Divine Suspense

On Kierkegaard's 'Frygt og Bæven' and the Aesthetics of Suspense

Andreas Seland

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110562873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

What is suspense, and why do we feel it? These questions are at the heart of the first part of this study. It develops and defends the 'imminence theory of suspense' – the view that suspense arises in situations that are structurally defined by something essential being imminent.

Next, the study utilizes this theory as an interpretative key to Søren Kierkegaard's seminal work 'Frygt og Bæven' ('FB'). FB is an exploration of what it means to take the story of Abraham and Isaac as a paradigmatic example of faith. The study argues that a core aspect of how Kierkegaard conceptualizes faith through the figure of Abraham is suspense. The argument is built upon the observation that to have faith is to be a hero. To be hero means to belong to a story. Stories manifests different conceptualizations of time. Abraham's story, as FB frames it, is radically geared towards something imminent – it is characterized by an essential relation of suspense.

The study then explores how suspense not only forms part of the conceptualization of faith, but is also part of how this conceptualization is communicated. Thus, the study argues that there exists a symmetry of suspense between the rhetorical and the conceptual levels of the text.

Chapter 1:
The Imminence Theory of Suspense

But that’s not a story, Sniff yelled. No suspense at all!
Tove Jansson33

The objective of this chapter is to argue for a novel theory of suspense, called “the imminence theory of suspense”, and with it, a novel solution to the paradox of suspense. The imminence theory holds that suspense arises in situations which are wholly defined in terms of something to come, situations oriented towards a future not yet here being defined precisely in terms of it not yet being here. This theory, if correct, lets one deny that suspense requires uncertainty, and hence resolves the paradox of suspense.

Introduction

In high school, my Norwegian teacher used to explain the main plot and the main themes of the novels and plays the class were to read before we actually read them. For example, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, he said, was about women’s role in society and the home, and he went on at great length about the ramifications of Nora leaving Torvald and the children in the final scene.34 Now, even though he had, in this lecture, essentially told the class everything that happens in A Doll’s House, the reading of the play was still a riveting and suspenseful experience for me. It was with much emotion that I witnessed Nora walk out the door in the final pages. But how could it have been so given that I already knew from the start that she was going to do this? Should not my foreknowledge of the plot have hindered me from being drawn into the weave of events? For even though I had foreknowledge of how it was going to end I still observed Nora’s fight against her own past actions and society’s strictures with no small degree of trepidation and suspense. This reaction – suspense even though one has foreknowledge of what is going to happen – is the central issue in what is known as the paradox of suspense.

One may perhaps here object that “suspense” seems an overly dramatic notion to use in relation to Ibsen as it is primarily a notion associated with lesser kinds of literary endeavors – romance, crime, horror, and so forth – and hence that the feeling that suspense is tied to intense melodrama.

Against this, I am going to attempt an argument to the effect that suspense is a much more ubiquitous phenomenon, that it in fact is tied to the aesthetic nature of narratives, or, to be more precise, to the manner in which narratives can potentially become sui generis narrative aesthetic objects.

Paraphrasing Thomas Nagel, just as there is something that it is like to be a bat,35 there is something that it is like to enjoy a novel, a movie, or a play. There is something that it is like to enjoy a narrative. The experience comes with a specific kind of phenomenological quality. Or, at the very least, I am here going to assume that this is the case. Assumption: There exists a sui generis narrative aesthetic feeling, that is, a species of aesthetic enjoyment arising specifically from narratives.

Working from this assumption, the genuinely narrative aesthetic feeling ought to, logically, come as a response to properties inherent in the narrative as an aesthetic medium. Otherwise, why else should the aesthetic feeling which is subject to the assumption be sui generis narrative?

In light of the objection that suspense is out of place in relation to Ibsen, let us begin this chapter by considering the following question: What are the unique properties of the narrative as an aesthetic medium? This consideration will furnish us with an argument to the effect that suspense is a feature of the narrative aesthetic experience per se, something that justifies its use in contexts above and beyond those of pulp fiction, and thereby includes the likes of Ibsen. Moreover, it will make Sniff’s assertion, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, correct.

