The Dark Interval

TOWARDS A THEOLOGY OF STORY

John Dominic Crossan

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1
A Theology of Limit

Game and Limit

Story and Limit
Limit and Transcendence

Chapter 2
The Ways of Story

Myth as Reconciliation
Parable as Contradiction
Between Myth and Parable

Chapter 3
The Tradition of Parable

Structure and Development

The Hebrew Bible
Some Modern Cases
The Art of the Parable

Chapter 4
Jesus as Parabler

Parable and Deed

Parable and Humor
Parable and Word
Parable and Kingdom

Epilogue
The Parabler becomes Parable
Bibliography
“I am the pause between two notes that fall
into a real accordance scarce at all,
for Death’s note tends to dominate . . .

Both, though, are reconciled in the dark interval,

tremblingly.
And the song remains immaculate.”

Rilke, The Book of Hours, I.

PREFACE

This book is a map of the highways of story. It opens with a philosophical

theology of story which studies the relationship of story to world. This is the
crucial question: is story telling us about a world out there objectively
present before and apart from any story concerning it, or, does story create
world so that we live as human beings in, and only in, layers upon layers of
interwoven story?

Story is taken in the second sense, as that which creates world, so that it
becomes very important to differentiate the various ways or types or modes
of story. It becomes especially important to see how story itself admits its
own creativity, admits that it is creating and not just describing world. In its
full range story must reveal its own relativity but also its own inevitability.
Five fundamental modes of story are suggested, based on the relationship
between story and world. I use italics to indicate that these are technical
terms in the book. Story establishes world in myth, defends such established
world in apologue, discusses and describes world in action, attacks worlds in
satire, and subverts world in parable.

Of these five ways of story, it is parable which receives most emphasis in

this book. The tradition of parable is described by seeing its development at
a very early stage in the books of Ruth and Jonah from the Hebrew Bible and
at a contemporary stage in the short stories of Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis
Borges.

With the existence and tradition of parable thus established, the stories of
Jesus are seen as parables in the strict and technical sense of the word. The
evangelists have accustomed us to reading Jesus’ stories as apologues, that
is, an allegorizing how God acts towards us or as exemplifying how we
should act before God and towards one another. Such a change in
interpretation and understanding is not inexplicable. Jesus spoke of God in
parables but the primitive communities spoke of Jesus, the Crucified One, as
the Parable of God.

You will notice quite a few lines and arrows and diagrams in this book. This
is necessary in using structuralist analysis and this book is an indirect
introduction to this new methodology. Structuralism is something of an
intellectual rage at the moment, as was existentialism at an earlier stage of
this century. What, then, is a structuralist? At the most ideological, a
structuralist is one who believes that reality is structure and especially
linguistic structure, that reality is the structure of language. Like the
existentialists, they are often called structuralists by their peers and will then
proceed to argue that they are no such thing. But, unlike the existentialists,
they prefer structure to nausea, and that may well be an improvement.
You will also notice that a fair amount of modern poetry is quoted
throughout the book. This is because it was primarily from these poets, and
from their practice, not just their theory, that I learned and came to accept
that reality is language and that we live in language like fish in the sea.
Besides, it is not very wise to talk a lot about language unless you spend
some time with the poets and find out what Emily Dickinson could do, for
example, with a hundred everyday words and a handful of every day dashes.

Another feature of the book is the number of authors whose writings are
quoted within the text so that you can know and hear the people who have
been most influential in helping me form the argument of this book. They are
introductions and not just quotations. If the citations interest you enough to
require further reading, you will find the appropriate works cited under the
author’s name in the alphabetical Bibliography for each chapter at the back
of the book.

Also, I wish I could assure you that this will be an easy book and that it will
gently massage your ego without placing any great strain on your mind. It is
not such. It is difficult because the content is relatively new and therefore
requires a maximum of concentration. I hope I have not made it any more
difficult than it has to be.
CHAPTER ONE

A Theology of Limit
I shall begin with a few comments explaining the word “limit” in order to
remove its negative connotation. In talking about a theology of limit I am not
saying that little seagulls should not learn to dive like falcons, if such be their
pleasure. Neither am I talking of any form of limit which human malice
invokes in order to subjugate or discriminate against another human being.
And I am most emphatically not referring to any artificial limit set by
arrogant human authority, be that arrogance racial or sexist, civil or
ecclesiastical. And, finally, I am not interested in the limits of knowledge in
the sense of what we do not know at present but which we will understand
some time in the future.

What, then, do I intend by the invocation of limit? Two experiences above

all. I am thinking first of our inevitable mortality, of that which was so
hauntingly evoked in Rilke’s magnificent “Ninth Elegy” from Duino:

But because being here is much, and because

all this
that’s here, so fleeting, seems to require us
and strangely
concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all.
Just once,
Everything, only for once. Once and no more.
And we, too,
Once. And never Again. But this
having been once, though only once,
having been once on earth—can it ever be cancelled?

I quote precisely these lines because they face the inevitability of limitation,
of life towards death, in the reiterated use of “once,” yet they do not make it
morbid or depressing. So, then, and first of all, I am speaking of the limit
which is our mortality and of our inability to separate those twin features—
life and death—in any fully human existence. Secondly, however, I am
thinking of another limit which may well be much more profound than the
limitation of death. Indeed, death may be only a sign and a reminder of this
more fundamental limit. This is the limit of language, that is, the limit which
is language itself. Our intentions, our theories, our visions are always
confined within both language and story. A theology of limit seeks above all
to explore this limitation, which is posed by the inevitability of life within
story, of existence in this story or that but always in some story. Such a
theology might well take as its motto the aphorism of the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein that, “Man has the urge to thrust against the limits of
language . . . but the tendency, the thrust, points to something.”

GAME AND LIMIT

Although this chapter will be primarily concerned with story, I intend to

begin with game. The major reason is that we are accustomed and easily
reconciled to limitation within game; we know how to distinguish the internal
limit which is the game itself, with its established rules, from the external
limit., which is simply our own ability or inability, our skill or our
incompetence. It is with the internal rather than the external limitation that
we are concerned here.

A man sat in a railroad station late at night. His train was long overdue. He
finished his coffee and tried to decide where to place the empty Styrofoam
cup on the floor. Not at his feet, surely, and not across the room, certainly.
Finally he put it a few feet away, went back to his seat and began to toss the
dime. Three hours later his train arrived. He had thrown the coin over a
hundred times. He had landed it in the cup exactly once.

One feature of this whole process is very obvious. You notice it whenever
you play a game. You tolerate a higher, even a total, failure rate more
readily than you will tolerate a total or even high success rate. You yourself
set up the rules and you therefore have set them up as you pleased. You
fixed the limitations of distance against which you would test your aim. You
would soon move the cup if you hit into it every time. But you might leave
the cup in the same place and miss it a hundred times and still not give up
the game.

A second instance. Imagine a room totally enclosed. It has no windows, and

its door is so finely molded into the wall as to be almost invisible. Only some
painted lines break the flat and absolute monotony of four walls, floor, and
ceiling. Clear, precise, and perfect limits. If you are inside, must you feel
enclosed and restricted? If it is a prison cell, the answer is presumably
affirmative. Yet I spend a few hours of every week in a room like that and
find its enclosed limitations exciting, exhilarating, and magnificently
challenging. It is, of course, not a prison cell but a squash court. To play in
and against such limits is not frustrating but refreshing.

Consider, then, a somewhat arbitrary distinction between game and sport.

Let us use the word “sport” for competition in which individuals or teams
oppose one another and in which there is always, even in extra time, a
winner and a loser. And let us keep the term “game” for that process in
which one individual or team compete against the limitations of possibility
imposed by the rules themselves. For example, take golf, since it can easily
be both game and sport in the above senses. As sport, it has winners and
losers. But as game, it requires and individual to put a small white ball in a
rather small hole in the ground in as few strokes as possible. That is
supposed to be the theory, and when one makes a hole-in-one-stroke it is
considered a very special event. What would happen is somebody made a
hole-in-one every time, with unerring inevitability? We would not soon hear
charges that it was no longer a game and that golf was being ruined? An
individual, we might imagine could still make a professional living on this
accomplishment, but the ability would soon partake more of the circus than
of game. He would be considered more of a freak than an athlete. Why is it,
in other words, that game prohibits absolute success; that it allows and
admires only partial and disciplined success, always mixed with failure.
Paradoxically, perfect success in a game would be total failure, for then it
would no longer b e a game. To win absolutely would be to lose absolutely.

What does this strange trait of human nature tell us about ourselves? Why
are we such creatures as make up games, inventing artificial rules and limits
for ourselves and then straining against them to see how close we can come
to beating those limits? But we do this in the certain knowledge that to beat
the limits every time would be to destroy the game and so, in the very
moment of victory, to achieve defeat? Why game?

I would suggest in answer that game is a very serious practice session for
life and death, or, more precisely for life-towards-death. It is a cautious
experience of the necessity of limit and the inevitability of death. It is an
experiment in disciplined failure. It is the joy of finitude and the laughter of
limitation. We seek to avoid the deep challenge of game by talking only of
sport and by talking mostly of winners. For in the final analysis we can only
win against each other, we cannot win against the game. Only the game
wins. Winners still lose to it. But notice one feature. Game teaches us to
enjoy the limitation posed by the game itself. To destroy that limitation is to
destroy the game. Imagine baseball with as many balls as the pitcher
wanted and as many strikes as the batter chose.

This basic human experience of game opens the way for reflection on our
necessary fascination with brinks and borders, with edges and limits.

