encourage ambiguity and uncertainty, not necessarily prompting belief, orientation, and a sense of meaningfulness, but also open-ended reflection and doubt. The case studies suggest that other religious narratives, both in and beyond the Judaic tradition, may also be amenable to interpretation in these terms, thus questioning a dominant trend in myth studies. The results of the analyses lead to a discussion of the role of ambiguity, uncertainty, and transformation in religious narrative in broader perspective, and to a questioning of the emphasis in the study of religion on the capacity of religious narrative for founding and maintaining institutions, orienting identity, and defending order over disorder. The book suggests the wider importance of incorporating destabilisation, disorientation, and ambiguity more strongly into theories of what religious narrative is and does.

1 Fields of Fantasy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315728742-2

In this chapter, I engage previous work in the field of studies of fantasy and religion (part 1), and in the exegetical tradition (part 2). The primary work of the chapter is to document that my agenda is previously untried and to provide backing for my theses. The first section of the chapter backs the thesis that fantasy theory may contribute fruitfully to the study of religious narrative, while the second backs the thesis that the fantastic elements of the Exodus narrative are sites of ambiguity and uncertainty to be interpreted in their literary contexts.

Since the study of religion has not paid much attention to the field of fantasy and religion, the first section maps this field, discerning the two main trends of religion-in-fantasy and fantasy-in-religion. I discuss previous work that suggests the relevance of bringing ‘religion’ and ‘fantasy’ to interact, and I position the present study in the field, noting its contribution. The second part of the chapter analyses the Exodus scholarship that has engaged with the narrative’s fantastic elements, suggesting four main trends in previous work. I show how the fantastic elements are problematic issues in exegesis, and that the standard approaches to them do not fully address their literary and cultural work. Despite the centrality of fantastic elements in the Exodus narrative, a literary analysis of the fantastic elements and of their functions in their literary contexts is lacking.

Fantasy and Religion—Previous Work

The field is characterised by two main trends: (1) Religion in fantasy, which consists primarily of case studies of the role of religion or religious aspects, features, loans, fragments in fantasy narratives, but also of a small number of fantasy theories that grapple with the role of religion in fantasy. (2) Fantasy in religion, which offers studies of the role of fantasy and the fantastic in religion.¹

Religion in Fantasy—Previous Work

The first group, religion in fantasy, encompasses work that takes up questions related to fantasy in traditional/religious societies, literary critics treating fantasy literature, especially that of The Inklings,² with a view to its religious aspects or its authors’ relation to religion, and work by scholars belonging to a sub-group within the field of ‘popular culture and religion’ (see, e.g., Forbes and Mahan 2000, Possamai 2007). Much of this work discusses the treatment of different religions in works of popular culture, including fantasy like Buffy the Vampire Slayer,³ the Harry Potter series,⁴ or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials⁵et al. in different media. In general, although such studies may produce valuable insights, their primary interest is not fantasy and religion, or religion/religious narrative; their theoretical object is fantasy. For these reasons I leave most of them aside here.⁶ Yet, I select two scholars in this group, Colin Manlove and Edward Ingebretsen⁷ for treatment, because their work on religion-in-fantasy has implications for the field of fantasy and religion in general and for a literary study of fantasy-in-religion as well.

Religion and the Fantastic in Traditional Societies

Within fantasy theory (Kathryn Hume, Marianne Wünsch⁸), as well as within the study of religion (Marco Frenschkowski), we find work that treats the fantastic in traditional societies and in that connection theorizes ‘religion-in-fantasy’.

In her 1984 book, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature, Kathryn Hume attacks the exclusivity of genre-based definitions of the fantastic and fantasy, and instead presents a broad definition that also includes religious literature. She argues that fantasy is one of two basic impulses which inform all fiction. The first impulse is that of mimesis, which she sees as the ‘desire to imitate, to describe, events, people, situations, and objects with such verisimilitude that others can share your experience’ (Hume 1984: 20). The other impulse, fantasy, is ‘the desire to change givens and alter reality’, a ‘departure from consensus reality’ (Hume 1984: 20, 21). Fantasy is the deliberate departure from the limits of what is accepted as real and normal, from deliberate distortion and departure to omission and erasure (Hume 1984: xii). Consensus reality is defined as the reality we depend upon for everyday action, for example that humans need food, air and liquid to survive, that bodies fall, that stones are solid, that humans die and so forth (Hume 1984: xi). For her, fantasy also comprises fantasy stories, whose marvel is considered ‘real’, for the fantasy that is considered real is not considered real in the same sense that a chair is real (Hume 1984: 21).⁹ This clearly opens the field of fantasy to include religious fantasy.¹⁰

Hume’s work is valuable for its observations of religion and fantasy, for example, of how fantasy form and religious content in some instances are almost ‘bound to’ coincide (Hume 1984: 121), by discussing literature’s many means of imposing meaning on the reader (Hume 1984: 168–197), and by being generally appreciative of the idea of ‘religious fantasy’. Yet, her views of what religion and religious literature do are not entirely satisfactory. For example, when she describes religious literature, she states that the framework of experience is imposed on the audience as ‘an absolute’ and that ‘no other possibility is acknowledged’ (Hume 1984: 122). Such a view of the transmission of worldview from text to mind seems to me too simplistic, and one could also pose the question of how this would look from within a polytheistic tradition like the Mesopotamian, which clearly acknowledged the presence and legitimacy of other deities and other founding narratives for other peoples in other cities and areas, as is also the case for some segments of the Hebrew Bible. Of course religious narratives play important roles in religions, yet they are not necessarily received in ways that can be called passive.¹¹ By contrast, the idea that belief is not as important as novelty and the elicitation of powerful sensations when accounting for the power of religious narrative (Hume 1984: 164–165, 167) is suggestive for a study of religious narrative. I also have reservations with respect to the classification of literature based on its ‘response to reality’¹² and with respect to the idea that only some types of literature would offer escape and comfort and only some other types subversion and so forth,¹³ and the, to my mind, too little space for the individual recipient that the theory allows for.¹⁴