Before turning to this introductory discussion, though, let me clarify the structure of the chapter as whole. Its ultimate aim is to explore the issue of the paradox of suspense, and to suggest a novel solution to this paradox – what I will call “the imminence theory of suspense”. In order to do this, I proceed as follows: first, I explore the relation of suspense to what I term the “aesthetic narrative”; second, I provide a more detailed account of the paradox of suspense in terms of the existing philosophical debate; third, I widen the scope of the problem raised by the paradox of suspense to include not only token repetitions of narratives, but type repetitions as well; fourth, I give a brief overview of the main theoretical responses; fifth, I promote the need for, and argue in favor of, a novel solution to the paradox of suspense; sixth, I explore the connection between the imminence theory of suspense and time; seventh, I connect my initial characterization of suspense to the imminence theory of suspense developed later on; and, finally, I consider a possible objection to the theory developed in the previous sections, and present conclusions.

1 The importance of suspense

Traditionally, artworks are distinguished into two different categories dependent upon the manner in which they are realized: the temporal arts and the spatial arts. The temporal arts include, for example, music and narratives, while the spatial arts consist of such forms as architecture, painting, and sculpture. Importantly, the distinction does not deny that time is an issue when it comes to spatial artworks, nor, vice versa, that spatial properties are an issue in temporal ones. It says something about the relative importance of these two dimensions when it comes to the two different types of art in question. A symphony, for example, needs to develop over time in order to be what it is. It consists of a complex set of notes and chords played in a structured sequence by a multitude of instruments. A statue, on the other hand, exists as it does without there being any analogous temporal development of the material itself. The temporal dimension of spatial artworks is located solely within the spectator, but when it comes to the temporal artwork, the artwork itself structures the time that the spectator partakes in.

This is, therefore, the first property of the narrative as an aesthetic medium. Narratives are temporal, meaning that the narrative itself, the actual telling of it, whether this is done by words on a page, by a theatre company upon a stage, or actors on the silver screen, needs to develop over time in a structured sequence in order to be what it is, a fact I will express in the following manner: Narratives have temporal form.

Interestingly, it is not only the form of the narrative that is temporal. In order to define what constitutes a narrative, it is common to argue that narratives are representations of sequences of events, an event being an occurrence at a certain place during a temporal interval. In other words, a narrative describes something that happens in time. In Jonathan Culler’s words: “To make narrative an object of study, one must distinguish narratives from nonnarratives, and this invariably involves reference to the fact that narratives report sequences of events.”36

Therefore, when it comes to narratives as an aesthetic medium there are two separate temporal dimensions: one of form and one of content. As music, by which I mean instrumental music, is not representational in the same sense as a narrative, narratives are uniquely singled out by the simultaneity of these twin temporalities. Approaching narratives by focusing upon these twin temporalities is roughly equivalent to how the Russian Formalists37 analyzed narratives in terms of a story’s fabula, the story in itself imagined as something separate from its telling (the narrative’s content, the sequence of events described), and sjužet, how the story is told (the narrative’s form, the actual telling of it).

What I want to suggest here is that the sui generis properties of the narrative as an aesthetic medium is found in the interplay between a narrative’s twin temporalities. Narratives take and utilize time (form) in order to recount something that unfolds in time (content). Inspired by the Russian Formalists, Peter Brooks has done something similar to this in his Reading for the Plot. In this work Brooks defines the mentioned interplay between the twin temporalities as “plot”:

To keep our terms straight without sacrificing the advantages of the semantic range of “plot,” let us say that we can generally understand plot to be an aspect of sjužet in that it belongs to the narrative discourse, as its active shaping force, but that it makes sense (as indeed sjužet itself principally makes sense) as it is used to reflect on fabula, as our understanding of story. Plot is thus the dynamic shaping force of the narrative discourse.38