STORY AND LIMIT

What about claims which deny the limitation of story and which hold,
implicitly or explicitly, that we are capable of getting outside story to an
objective reality? Three such claims have been extremely important in the
formulation of Western consciousness, and I must confess immediately that I
can no longer believe in any of them, let alone in the combination of all
three.
The first great master-claim is one which makes a distinction between art
(or faith, or imagination) and science (or fact, or reason) and then postulates
for each a different language and a different destiny. Having established this
complete disjunction, the claim then situates one term in hierarchical
supremacy over the other. In our time, it is clear that for most people the
ascendancy is that of science over art.

The second master-claim is that of evolutionary progress—the claim that, if

not every day and in every way, then at least some days and in some ways
we are getting better and better. This is not taken merely as a story, a
possible and most interesting way of seeing it, but as objective and realistic
fact, open and obvious to the unprejudiced viewer.

The third master-claim is the postulate that there is an external reality out
there extrinsic to our vision, our imagination, and our intellect and that we
are gaining objective knowledge and disciplined control over this
extramental reality.

All three claims can and do coalesce quite easily if, leaving aside art as
inferior and ornamental, science is taken as pointing the way to progress as
it increasingly comes to understand and control external reality. I admit that
I can no longer believe in any of this. For now I accept a rather simple
meaning in declaring these stories no longer true for me. The process
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it clearly. “In the real world, it is
more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The
importance of truth is, that it adds to interest.” The same point is made by
the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in his short story “Death and the
Compass.” Two detectives discuss a recent murder. “ ‘Possible but not
interesting,’ Lönnrot answered. ‘You’ll reply that reality hasn’t the least
obligation to be interesting. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid that
obligation but that hypotheses may not.’ ” So for now at least when I say
that these stories are not true, I mean no more than that they are no longer
interesting. I am sure that if I were pushed to explain and defend the term
“interesting” I would say that the most interesting story for me is that which
opens up the possibility of transcendental experience for here and now. Let
us have some witnesses, then, against these three claims that deny their
own being as story and maintain that they are telling us how it really is and
not how I-you-we-they have agreed to imagine it. In the process of
presenting these witnesses I hope to make clear more precisely what I mean
by the limits of story and by story as limit.

Art and Science

In this section I am bringing together two somewhat unlikely partners, the

philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the novelist C. P. Snow. I am interested
in what happens when one opens up a metaphysical distinction between art
and science, between the language of poetry and the language of physics.
Even if the distinction is made in order to exalt art over science, as with
Wittgenstein, it can just as easily be used to elevate science over art, as with
Snow. In order to avoid this latter hierarchy, one may have to qualify very
carefully the exact dimensions of the distinction. We know all to well in the
contemporary world that precisely how one distinguishes, say, female from
male or black person from white person mat establish already the hierarchy
one wishes to claim for one over the other.

There was once a man who owned some property on a high cliff which
overlooked the sea. He spent many years of careful construction on a road
from his house to the very edge of the cliff. When the road was finished, he
spent hours each day standing on the extreme edge where he could feel the
thrill of the sea. The people who lived round about were practical and
sensible folk, and they said that he was a very good road-builder and that he
certainly liked to walk a lot.

At the very beginning and again at the end of his Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus the (not so) British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein placed the
cryptic aphorism, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
This saying was clearly of great significance for him, as both its repetition
and its framing position would indicate. And its gnomic nature was such that
one could hardly blame commentators if they misconstrued its thrust. They
took it completely for granted that he was saying we should not talk of such
things as art or ethics or theology because these things simply do not exist;
they refer to no objectively verifiable referential object. The commentators
should have remembered, however, one very interesting episode prior to
Wittgenstein’s departure from Vienna to England. When he was finally
persuaded to speak to the Vienna Circle of philosophers, he chose to read
them poetry rather than lecture them on philosophy. In any case, here is the
difference between Wittgenstein and the positivists, according to Paul
Engelmann: “A whole generation of disciples was able to take Wittgenstein
as a positivist, because he has something of enormous importance in
common with the positivists: he draws the line between what we can speak
about and what we must be silent about just as they do. The difference is
only that they have nothing to be silent about. Positivism holds—and this is
its essence—that what we can speak about is all that matters in life.
Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in
human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about. When he
nevertheless takes immense pains to delimit the unimportant [i.e., the scope
and limits of ordinary language], it is not the coastline of that island which he
is bent on surveying with such meticulous accuracy, but the boundary of the
ocean.”
The thesis that Wittgenstein was interested in the boundary of the dry land
(science) because of the excitement of the ocean bordering upon it (art) can
be proved convincingly from some of his own letters of that period. There is
something ironically sad in reading his letter to Bertrand Russell, who had
sponsored him in his new country. He informs Russell that his enthusiasm for
the Tractatus is misplaced and that he has completely misunderstood it.
Wittgenstein distinguishes between what can be explained in the clear and
logical propositions of scientific language and what can only be shown in
indirect and poetic ways (this includes such vital areas as ethics, for
example). The key passage is worth quoting: “Now I am afraid you haven’t
really got hold of my main contention, to which the whole business of logical
propositions is only a corollary. The main point is the theory of what can be
explained by propositions—i.e. by language . . . and what cannot be
expressed by propositions, but only shown, which I believe, is the cardinal
problem of philosophy.” In a letter to Ficker he made his purpose even
clearer. “The book’s point is an ethical one. I once meant to include in the
preface a sentence which is not in fact there now; but which I will write out
for you here, because it will perhaps be a key to the work for you. What I
meant to write, then, was this: My work consists of two parts: the one
presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely that second
part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the
ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY
rigorous way of drawing those limits.” It might have made quite a difference
to have had that sentence in the preface but, again, possibly not, for one
sees what one wants in such cases. Why is that man standing on the edge of
the cliff? Is the cliff where the land ends or where the waters begin?

Wittgenstein intended to delineate the edges of ordinary, descriptive

language, within which science and logic could operate, and, at the same
time, to indicate the areas outside ordinary language where questions of
ethics, values, and ultimate meanings are known in mystical intuition and
conveyed (“shown”) in the indirect and metaphorical language of poetry and
art. But even if he believed that what could be shown in art was much more
important than what could be spoken in science, it is immediately obvious
that, with the distinction once established, the hierarchical priority can be
argued just as well for science over art as for art over science.

And that is precisely the clear and unequivocal conclusion of C. P. Snow,

looking back years later on his famous book, Two Cultures. What is most
fascinating in his comments in the Times Literary Supplement is the sheer
arrogance of his language and his comparisons. The language is as
prejudicial as if one were to divide people into male and nonmale, races into
white and nonwhite, or religions into Christian and non-Christian. Notice in
the following paraphrase how science is always defined in the first place and
with positive qualities while art is always in second place and defined as the
mere negation of those qualities postulated for science. I shall paraphrase
his statements but keep this subtle imperialism.

There are, he claimed, two kinds of understanding, two ways of dealing

with experience—there really are two and only two. He first describes the
way of science as a search for agreement which builds brick by brick,
incorporating what has been previously done into the growing structure. The
article proceeds with subtle linguistic discrimination to identify “the other
way of knowing” as the mere negation of the first way. This second way, the
humanist culture, is such that we will always have to go back and read, for
example, Shakespeare and Tolstoy. The creators and creations of humanist
culture have not passed, and cannot pass, into a general agreement or a
collective mind. The conclusion makes the humanist culture pale before the
scientific culture. “So we seem to have reached a clear divide between two
cultures or traditions. One is cumulative, incorporative, collective,
consensual, so deigned that it must progress through time. The other is non-
cumulative, non-incorporative, unable to abandon its past but also unable to
embody it. . . . it loses by its nature the diachronic progress which is
science’s greatest gift to the mind of man.” Without any doubt this is the
popular viewpoint on science, and most ordinary people will not question it,
especially when “science” means, for example, medicine. Again, notice the
order of description, with science first and art second, and the positive
qualities of science, art being described only through the negation of these
positive gifts. And notice especially the combination, in the last sentence, of
science and progress.
This statement by Snow (science over art) is clearly opposed to
Wittgenstein’s intention (art over science), but it brings home the problem
most forcibly. And the problem is not the propriety of the hierarchy, one way
or the other, but the very validity of the distinction itself. The most basic
question for a theology of limit and of story is whether there is any such
direct, ordinary, objective, descriptive language as over against some other
type, whether it is considered to be a higher or a lower type. Top concede
objectivity to scientific language is to lose the battle before the first shot is
fired. One will never prevail on such a field. But it may well be that there is
only indirect (if you will excuse the redundancy) language. In that case the
real distinction would not be between the direct language of science and the
indirect language of poetry but between language, whether in science or in
poetry or in anything else, which is aware of its limits and language when it
is fossilized and totally oblivious to the yawning chasm beneath its
complacency. Art and science may not be two simultaneous and parallel
ways of knowing, but art and science may be, and in that order, two
successive moments of any truly human knowledge. We will return to this
point in considering the third master-claim later on.

Evolutionary Progress
Next comes the great master-claim of the Western world, that of progress.
It is a claim so profound and pervasive that it surfaces in such disparate
places as the utopian socialism of Karl Marx and the Christian eschatology of
Teilhard de Chardin. Indeed, the former thinker found it much easier to be rid
of faith in God than of hope in progress. Which makes one wonder, in
passing, if that God had any other major function besides being guarantor for
that progress. The great Western claim is of the past and future progress of
the human race. We have in our vocabulary a neutral word such as “change”
and we have also words such as “improvement” and “decline.” These two
add to change the idea of for-the-better or for-the-worse. “Evolution” has
been taken for a hundred years, not as a neutral word denoting change, but
as a positive word implying improvement. This improvement is taken to be
so self-evident that the only way to offset its claim is to be deliberately
perverse and argue that the human race is steadily declining and that
evolution is slow deterioration.