Marianne Wünsch’s 1991 book Die Fantastische Literatur der Frühen Moderne (1890–1930): Definition, Denkgeschichtlicher Kontext, Strukturen) points clearly to the key problem of any definition of the fantastic—the question of the definition of the concepts of ‘the inexplicable’, ‘the unnatural’ and ‘the supernatural’. Her detailed engagement with this question is relevant for the question of the fantastic in relation to religion and traditional societies. She argues that if we categorize forms of literature by means of their relationship to ‘reality’, we must philosophically investigate what is meant by reality. In her social-constructionist view, concepts of reality are historically quite variable. There is no singular universal model of reality, only epochal reality models. In order to clarify this concept, Wünsch introduces the concept of ‘cultural knowledge’ and defines it as the ‘total amount of true statements of an epoch’ (Wünsch 1991: 16–18). This sociologically and historically variable concept of reality is used to distinguish between reality-compatible literature (literature that does not violate the reality concept of the epoch) and non-reality-compatible literature (literature that does violate the reality concept of the epoch). Furthermore she introduces a text-internal entity that represents the knowledge elements of the reality concept that are violated in the text and this entity reacts with disbelief, wonder and so forth when faced with the fantastic events in fantastic literature (Wünsch 1991: 37). Fantastic literature always represents a vehicle for wonder, shock and surprise, according to Wünsch. The need for explanation is represented in the text itself, she holds. This, however, would exclude not only Kafka but also Tolkien and much new fantasy from the domain. Wünsch openly excludes religious narrative, because she holds that if believed a work is not fantastic. Yet, contrary to Wünsch’s view that if believed a work is not fantastic, if the presence of doubt, hesitation and wonder in a text makes it fantastic, then surely many religious narratives would have to be included.

Wünsch offers a detailed engagement with the problem of locating the fantastic in other cultural contexts. Her definition of the fantastic in relation to the full scale of the ‘extra-literary reality’ is, to my mind, problematic, because it is difficult to pinpoint what people in a given epoch find real and how many of them find it real simultaneously, especially so with respect to the past. Also today, the concept of the total sum of true statements of an epoch presents difficulties. Still, Wünsch is correct in pointing out that no theory of the fantastic and fantasy can do without some approach to the problem—at least if we want to address the fantastic in other cultures or in the past.

Turning now to the study of religion, Marco Frenschkowski, evangelical theologian and historian of religion, offers what he terms a Religionswissenschaftliche take on fantasy narrative and a set of general comments on the field of fantasy and religion (Frenschkowski 1999, 2005, 2006). In his view, the fantastic is a fundamentally modern phenomenon (Frenschkowski 2006: 339–340; 2005). Frenschkowski compares religion—not religious narrative—with fantasy literature and provides an overall historical explanation of the replacement of the religious literature of a religious worldview with the fantasy literature of a secular worldview (Frenschkowski 2005: 1999). According to Frenschkowski, the fantastic as a narrative form can only arise where a religious worldview has collapsed. Imaginative narratives from earlier epochs are not fantasy if they form unbroken parts of the contemporary worldview (Frenschkowski 1999: 47; 2006: 339–341).¹⁵ In other words, if the supernatural is believed and claimed to be real then it cannot be fantastic (Frenschkowski 2006: 351). Yet, he acknowledges some of the problems with such a view, namely that such narratives are clearly intuitively fantastic, and second that the secularization hypothesis has turned out to be problematic—that for the Western societies, we cannot argue a simple succession from a religious worldview before the Enlightenment to a secular one in post-Enlightenment times.¹⁶ Therefore, he concedes that fantasy is not post-religious in a cultural-historical sense, but only structurally, and acknowledges the simultaneous coexistence of fantasy and religion. In premodern cultures, too, people would believe different things in different contexts, and a narrator may insist that his or her narrative was true in one context, and in another insist that it is not; humans simply do not believe the same things at all times and in all contexts, nor with the same intensity, he says (Frenschkowski 2005). Frenschkowski also acknowledges that because myths in general are historical, artfully made products, there is thus no fundamental diff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Font Chapter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: More Things—Marvels, Monsters, Miracles
• 1 Fields of Fantasy
• 2 Fantasy and Religious Narrative: Theory and Strategy
• 3 Marvels, Magic and Mystery: Reading the Fantastic in the Exodus Narrative
• 4 Between Wonder and Doubt: Fantastic Strategies, Their Effects and Status in the Exodus Narrative
• 5 Exodus as Mnemo-Fantasy: The Functions of the Fantastic in the Exodus Narrative
• 6 From Ethnogenesis to Everyday Life: Contextualizing the Fantastic in Hebrew Bible Narrative
• 7 Es spukt…—The Fantastic in Religious Narrative
• Bibliography
• Index of Biblical References
• Index of Authors