Turning from the Russian Formalists to the work of Roland Barthes, Brooks continues: “Plot – I continue to extrapolate from Barthes – is an interpretive structuring operation elicited, and necessitated, by those texts that we identify as narrative, where we know the meanings are developed over temporal succession in a suspense over final predication.”39

Brooks’ point here is that in any plotted narrative (in any narrative where the interplay between the twin temporalities is an explicit issue) the events referred to (content) are actively mediated by the event of their telling (form). In other words, the timing with which something is said, and how it is said, directly influences our appreciation of this something and the meaning it makes. Let me exemplify, and I quote from Robert Yanal’s paper “The Paradox of Suspense”:

Narratives, fictional and factual, commonly raise in their audience suspense. A narrative lays out over time (not all at once) a sequence of events; and because the events of the narrative are not completely told all at once, questions arise for the audience which will be answered only later in the narrative’s telling.40

What Yanal points to in this extract is one feature of how the telling actively mediates the told, or how form forms content. The telling holds back certain information only to disclose it at a later, more dramatically suitable time – it times when something is said. Ibsen, for example, does not tell his audience straight away what is going to happen in A Doll’s House. Instead he lets events and tensions build over time so as to make the final scene strike us with an acute emotional impact. If, for example, he were to place the final scene at the beginning of the play, it would not strike one in the same manner. Accordingly, this “acute emotional impact” is a function of how the story is told, that is, of how its meaning is developed over time in terms of the narrative’s form.

Now, the two extracts from the works of Yanal and Brooks both refer to suspense in the context of how meaning is developed over time in narratives: Yanal by accentuating how a narrative effectively holds back information only to reveal it later on; Brooks by underscoring that narratives are those texts (or stage performances, etc.) “where we know the meanings are developed over temporal succession in a suspense over final predication.”41 Common to both is the view that narratives develop gradually towards some retroactively defining moment (a final disclosure) in terms of their temporal form – suspense being viewed as an effect of this motion of gradual development.

The view that narratives develop their meaning over time can also be approached from the following angle: Whatever is said in a narrative is said in terms of an ongoing event of saying. Narration has to take the form of a temporal process of enunciation where whatever is said at a certain point in time automatically stands in relation to past statements, and if it is not the last thing said, to statements yet to be made. This means that whatever is disclosed in a narrative is never fully disclosed because it is not fully contextualized until the narrative has run its course. What a narrative really says, therefore – and in parallel, what the story is really about – cannot be properly decided before everything is said, before final predication is made.

A telling example of this is Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. In this novel, the last couple of scenes hold a revelation that recasts the whole of the narrative. Nothing up until that point has been what you as a reader has believed it to be because the narrator of the story has systematically been leaving out certain things, and once they are added everything changes. I will leave the details of this revelation for the reader him/herself to pursue.

This is not to imply that it is impossible for a narrative to state early on how it will end. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, for example, makes its ending quite clear from the beginning: “It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet.”42 But even if one knows this (and the additional details surrounding this “poo-tee-weet” which are also disclosed), the fact is still that one does not know what this really means until one has actually reached the end and placed the “poo-tee-weet” in its proper context. “Poo-tee-weet” represents birdsong which is a recurrent motif in Vonnegut’s narrative. It is associated with the inexplicable meaninglessness of utter tragedy, and hence is given a quite distinct symbolic meaning through the unfolding of the narrative which, of course, it does not have when the phrase is first mentioned; rather, it comes from how it is used over the course of the narration.43

Let me recapitulate. We began this discussion with the question: What are the sui generis properties of the narrative as an aesthetic medium...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Imminence Theory of Suspense
• Chapter 2: Narrativity, Heroism and the Knight of Faith
• Chapter 3: Bakhtin, Suspense and the Knight of Faith
• Chapter 4: Symmetry of Suspense
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Abbreviations
• Index