Against this claim of progress and evolutionary improvement I would bring

certain witnesses for change without progress and for evolution without
improvement. I would not be misunderstood; it is not evolution I wish to
dispute but the claim of progress therein. Once again I shall be working with
art and science as the poles of the discussion.

I shall begin with art because it was in art and poetry, in architecture and
drama, that I first saw most clearly the total lack of any evolutionary
progress. Change, by all means, but improvement?

What happens when a modern stands before cave paintings over fifteen
thousand years old? Does one really think: Well, not bad, considering their
stage of evolution? Can one talk of artistic progress at all? In the summer of
1919 the poet T. S. Eliot visited the Dordogne caves in southern France and
saw what a Magdalenian artist had done with magnesium oxide and buffalo
grease on an Upper Paleolithic wall. Years later Eliot drew two conclusions
from that experience, one on art and one on humanity. In his 1932 essay on
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” he stated it in a sentence which became
something of an aphorism: “art never improves, but . . . the material of art is
never the same.” There is, of course, and quite obviously, change in art, but
“this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does
not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the
Magdalenian draughtsman.” This takes art, at least, out of any scheme of
evolutionary progress because “this development, refinement perhaps,
complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any
improvement.” In a second essay, published that same year in the Criterion,
this intuition concerning art was widened to apply to both humanity and
holiness. “And we must affirm that perfection is as nearly attainable for man
here and now as it ever will be in any future in any place. That there can be
no art greater than the art which has already been created: there will only be
different and necessarily different combinations of the eternal and changing
in the forms of art.” There is a bite in all this, however, which makes either
complacency or despair impossible. It is true that a Chartres cathedral was,
is, and ever will be a work of consummate art, it is equally true and even
more devastatingly obvious that we cannot build a Chartres today. One does
not triumph over or even improve upon past artistic greatness. It is enough
to be as great. Or, as Eliot himself wrote in “East Coker,”

There is only the light to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

This example from art is important enough to stay with for a few moments. I
have argued that the history of art shows no evolutionary progress (or
decline, either) across the centuries. Yet it is certainly obvious that art has
not been either static or moribund throughout these same centuries.
Therefore, we have movement without progress, we have change without
improvement. This does not mean that at any given moment there may not
be good or bad, better or worse, in art but that if one tried to make a graph
of its history over the centuries, the graph would look, I suppose, rather like
a person’s electrocardiogram. It would not be a clear, rising line, but neither
would it be a circle closed in on itself. The question, then, is whether such a
graph might not be a master-paradigm for all human activities, not just for
art.

C. P. Snow used precisely this nonprogress of art to argue for its inferiority
to the clear progress of science. But, as against a popular propagandist such
as Snow, the historians and philosophers of science raise very disturbing
questions about this progress which has been claimed as almost
synonymous with science itself.

In his fascinating book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S.

Kuhn dismisses this theory of steady and cumulative progress on the part of
science by drawing attention to the master-paradigms which control such
cumulative progress. There may be clear and steady progress within any
given overarching theory or paradigm, but where would you stand to
compare such overarching theories with one another? And what of master-
paradigms that nobody thought of and for which it is now too late? I would
presume, for example, in 1975, that all of us are no longer as sure as we
once were that a way of life based on unlimited and fairly cheap oil is the
best of all possible worlds, the manifest path of destiny and progress.

When a master-paradigm breaks down and another takes its place, the
latter is not derived by logical deduction from the ruins of the preceding
paradigm or model. The people who know this all too well are the scientists
who have created a scientific revolution. A classic example by Russell Kirk
records the delight of Albert Einstein as the poet St. John Perse explained to
him the importance of intuition in poetry. “ ‘But it’s the same thing for the
man of science,’ he said. ‘The mechanics of discovery are neither logical nor
intellectual. It’s a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure,
intelligence analyzes and experiments confirm (or invalidate) the intuition.
But initially there is a great forward leap of the imagination.’ ”

This makes the moment when master-paradigms are created in science

look similar to the great visionary intuitions of the poet. It also makes one
wonder if Eliot’s phrase might not be just as true of science as it is of art:
“science never improves, but the material of science is never the same.”

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss seems to be saying this in a

discussion of the “Neolithic Paradox” in his book, The Savage Mind. “It was in
neolithic times that man’s mastery of the great arts of civilization—of
pottery, weaving, agriculture and the domestication of animals—became
firmly established. No one today would any longer think of attributing these
enormous advances to the fortuitous accumulation of a series of chance
discoveries or believe them to have been revealed by the passive perception
of certain natural phenomena.” In other words, when we look at this list of
discoveries made over ten thousand years ago, we can only conclude that,
“Neolithic or early historical, man was therefore the heir of a long scientific
tradition.” It did not all happen by chance or coincidence. Somebody
hypothesized, experimented, and concluded.

But if we grant that neolithic science was worthy of this name, how do we
explain the difference between it and modern science? Lévi-Strauss suggests
that there are two distinct modes of scientific thought. But he argues that
“these are certainly not a function of different stages of development of the
human mind but rather of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible
to scientific inquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the
imagination: the other at a remove from it.” His example of this difference
has become something of a classic. The neolithic scientist is like the
handyman who can fix anything by clever adaptation of the materials at
hand. The modern scientist will study the problem in the abstract, define the
solution, and order the needed materials to be made from appropriate
supplies of their raw state. In the final analysis, the difference may come
down to counting in one’s head as against counting on one’s very concrete
fingers. Our science, precisely as science, is not better than neolithic
science. It is simply different. If one insists that modern science is both
different and better, it might be as well to remember that the bill for modern
science has not yet been paid in full. We do know that Neolithic science did
not destroy the earth or render its climate unlivable. So let us settle for
difference rather than progress between Neolithic and modern science, and
let us hope we are creative as humans then were, and at no greater cost to
our humanity or the earth’s well-being.

If evolutionary progress is simply a piece of major Western arrogance, does

that mean our life becomes meaningless, a boring repetition of repetitious
boredom? Stand on the shore and look at the sea. Is it boring, is it ever
boring? Yet, there it is, motion without progress, forever.

Here are two passages from Ezra Pound’s “Canto 81.” The first reminds us
to think twice before we concoct claims of progress with ourselves as its
present peak.

The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
The second passage reassures us that the abandonment of this claim to
superiority over all that has preceded us need not in any way diminish our
humanity.
But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered.

External Reality

The problem is so obvious it is difficult to see like something too close to

my eyes. For example, if I wore red sunglasses, the world would look red to
me. But I could take them off and see that it was actually multicolored. Even
if I never took them off, others, not wearing them, would tell me of the
world’s color spectrum. But suppose everyone had red contact lenses
physically molded to their eyes, and nobody knew that the lenses were
present. Then would everyone be in complete agreement that the world was
red? Not really. Nobody would say “red;” they would say that the world was
the way it was. Unless, of course, somebody said one day: “What if we all
have red contact lenses?” and so on. What I am getting at is this. Do we (or
does society or family or church for us) first propose theories and then try to
see if the “facts” fit them, or do we first see the facts out there and propose
theories to account for them? Which comes first, the theory or the fact?
I shall begin with another quotation from Thomas S. Kuhn’s book because it
catches beautifully the ambivalence all of us feel when first confronted with
this problem. “Is sensory experience fixed and neutral? Are theories simply
man-made interpretations of given data? The epistemological viewpoint that
has most often guided Western philosophy for three centuries dictates an
immediate and unequivocal, Yes! In the absence of a developed alternative, I
find it impossible to relinquish entirely that viewpoint. Yet it no longer
functions effectively, and the attempt to make it do so through the
introduction of a neutral language of observation is now seen to be
hopeless.” Kuhn states that this is the way we have been trained to answer
that question: the data, the facts are out there; we should/could observe
them neutrally and objectively and make up theories to explain them
impartially and without prejudice.

Another philosopher of science, Mary Hesse, makes a similar point, but she
also draws attention to the role of society in all of this. “Contrary to what
some empiricist philosophers seem to have held, ‘observation-descriptions’
are not written on the face of events to be transferred directly into language
but are already ‘interpretations’ of events, and the kind of interpretation
depends on the framework of assumptions of a language community.” We
have usually been told the theories and the facts that “proved them.” This
was, of course, highly persuasive since the theory also taught us what was
and was not a “fact.” It is only when we imagine other theories and wonder
how different the “facts” might then be, that we see the problem for the first
time.

All of this serves to destroy Snow’s “two ways of knowing” and the
superiority of the scientific over the humanistic way. We begin to see instead
a much closer relationship between the paradigms of the scientist and the
visions of the poet or artist. We also realize that while there can certainly be
progress within a given paradigm, and while there are certainly changes of
paradigms, there may well be no progress and improvement of paradigms as
such. But we also see emerging here a far more disquieting theory than one
which postulated “two ways” of knowing, however hierarchically arranged
they were to be. For the poet and for the scientist alike, reality is not
something objectively “out there” about which we are getting more and
more exact knowledge.

One final example. The critic Christine Brooke-Rose says, “The facts can
only be the facts as apprehended by man, and these do alter considerably
when a working hypothesis (e.g. Newton’s), which worked for a long time, is
upset by a new equation or a new working hypothesis (e.g. Einstein’s), just
as Einstein’s theory has been to a certain extent modified by Heisenberg.
Even the principle that the observed thing is altered by the instrument
observing it is nearer to the artistic than to any old-fashioned mechanistic
view.” At this point it does look like something beyond idealism or realism is
at work, something which might be termed relativism, if that word were not
already reprobate. If it will not abuse the language too much we might call
this new theory “relationism.” Reality is neither in here in the mind nor out
there in the world: it is the interplay of both mind and world in language.
Reality is relational and relationship. Even more simply, reality is language.
What is there before us and is without language is as unknowable as the
answer to the question of how we would feel had we never been born. The
Bible suggests (one of its less happy suggestions) that we go to the ant and
learn its ways. A better suggestion would be to go to the spider and study its
destiny and ponder how it weaves a web from inside itself and then dwells in
it and calls it world (I suppose). All of which means we had better take
language very carefully and treat our poets very seriously.

As Plato knew long ago, poets are the dangerous ones. There is no such
thing as an innocent poem, and the most dangerous are not those which
question national policy or political purpose but those which make us
question perception itself. It all looks so terribly simple. The poet talks about
the rose. But, we say, she is not really talking about the rose as it really is
but about her relationship to the rose and the rose in relationship to herself.
And that, we add swiftly and glibly, is what distinguishes poetry from the rest
of language because with other language we are describing things as they
are and not our relationship to them and theirs to us. Of course. Unless,
maybe, . . .

If there is only language, and it being human means living in language and
calling that process reality, we can listen anew to the poets whose claims
may not seem as extravagant now as before. Three American poets, for
example.

N his essay “The Constant Symbol,” Robert Frost pleads for the view that
“poetry is simply made of metaphor. So also is philosophy—and science, too,
for that matter, if it will take the soft impeachment from a friend.” Once an
artistic or scientific revolution has taken place and we look backwards, we
usually find the whole process logical and even necessary. This is inevitable
since we now see the past in the light of the present, the old in the light of
the new. But what we never know and never can know, after an Einstein has
given us a post-Newtonian vision, is what other vision, what alternative to
Einstein never made it to Bethlehem to be born. A second example. Northrop
Frye has summed up the theory and practice of Wallace Stevens in one
sentence: “The motive for metaphor, according to Wallace Stevens, is a
desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes
on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare
moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we
are also a part of what we know.” Or, to play with Paul some more, we do not
mourn what we see through a glass darkly, we now rejoice in the dark
loveliness of the glass. Black is beautiful. Finally, over twenty-five years ago
the poet William Carlos Williams, in his essay “An Approach to the Poem,”
gave us a litmus test by which we can determine whether we still prefer to
live in the story of reality-out-there or are ready for a sterner challenge. Do
we find the following statement acceptable? “Until your artists have
conceived you in your unique and supreme form you can never conceive
yourselves and have not, in fact, existed.”

LIMIT AND TRANSCENDENCE

The main objection I have been making to the three claims just studied is
that they do not consider themselves as stories, as possible ways of
imagining, but as objective and neutral descriptions of how reality is. If I
accept them as stories, which is the way I actually see them, my only
objection to them is that they have become boring, uninteresting, and in
direct conflict with some more challenging and exciting new stories. The only
thing that is “wrong” with them is what was “wrong” with classical art when
modern art has arrived on the scene. I propose, then, to consider as most
interesting the story that art and science, or poetic intuition and scientific
achievement, are not two simultaneous and separate ways of knowing but
two successive and connected moments of all human knowledge; that there
is continual evolutionary change but no overall evolutionary progress; and
that “reality” is the world we create in and by our language and our story so
that what is “out there,” apart from our imagination and without our
language, is as unknowable as, say, our fingerprints, had we never been
conceived. To ask, in other words, what is “out there” apart from the story in
which “it” is envisioned, should strike us as strangely as would the question
of how one might feel today about the fact that one had never been born. I
am not saying we cannot know reality. I am claiming that what we know is
reality, is our reality here together and with each other.

Having absolutely limited myself within a story, whether this, that, or some
other story, I do not feel constrained or confined because, as with my earlier
analogy of game, I find that limitation exhilarating.

All of which brings me to the following problem. If there is only story, then
God, or the referent of transcendental experience, is either inside my story
and, in that case, at least in the Judaeo-Christian tradition I know best, God is
merely an idol I have created; or, God is outside my story, and I have just
argued that what is “out there” is completely unknowable .So it would seem
that any transcendental experience has been ruled out, if we can only live in
story. In all of this I admit most openly a rooted prejudice against
worshipping my own imagination and genuflecting before my own mind.

The Death of the

Lighthouse Keeper

Once upon a time there were people who lived on rafts upon the sea. The
rafts were constructed of materials from the land whence they had come. On
this land was a lighthouse in which there was a lighthouse keeper. No matter
where the rafts were, and even if the people themselves had no idea where
they actually were, the keeper always knew their whereabouts. There was
even communication between people and keeper so that in an absolute
emergency they could always be guided safely home to land.
In rather crude form that is the story in which the classical mind dwelt
brilliantly for centuries. It was, again, a very good story and a very
interesting one. One could, for example, call the lighthouse keeper God, if
one were so inclined. And even if one did not want to do anything as
embarrassingly honest as that, one could have brilliant methodological
doubts about rafts and winds and currents because, no matter how much
one doubted, the lighthouse keeper knew the answer, and his knowledge
was known as truth. Then one day the rumor came that destroyed the
classical vision. It did not say that the lighthouse keeper had died and that
the lighthouse was in ruins, its light gone out forever; it said that there was
no dry land, so how could there be either a lighthouse or a lighthouse
keeper? The rumor’s most cogent articulation is usually attributed to the
poet-philosopher Nietzsche, whose madman announced to the startled
villagers that mankind had murdered God. The announcer, for all his
madness, was well aware of the vertiginous terror of the event he
proclaimed. “All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How
were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the
entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns?
Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all
directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an
infinite nothing?”

That is one version of the rumor, but I have always preferred another and
equally early version of it. The reason is purely personal. It is that Emily
Dickinson makes me shiver in a way that Nietzsche has never been able to
do. Her version:

Finding is the first Act

The second, loss,
Third, Expedition for
the “Golden Fleece.”

Fourth, no Discovery –
Fifth, no Crew –
Finally, no Golden Fleece –
Jason – sham – too.
In that “sham” one hears the chilling slam as the door closes on the classical
vision of a fixed center out there somewhere. What had died was the fixed
center outside language, and for many who attended the funeral that could
only mean the burial of God since hey equated the two. When one believed
in a fixed reality out there, apart from us and independent of us, one could
easily imagine God as the one who really knew all about it. It was God’s
knowledge of it that made it what it really was, and we could easily imagine
ourselves knowing more and more about it so that even if our knowledge
was all wrong, God at least knew the correct answer. In fact, if we could get
God on our side, would not progress be assured and inevitable since we
would be seeing reality more and more as God saw it? Yet who would need
such a God if reality was not outside us but inside our language? So, with the
loss of credibility in a fixed reality independent of us, there soon followed the
loss of faith in a God whose chief role was to guarantee that reality’s validity.

The Renewal of Transcendence

For those who could not or would not accept the presumption that the shift
from the classical to the modern mind (change, not improvement), which
necessarily meant the loss of the fixed center’s security, necessarily meant
also the death of God, there was work to be done. T. S. Eliot hurried home
from the funeral of the lighthouse keeper and challenged us, in “Ash
Wednesday,” to:

Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the
guilded hearse.

Let us try, then, that story which opened this section, but in a second
version.

There is no lighthouse keeper. There is no lighthouse. There is no dry land.

There are only people living on rafts made from their own imaginations. And
there is the sea.

(It was still there, Emily, even with Jason gone). Why might it not be possible
to experience transcendence now from the call of the sea, as once before
from the voice of the lighthouse keeper?

One moment. If there are only rafts and these rafts are really language
itself, what is this sea which is “outside” language because it is beyond the
raft? Maybe there is no sea either? If there is only language, then God must
be either inside language and in that case, as I said above, an idol; or he is
outside language, and there is nothing out there but silence. There is only
one possibility left, and that is what we can experience in the movement of
the raft, in the breaks in the raft’s structure, and, above all, what can be
experienced as the edges of the raft itself. For we cannot really talk of the
sea, we can only talk of the edges of the raft and what happens there. Our
prayer will have to be, not “Thank God for edges,” but “Thank edges for
God.”

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur may have had something like this in
mind when he said that there was no mystery in language but only the
mystery of language. There are no mysteries on the raft but, as Galileo might
have said, still it moves. At this point, one can also appreciate why the
American scholar Paul Van Buren has written a philosophy of religion with
the title The Edges of Language. In summary, the classical mind says, that’s
only a story, but the modern mind says, there’s only story.

A concluding analogy. For myself at least, the most exciting way to sail a
boat is on a close-haul course, beating as close to the eye of the wind as
possible. The limitation is absolute. One cannot sail into the eye of the wind
any more, I would argue, than one can get outside language and outside
story. But one can sail as close as possible into the wind, and one can tell
that you are as close as possible only by constantly testing the wind. Then
the boat heels over, strains hard, and one experiences most fully, or at least
I do, the thrill of sailing. My suggestion is that the excitement of
transcendental experience is found only at the edge of language and the
limit of story and that the only way to find that excitement is to test those
edges and those limits. And that, as we shall see, is what parable is all about.
CHAPTER TWO

The Ways of Story

In the last chapter I argued the proposition that we live in story like fish in
the sea. It does not at all trouble me to contemplate the inevitability that this
too must be a story, because it is the story in which I now have to live, and I
know that in this I am not alone. I am quite aware that there are other
master-stories around, and to those who can live in them I can only wish that
they both fare forward and fare well. I find my story different and presently
necessary, and I also find that I need to claim no more for it than that. That
will suffice.

The next step then, having taken the necessity of story as our present
master-story, is to investigate the ways of story and especially to pursue the
question of how God can be experienced in such a situation.

In this chapter I shall be discussing various ways in story, but the major
emphases will be on myth and on parable as the poles of story. In defining
these terms as the limits of story’s possibilities I shall be using them in a
strict and technical sense which will, I hope, become clearer as we proceed.
This attempt at mapping the edges of story operates in definite
consciousness of the warning of Northrop Frye that “The poet’s function is
still his primitive oral function of defining and illustrating the concerns of the
society that man is producing, but this fact is not generally realized. It is not
realized partly because the language of poetry is still thought of as a
rhetorical and sub-logical language: the principles of mythical language are
still largely unknown.” Careful cartography, then, is in order.

MYTH AS RECONCILIATION

To begin with two negatives. Myth is not used here in its ordinary popular
usage as synonymous with sophisticated lying. Neither is it used to mean
stories with gods and goddesses in them, simply because such personalities
appear in the stories. The guide for our discussion will be Claude Lévi-
Strauss, whose brilliant structural analyses of myths have offered a far
sharper definition for the word than either of these two popular conceptions.

The Structure of Myth

The Academy Award for hest leading male actor was voted to Marlon
Brando in 1973. He refused the Oscar, and an Indian actress appeared in his
place to explain that his refusal was in protest against the denigration of the
American Indian in Hollywood westerns. He was not protesting against any
individual movie but against a pattern which emerged with repeated and
relentless inevitability from the entire corpus of “cowboys and Indians” films.
It was a pattern that every role-playing child knew so instinctively that “I
don’t want to be the Indian” became a standard objection in children’s play.
The protest was aimed at what we might term a structure of contempt which
was built into the entire portrayal of the Indian on film.

This example helps our understanding of what Lévi-Strauss is after as he

investigates a vast repertoire of myth. He is not looking at the surface story
for itself, however exciting that may be, not at the actors and their roles,
however fascinating these may be. He is looking for the structure, at the
deepest level possible. In order to get at this deep structure without getting
lost in the multitudinous variations of surface adventure, Lévi-Strauss must
concentrate on the relations, indeed on the bundles of relations, between the
units of the myth. For instance, imagine that somebody challenged the Oscar
protest and denied that there was a structure of contemptuous chauvinism
within Hollywood’s Indian movies. Suppose we responded that in many
Indian films there is a beautiful Indian girl who helps the white hero, even
betraying her own people for his love, and who is then killed off, usually
heroically and self-sacrificially, to avoid the specter of miscegenation at the
end. If one wished to show the white male chauvinism in this pattern, one
would have to argue not from one instance in one film, which might even be
historically accurate, but from the bundles of relations within a whole series
of films. The chauvinism cannot be proved from the relation of one Indian girl
to one white man in one movie. Only the bundles or sets of such relations in
as many movies as possible will prove it—and then with a compelling
precision. With Lévi-Strauss, we are seeking the structure of bundles of
relations in myths. From one example comes only a sequence: Indian girl
dies to save white man from death. From many examples comes a structure
(and an ideology): Indian girl must die to save society from miscegenation.
That is why Lévi-Strauss’s seminal articles of 1955, “The Structural Study of
Myth,” which has since appeared in his collection Structural Anthropology,
concludes that “the question has often been raised why myths and more
generally oral literature, are so addicted to duplication, triplication, or
quadruplication of the same sequence. If our hypotheses are accepted, the
answer is obvious: The function of repetition is to render the structure of the
myth apparent.”

Lévi-Strauss is not concerned with only one collection of myths, although

one such series is, of course, his area of specific illustration and
concentration. He is really interested in the structure of myth as such, if not,
indeed, with the structure of the mind as such. What, then, is the structure of
myth as myth?
The English anthropologist, Edmund Leach, has summarized Lévi-Strauss
succinctly: “So, despite all variations . . . this aspect of myth is a constant. In
every myth system we will find a persistent sequence of binary
discriminations as between human/superhuman, mortal/immortal,
male/female, legitimate/illegitimate, good/bad . . . followed by a ‘mediation’
of the paired categories thus distinguished.” In other words, in a mythical
story, an opposition between two terms that cannot be reconciled (binary
opposition), will be represented by two fictional surrogates, and these
replacements will allow a reconciliation or mediation which the original pair
could not receive. It is also evident that these opposite terms are usually
very profound and fundamentally important ones.

The Function of Myth

The American anthropologists Elli Köngäs Maranda and Pierre Maranda

have applied Lévi-Strauss’s structural formula for myth to other types of
folklore, and their results cast some significant light on the whole process
under study in this chapter. They accept Lévi-Strauss’s basic thesis that
myth performs the specific task of mediating irreducible opposites. When
they extend this formula to other genres of folklore, they arrive at a set of
models that can be represented by a tree structure and that can also serve
as a decision model for the storyteller (see figure 1. from the Marandas).
Figure 1

The model in the figure obviously proceeds by a binary opposition at each

step. If one chooses the negative (upper) option, the sequence and the story
aborts. If one chooses the positive (lower) option, one can then proceed to
the next possibility. An example: (1) Contrast (or contradiction) is present
between a certain peace-loving nation which possesses a huge supply of
weapons. (2) Attempt to mediate by invoking fear of attack by another
equally powerful nation. (3) Success in mediation as the nation’s own people
accept the story and the other nation gets nervous and bellicose. (4) Gain by
mediation for munitions industry at home and for imperialist adventures
abroad.

It is the introduction of the term “gain” in the diagram which will be the
focus of our present concern. Think, for example, of the mythical or folklore
story in which the hero starts out to solve the poverty-stricken situation of
himself and his family. But instead of concluding in comfortable, middle-class
suburbia, he ends up marrying the king’s daughter, becoming heir to the
throne, and moving his family into the palace. That, I suppose, is “gain” (rags
to great riches) and not just “mediation” (rags to clothes). Or, as the
Marandas note, this last model of story “doubtless prevails in European
folklore and probably also in other optimistic, ‘winning’, and rich societies.
There, lowly heroes start from poor conditions of life and rise, in a
‘capitalistic’ way, to positions of wealth and high social status. In this
respect, the conception of after-life is much greedier in European than in
Eskimo folklore: in the latter, adequate means of subsistence are enough to
bring happiness.”

But the question of gain is even more fundamental and reaches from the
social to the metaphysical or ontological level of human experience. When
one looks back at myth from this vantage point, one notices that the whole
process of mediation and reconciliation implies in itself a gigantic gain.
Whether mediation is successful or not, or even gainful or not, one is
establishing in, by, and through myth the conviction that mediation is
possible. This is the heart of myth, and it is also the profound and ontological
“gain” therein. Here is myth at its most basic functional purpose. What myth
does is not just to attempt the mediation in story of what is sensed as
irreconcilable, but in, by, and through this attempt it establishes the
possibility of reconciliation. No one, I suppose, has articulated better this
function of myth than Pierre Maranda himself in a description which reflects
both the difficulty and the poetry of mythical language itself: “Myth . . . is the
expression of the dynamic disequilibrium which is the (acknowledged)
powerlessness to build adequate homomorphisms between incompatible and
hence disturbing facts. It is the expression of the reluctant acknowledgement
that the event is mightier than the structure. But myth is also and more than
anything else the hallucinogenic chant in which mankind harmonizes the
vagaries of history—the chant hummed for generations in the minds of men
and humming itself in the human mind (that innate dream to reduce
continuous randomness to a final pattern) as hinted at by Plato and Jung or,
better, as amplified by Chomsky and Lévi-Strauss.”

It is much more important to believe in the possibility of solution than ever

to find one in actuality. The gain, or advantage of myth, and its basic
function, is to establish the possibility itself.

PARABLE AS CONTRADICTION

In the process of discussing myth and the extension of Lévi-Strauss’s

mythical formula to other folklore genres by the Marandas, we found
ourselves repeatedly thinking in terms of binary or paired oppositions.
Whether the mind must always so think or just tends to think that way much
of the time, can be left aside for the moment. If we are thinking in binary
opposites, however, one question is immediately obvious. Is there another
kind of story, the binary opposite of myth, which does not create
reconciliation for irreconcilables but which creates irreconciliation where
before there was reconciliation? In other words, if we go back to the tree
diagram in figure 1, must there not be a second bifurcation in that initial
branch, as suggested in figure 1a, with my additions in italics. It is the basic
thesis of this book that parable is a story which is the polar, or binary,
opposite of myth. Parable brings not peace but the sword, and parable casts
fire upon the earth which receives it.

Figure 1a

In this diagram I have added a new branch to the “no contrast” branch of
figure 1. Again, there is a binary opposition: “contrast not created/contrast
created.” If a storyteller chooses the former option, the story aborts
immediately. If one opts for “contrast created,” a parable is the result. But to
stay in parable one must stop right there. If the storyteller starts to mediate
the newly created contrast, the story starts slipping into the other main stem
of the diagram and going back into myth.,

I will use this understanding of parable within the possibilities of story both
to establish a tradition of parable and to see if Jesus’ stories (some? or most?
or all?) are within this tradition. In parable, of course, we are not outside of
story, which is to be outside humanity, but we are in story at the point where
it shows awareness of its own inevitability and also its own relativity. Parable
shows us the seams and edges of myth. Or, to recall an earlier image, it
places us on the edge of the raft. It was to these two binary opposites within
story that the literary critic Frank Kermode referred with the statement,
“Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change.” Parables
are fictions, not myths; they are meant to change, not reassure us.

Parable is always a somewhat unnerving experience. You can usually

recognize a parable because your immediate reaction will be self-
contradictory: “I don’t know what you mean by that story but I’m certain I
don’t like it.” To be human and to remain open to transcendental experience
demands a willingness to be “parabled” or, as W. H. Auden put it in his For
The Time Being,

Therefore, see without looking, hear without listening, breathe without

asking:
The Inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance;
The Real is what will strike you as really absurd;
Unless you are certain you are dreaming, it is certainly a dream of your
own;
Unless you exclaim—“There must be some mistake”—you must be
mistaken.

Myth has a double function: the reconciliation of an individual contradiction

and, more important, the creation of belief in the permanent possibility of
reconciliation. Parable also has a double function which opposes that double
function of myth. The surface function of parable is to create contradiction
within a given situation of complacent security but, even more unnervingly,
to challenge the fundamental principle of reconciliation by making us aware
of the fact that we made up the reconciliation. Reconciliation is no more
fundamental a principle than irreconciliation. You have built a lovely home,
myth assures us: but, whispers parable, you are right above an earthquake
fault.

In all of this I am not at all interested in elevating the adolescent pout to

the level of transcendental experience .What matters to me in this discussion
of parable is what L. M. Vail wrote in describing the philosophy of Martin
Heidegger: “In the openness of authentic disclosure we admit the possibility
of something unknown, even contradictory, to our world: for we put into
question our own faculties—for instance, reason, will, the senses – rather
than blindly measuring and evaluating what is real on the basis of these.” It
is because I believe that there is only story and that parable is story grown
self-conscious and self-critical that I wish to discuss parable is such detail in
this book.

BETWEEN MYTH AND PARABLE

I have argued for myth and parable as the binary or polar opposites of
story and have pointed to the philosophical implications of this polarity. Even
though the rest of this work will concern itself exclusively with parable, it will
be necessary to sketch certain other possibilities of story within these twin
poles. In doing this I shall be following very closely the analysis of Sheldon
Sacks in his book Fiction and the Shape of Belief.

Professor Sacks sums up his purpose and his thesis as follows. “In pursuing
the enquiry into the relationship between a novelist’s moral beliefs, opinions,
and prejudices and the work he creates, I have advanced the theory that all
relevant works of prose fiction are organized according to one of three
mutually exclusive types: satire, apologue, or action.” Sacks uses these
three types for a critical analysis of the writings of certain eighteenth-century
prose writers, especially Henry Fielding. First, satire. “A satire is a work
organized so that it ridicules objects external to the fictional world created in
it.” The objects ridiculed may be “particular men, the institutions of men,
traits presumed to be in all men, or any combination of the three.” Second,
apologue. “An apologue is a work organized as a fictional example of the
truth of a formulable statement or a series of such statements.” The
informing principle that holds these two types of writing together as coherent
wholes is that all the parts must contribute either to establishing ridicule in
satire or in persuading the truth of the statements in apologue. Third,
represented action. “An action is a work organized so that it introduces
characters, about whose fates we are made to care, in unstable relationships
which are then further complicated until the complication is finally resolved
by the removal of the represented stability.” Most ordinary novels are
actions as defined here.

This threefold schema of p[rose writing suggested by Sacks can be

integrated within the schema of myth and parable as indicated in figure 2.

Figure 2

This gives us a full spectrum of story and the distinctions between its parts
can best be explained by the relationship of each to world. It is these
relationships, in other words, which establish the different kinds of story, the
different ways in story. But these relationships are not to world outside story,
world which story describes and imitates, but to world inside story, world
which story creates and defines.

This basic fivefold typology can be summarized like this. Myth establishes
world. Apologue defends world. Action investigates world. Satire attacks
world. Parable subverts world. It is clear, I hope, that parable can only
subvert the world created in and by myth. There is no other world it can
touch. It is possible to live in myth and without parable. But it is not possible
to live in parable alone. To live in parable means to dwell in the tension of
myth and parable. It is obvious, of course, that one can change from one
myth (for example, capitalism) to another (for example, communism), and
that every myth can have an antimyth. But a parable is not an antimyth, and
it must be carefully distinguished from such. It is a story deliberately
calculated to show the limitations of myth, to shatter world so that its
relativity becomes apparent. It does not, as parable, replace one myth with
another. Like satire, parable keeps us humble by reminding us of limit. Like
satire, parable is intrinsically negative. It is in fact the dark night of story, but
precisely therein and thereby can it prepare us for the experience of
transcendence. To borrow from “The Dry Salvages” of T. S. Eliot, you could
say that parable is,

The backward look behind the assurance

Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

The best way I can think of to exemplify these five modes of story in a
unified way is to take up the comic pages of the newspaper and illustrate all
five types of story from among the comic strips. Myth is represented by “Rick
O’Shay,” which continues the venerable Western myth of the virtuous
gunslinger whose gun is fastest because his heart is purest. Apologue is
rather blatant in “Dick Tracy,” where law and order is advocated by such
immortal sayings as, “Yes, INEVITABLY a criminal’s mind cracks first, then
with reason perverted he fashions his own finish.” You can usually see the
“message” (apologue) coming because Tracy, or whoever, will announce it,
looking straight out of the strip at the reader. Action is found in the
adventures of “Brenda Starr.” We are made to care about Brenda through
the course of interminable episodes because there is a basic “instability of
relationship” introduced in the story by the fact that her boyfriend is always
off in the jungle trying to stay alive on black orchid serum (“Home from the
airport, Brenda falls on her bed in a flood of tears”). Satire is now very ably
represented by “Doonesbury,” with, for example. Mrs. Richardson asking her
husband, “Elliot, don’t you think it’s about time you started looking for a
job?” Parable is present, at times, in the recently arrived “Basil.” Quite often
this strip moves between whimsy and fantasy, but just as often there is a
strong element of parable asking us why things might not be just as well
some other way rather than the way we expected and presumed.

Figure 3 brings together the five modes of story, their fivefold relationship
to the world created in and by story, and these five examples.

Figure 3

This book is mostly about parable, which has been approached through its
opposite, myth. The importance of the rest of the fivefold typology will
appear later. I will try to show in the last chapter that Jesus’ stories are
parables as parables have been defined here, not historical allegories and
moral example-stories which is how the traditional interpretation has
presented them. These latter would be forms of apologue, either defending
how God acts or defining how we should act, and would be, in the above
figure, almost as far from parable as one could go. They would be well on
their way towards the polar opposite of what they were originally, well on
their way to myth. This change would represent, for example, a far greater
shift than that undergone by Jonathan Swift’s satire, Gulliver’s Travels, which
came to be read as an action, intended mainly for children.
CHAPTER THREE

The Tradition of
Parable
I have suggested that parable is necessary, logically, as the binary
opposite of myth. Myth proposes, parable disposes. Here I will try to
establish that parable does exist and has a long and rich tradition of its own.

STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT

Since it is impossible to compress a whole tradition in a few pages, I will

examine only two stages in the development of parable as a literary genre,
the earliest and the most recent stages. This will give some sense of the
evolution of the parabolic form and will serve as an introduction to the
tradition of parable itself. The first stage will be illustrated from two books of
the Hebrew Bible and the final stage will be exemplified in the work of two
modern novelists.

The difficulty in this approach will be to find some common ground on

which to base comparison of such disparate works of literature used as
examples: the biblical books of Ruth and Jonah and the writings of Kafka and
Borges. As in the previous chapter, structuralist analysis will be of prime
importance in solving the problem.

The French structuralist critic Algirdas Julien Greimas has drawn attention
to the fact that many folktales have a basic structure which could be outlined
as in figure 4.

Figure 4

This can be very easily exemplified from any standard story in the private
detective genre. The Giver is, for example, the insurance company which
hires the detective to recover some lost and insured merchandise .The
Object is this latter merchandise. The Receiver is the owner of the insured
and stolen goods .The Subject is, of course, the private detective himself.
The Opponent is whoever stole the merchandise .The Helper could be some
Watson-like friend. This can be outlined as in figure 5.

Figure 5

The variations that can be worked out for this pattern by combining in one
person the Recipient and the Thief, and so on, are quite extensive.
Roland Barthes, another structuralist literary critic, has noted that there
are actually three separate lines or axes, involved in Greimas’ schematic
structure. He called the Giver-Object-Receiver line and axis of
communication; the Subject-Object axis, one of volition, search, or quest;
and the Helper-Subject-Opponent line an axis of test, trial, or ordeal. This
means that apart from stories like those just mentioned, in which all three
axes and their six actants are present, there could also be stories in which
only one, or only two axes are involved. There could be stories, for example,
using only the GOR axis of communication or the SO axis of search, or either
of these with the HOp axis of test. Second, he said that in many instances
the tension of the story would actually consist in a “duel of persons.” This
means that one could have stories whose major action was not just the
interplay of the six actants suggested by Greimas but, for example, a duel
between two equal Subjects for the same Object (a love triangle) or even a
duel between two equal Givers or two equal Receivers.

It is these two suggestions of Barthes that I shall use in offering a

structuralist pattern which can be seen in parables at the two stages of their
development to be investigated. A “duel of persons” on the axis of
communication (GOR) will suffice to show the structural similarities between
ancient and modern parables. In all cases to be considered I shall be
analyzing the story either in terms of one Giver, two Objects, and two
Receivers, or in terms of two Givers, two Objects, and one Receiver. There
will be either a duel of Givers or of Receivers in each case. These two
structures are outlined in figure 6.

Figure 6

There is one final point. My argument will be that there is in every

parabolic situation a battle of basic structures. There is the structure of
expectation on the part of the hearer and there is the structure of expression
on the part of the speaker. These structures are in diametrical opposition,
and this opposition is the heart of the parabolic event. That is, the hearer
expects that a certain Object (O+) will be given by a certain Giver (G+) to a
certain Receiver (R+) and that the opposite Object (O-) may also be given by
a certain other Giver (G-) to a certain opposite Receiver (R-). What actually
happens in the parable is the reverse of what the hearer expects. The two
possibilities are outlined in figure 7.

Figure 7

If all these diagrams seem strange and abstract, please bear with me a
while. I have not forgotten the warning of the poem “What Fifty Said” by
Robert Frost, “I gave up fire for form till I was cold,” or that of Auden’s even
more laconic admonition, “If speech can never become music, neither can it
ever become algebra.” So now for application.

THE HEBREW BIBLE

The first stage in the development of the parable form will be taken from
the books of Ruth and Jonah in the Hebrew Bible. In the gospel of Luke
(24:27) the Hebrew Bible is referred to by the phrase, “Moses and all the
prophets.” This twofold division reflects two of the great traditions of Israel,
the legal and the prophetic. In Luke 24:44 this is expanded into “the law of
Moses and the prophets and the psalms,” so that a third major tradition, the
sapiential or wisdom tradition, is added. My suggestion is that the books of
Ruth and Jonah represent parables deliberately poised against the first two
of these traditions, the legal and the prophetic. (For a parabolic attack on the
wisdom tradition’s assurance that God rewards the good and punishes the
wicked here on earth, read the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 2.) As parables,
Ruth and Jonah do not intend to negate or destroy these magnificent
traditions, but they do intend to remind Israel about the difference between
the traditions of God and the God of the traditions.

The Book of Ruth

This book is really a short story and the synopsis given here should be
taken as a substitute for the four brief chapters of the story itself, which
deserves to be read in its entirety.

Elimelech is a native of Bethlehem whom famine forces to migrate with his

wife, Naomi, and their two sons into the non-Israelite regions of Moab. The
father dies, the two sons marry, and eventually they also die. So, with five
verses and three funerals, the stage is set for the story. Naomi decides to
return home, and her daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, want to accompany
her. She manages to dissuade Orpah, but Ruth insists on returning with her.
The words of her loyalty have justly become famous. “ ‘Entreat me not to
leave you or to return from following you; for where you go I will go, and
where you lodge I will lodge; you people shall be my people, and your God
my God’ ” (1:16). It is the time of the harvest and Ruth goes into the field of
one Boaz to glean barley as the field is harvested. Boaz, a relative of the
dead Elimelech, admires the loyalty of Ruth and makes certain that she is
able to glean far more than her share. Naomi now takes over and tells Ruth
to go to the threshing floor by night. There “when Boaz had eaten and drunk,
and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of grain.
Then she came softly, and uncovered his feet, and lay down” (3:7). The story
now moves to a climax. Boaz agrees to marry Ruth “in the morning” (3:13),
but he must first get permission from another relative who has prior rights to
both her land and her hand. This is swiftly done, and the story comes to a
happy ending. “So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife; and he went
into her, and the Lord gave her conception and she bore a son” (4:13).

If this beautiful story of fidelity and dignity had ended with the happiness
of Naomi, it could be explained as an example of God’s concern for and
reward of the graciousness of Ruth herself. But the story actually ends with
this genealogical statement: “They named him Obed; he was the father of
David. Now these are the descendants of Perez: Perez was the father of
Hezron, Hezron of Ram, Ram of Amminadab, Amminadab of Nashon, Nashon
of Salmon, Salmon of Boaz, Boaz of Obed, Obed of Jesse, and Jesse of David.”
In other words, it is twice repeated that Obed, the son of Ruth, was the
grandfather of David, the great king of Israel.

Otto Eissfeldt has argued that “the Ruth narrative had originally nothing at
all to do with David, but has only secondarily been made into a narrative
concerning David’s ancestors.” Why might this change have been made, so
that the pastoral idyll now ends with the reiterated statement that Ruth of
Moab was the great-grandmother of David? My suggested answer is that the
book of Ruth is a parable, not an apologue or example story of the divine
rewards for human fidelity.

To understand this biblical story as a parable, we need to look at the

background against which it was written. The Babylonians had destroyed
Jerusalem in 587 B.C. and had deported large numbers of the most important
and influential; members of the population. The Babylonians fell before Cyrus
and his Persians in 553, and in 538 Cyrus had issued a decree allowing the
exiles to return to Palestine. Under Persian tolerance, and despite
tremendous internal and external difficulties, the returned exiles started to
rebuild their shattered homeland under the guidance of Nehemiah and Ezra.
It is easy understand the intransigence that was needed to push through
such a restoration to its completion. The walls of Jerusalem had to be rebuilt,
the Temple and its worship restored, and, above all else, the Law of God,
which was the very heart of the theocratic state, had to be reinstituted.

Ezra had the official mandate of the Persian imperial power to teach and
enforce the Law of God. King Artaxerxes concluded his royal decree with
these words: “Whoever will not obey the law of your God and the law of the
king, let judgment be strictly executed upon him, whether for death or for
banishment or for confiscation of his goods or his imprisonment” (Ezra 7:26).
Ezra decided that such fidelity to God’s Law not only forbade any
intermarriage between Israelites and foreigners (it was a question of foreign
wives, mainly) but also demanded the present and immediate divorce of all
such marriages already contracted. Hence the confession and repentance of
Ezra 10:2-3. “ ‘We have broken faith with our God and have married foreign
women from the peoples of the land, but even now there is hope for Israel in
spite of this. Therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all
these wives and their children.’ ” There follows a great gathering where “all
the people sat in the open square before the house of God, trembling
because of this matter and because of the heavy rain” (10:9). (A little irony
there, maybe?) The whole gathering agrees to divorce all foreign wives. “ ‘It
is so; we must do as you have said. But the people are many, and it is a time
of heavy rain; we cannot stand in the open. Nor is this a work for one day or
for two; for we have greatly transgressed in this matter’ ” (10:12-13).

When the book of Ruth is read against this postexilic background of the
divorce and abandonment of foreign wives and their children, the polemic of
the genealogy becomes clear. Over against Ezra’s decree of divorce,
abandonment, and strict genealogical data stands this simple pastoral idyll.
In Ezra 9:1-2 complaint is made to him that “the people of Israel” have gone
to foreigners, among them “the Moabites,” and “have taken some of their
daughters to be wives for themselves and their sons.” But the book of Ruth
continually stresses that she is “a foreigner” (2:10), from Moab, and a
Moabitess (1:1,2,4,6,7,22; 2:2,6,21; 4:3,5,10). If Boaz had divorced Ruth and
abandoned her child, Obed, what, then, of David? Or, in the diagram format
of figure 8,

Figure 8

(Read: the hearer expects that God will grant approval to a Jewish-Jewish
marriage and disapproval to a Jewish-Foreign one, but the story tells of
divine approval to a Jewish-Foreign union.)

The Book of Jonah

Once again we are dealing with a short story that should be read in its
entirety. John Miles has described this story as a “parody laughing at the
Bible” itself. John McKenzie has called it a “parable [whose] story seems to
run directly counter to the ancient theology of election and covenant.” The
book of Jonah places a parable not only against the entire prophetic tradition
but against the very heart of the Bible itself. But, note well, against the Bible
within the Bible. I shall summarize the story in four main points: the call, the
mission, the message, and the anger of Jonah. In each of the drama’s four
acts what happens is the exact opposite of what one expects in a story from
the prophetic tradition.
First, the call of Jonah. When the prophet Isaiah is called to prophecy he is
eager and willing for that high destiny. In Isaiah 6:8-9: “I heard the voice of
the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said,
‘Here am I! Send me.’ And he said, ‘Go.’ ” When Jeremiah is called to his
vocation, he is at first afraid of its demands. In Jeremiah 1:6 he responds, “
‘Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.’ ”
Whether diffident or confident, however, the prophet must respond to his call
with obedience. This is the tradition. But what of Jonah’s call to prophecy?
“Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, ‘Arise,
go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has
come up before me.’ But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of
the Lord” (1:1-3). God commands him to go east by land. Jonah goes west by
sea. A strange prophet, this.

Second, the mission. God succeeds in getting Jonah going in the right
direction by having him thrown overboard in a storm, thrown, it should be
noted, by pagan sailors who know enough to realize that one cannot “flee
from the presence of the Lord” (1:10). Then comes the next indignity for the
recalcitrant prophet. “And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up
Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights”
(1:17). And debate has raged for generations over what precise species of
Mediterranean fish is large enough to swallow prophets without basic
structural damage to them, all the while completely ignoring the delicious
satire of the whole ptoceedings. This satire of the disobedient prophet
continues with his ignominious arrival in the Persian Gulf. “And the Lord
spoke to the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land” (2:10).

Third, the message. God now starts all over again with Jonah. “ ‘Arise, go to
Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you’ ”
(3:2). When he arrives there and delivers his message, that “Yet forty days,
and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ ” (3:4), the result is the most magnificent
repentance in the whole history of the prophetic tradition. “And the people of
Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed, a fast, and put on sackcloth, from
the greatest of them to the least of them” (3:5). Even the king: “he rose from
his throne, removed his robe, and covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in
ashes” (3:6) .A supreme satiric thrust is still to come. The repentance
extends even to the beasts. “ ‘Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock,
taste anything; let them not feed, or drink water, but let man and beast be
covered with sackcloth, and let them cry mightily to God’ ” (3:7-8).

Finally, the anger of Jonah, a concluding irony. God decides not to punish
Nineveh after all. This gives Jonah a somewhat belated excuse for his initial
refusal to obey the prophetic call. “ ‘I pray thee, Lord, is not this what I said
when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish;
for I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and
abounding in steadfast love, and repentest of evil.’ ” So Jonah sits out in the
desert, pouting, both because his prophecy of destruction has not come true
(as if the purpose of prophecy was accuracy rather than repentance) and
because the plant that had been shading him is withering. Then the final
sentence, with God speaking: “And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city,
in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who
do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?’ ” (4:11).

The structure of the parable is actually a double reversal of expectation

rather than a single one, as in the book of Ruth. This reverse is outlined in
figure 9 (compare with figure 8 above).

Figure 9

(Read: the hearer expects prophets to obey God, and pagans such as the
Ninevites, especially, to disobey God. But the speaker tells a story in which a
prophet disobeys and the Ninevites obey beyond all belief.)

It is also clear that, in this case, we have two Givers and one Receiver rather
than the reverse situation as in the book of Ruth.

The city of Nineveh was the capital of the brutal Assyrian Empire. To see
what biblical prophecy really thought of “that great city” one should read the
book of Nahum, which gives an entire chapter to a gleeful detailing of its
destruction. Nahum begins in 3:1. “Woe to that bloody city, all full of lies and
booty—no end to the plunder.” And he concludes his diatribe in 3:19: “There
is no assuaging your hurt, your wound is grievous. All who hear the news of
you clap their hands over you. For upon whom has not come your unceasing
evil?” In the parabolic book of Jonah there is, again, no destruction of the
magnificent traditions of election, covenant, and prophecy. All that happens
is what always happens in parable. God is given a little room in which to be
God, and we are reminded of our finitude and our humanity. As Robert Frost
has God explain to Job in his A Masque of Reason,

And it came out all right. I have no doubt

You realize by now the part you played
To stultify the Deuteronomist
And change the tenor of religious thought.
My thanks are to you for releasing me
From moral bondage to the human race.
The only free will there at first was man’s,
Who could do good or evil as he chose.
I had no choice but I must follow him
With forfeits and rewards he understood.
The question posed by the books of Ruth and Jonah is this. What if God does
not play the game by our rules?

SOME MODERN CASES

The two modern authors I have chosen to indicate contemporary

developments in the parable form are the Czech writer Franz Kafka and the
Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. These two authors are chosen because
their stories are parables in the technical sense used in this book.
In the special issue of the periodical TriQuarterly for 1972 devoted to Prose
for Borges there is an interesting article by Ben Belitt entitled “The enigmatic
predicament: some parables of Kafka and Borges.” He sums up their
parabolic contribution with this comment: “as insights, parables serve what
might be called an epistemology of loss. Their value, as knowledge, is to
enhance our ‘consciousness of ignorance’—but that is the beginning of
philosophy.” I suspect it is also the start of religious experience.

Franz Kafka

Roland Barthes wrote this of Kafka in his collected Critical Essays: “Kafka’s
technique says that the world’s meaning is unutterable, that the artist’s only
task is to explore possible significations, each of which taken by itself will be
only a (necessary) lie but whose multiplicity will be the writer’s truth itself.”
This can serve as introduction to the parabolic nature of Kafka’s work.

In the Kafka anthology Parables and Paradoxes there is a story, “Before the
Law,” which is excerpted from his novel The Trial. This is how the story
begins: “Before the Law stands a doorkeeper on guard. To this doorkeeper
there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance to the Law.
But the doorkeeper says that he cannot admit the man at the moment.” The
man waits and waits, but the doorkeeper continues to refuse him admittance
“yet.” Finally, the man is dying, and he calls the doorkeeper over to his side.
“ ‘Everyone strives to attain the Law’ . . . ‘how does it come about, then, that
in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?’ The
doorkeeper perceives that the man is at the end of his strength and that his
hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: ‘No one but you could gain
admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am
now going to shut it.’ ”

One can recognize immediately the parabolic structure, with its single
reversal, as shown in figure 10.
Figure 10

(Read: the hearer expects a doorkeeper to give admittance to those for

whom the door was intended but no admittance to others. Instead, the story
has no admittance given to a man for whom the door was specially planned.)

After the story proper there is a discussion concerning it between K. and “the
priest.” Is the man at fault for not trying harder, or is the doorkeeper at fault
for denying him admittance? At the very end the disturbing third alternative
begins to loom before their eyes. Could it be that nobody is “at fault” for the
situation except, of course, the Law which established such a situation. . . .

There are certain standard reactions that I get from undergraduate college
students when they read this story for the first time .Some find no problem in
it since they read into it a Christian conclusion that presumes the man is
admitted after his death. To which I can only reply, as the priest does to K. in
their discussion, “ ‘You have not enough respect for the written word and
you are altering the story.’ ” Many (most) have a John Wayne reaction to the
problem and blame the man for not forcing his way past the doorkeeper. This
despite the story’s clear warning that force would be futile. “ ‘But note that I
am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall keepers
stand at every door, one more powerful than the other. Even the third of
these has an aspect that even I can not bear to look at.’ ” Others blame the
doorkeeper, even though there is no indication in the story that he is
exceeding his function and his responsibility. But there are always a few in
every class who hear Kafka’s challenge with all its disturbing clarity” what if
life were like a door intended for you alone but through which you could not
enter?

Jorge Luis Borges

The American novelist John Barth wrote an article on Borges in The Atlantic
Monthly for August 1967 and called it, “The Literature of Exhaustion.” By this
he meant the literature “of exhausted possibilities.” He discussed how a
modern writer, precisely as modern, might have to make literature out of the
experienced difficulty or even felt impossibility of making literature any
longer. The novel is dead. Well, then, write a novel about the funeral.
“Moreover, like all of Borges’ work, it illustrates in other of its aspects my
subject: how an artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time
into material and means for his work—paradoxically because by doing so he
transcends what had happened to be his refutation, in the same way that the
mystic who transcends finitude is said to be enabled to live, spiritually and
physically, in the finite world.” It is this which fascinates me with Borges and
it is this which makes him a “parabler” in the sense used in this book.

Take, for example, his short story “The Circular Ruins.” It can be found in
at least four different collections of his work, in Ficciones (1962) or
Labyrinths (1962) or A Personal Anthology (1967) or The Aleph and Other
Stories 1933-1969 (1970). Because paraphrase fails dismally to convey the
persuasive power of his prose, I shall quote him often.

A stranger came ashore from the south by night and fell fainting amid the
circular ruins at a “temple which was destroyed ages ago by flames, which
the swampy wilderness later desecrated, and whose god no longer receives
the reverence of men.” The stranger rested and slept. We are told that “his
guiding purpose, though it was supernatural, was not impossible. He wanted
to dream a man; he wanted to dream him down to the last detail and project
him into the world of reality.” He began by dreaming the circular ruins into a
university lecture theater and listened carefully to the responses of the
crowds of students who answer his questions. “He was in search of a soul
worthy of taking a place in the world.”

He dreamt day and night save for an hour or two at dawn. After ten days
he had divided the students into passive recipients and active questioners
“who from time to time hazarded reasonable doubts about what he taught.”
Finally, he chose one of these latter students, and dismissed all the rest. He
concentrated totally on this one student. Then, catastrophe. He awoke to
insomnia. He tried everything to resume dreaming but to no avail, and “in
his almost endless wakefulness, tears of anger stung his old eyes.” Only
when he finally gave up trying to dream for a whole month did he finally fall
asleep and was able to start all over again.

This time his first dream was of a human heart, and from there, in a period
of one year, he built up, dream by dream, a full human being, although “the
countless strands of hair were perhaps the hardest task of all.” But the
young man he had dreamed would not open his eyes. “Night after night, the
man dreamed him asleep.” Despondent, he almost destroyed the young man
but, restraining himself, turned in his dream for aid from the god whose
ruined temple he had inhabited. This god revealed that its earthly name was
Fire and that “through its magic the phantom of the man’s dreams would be
awakened to life in such a way that—except for Fire itself and the dreamer—
every being in the world would accept him as a man of flesh and blood.”
Once the young man was alive, the god ordered him to be sent north to a
second ruined temple to worship the god at his other shrine. “In the
dreamer’s dream, the dreamed one awoke.”

Slowly the man inserted him, step by step, into reality. “On one occasion
he commanded him to set up a flag on a distant peak. The next day, there
on the peak, a fiery pennant shone.” Finally, he sent the young man north
and erased from his mind all memory of his apprenticeship.

Later, he worried about his “unreal son” when travelers from the north told
him of a certain magician in a temple downstream who could walk unharmed
on fire. “He feared that his son might wonder at this strange privilege and in
some way discover his condition as a mere appearance.”

This anxiety was interrupted by the arrival of a long drought which

eventually precipitated a forest fire that threw the animals of the forest into
a headlong panic. As had happened long before, the fire god’s shrine was to
be destroyed by fire. “For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the river,
but then he realized that death was coming to crown his years and to release
him from his labors. He walked into the leaping pennants of flame. They did
not bite into his flesh, but caressed him and flooded him without heat or
burning. In relief, in humiliation, in terror, he understood that he, too, was an
appearance, that someone else was dreaming him.”

The story operates with a very subtle double reversal, as indicated in figure
11.

Figure 11

(Read: we expect human beings to give real existence only to real persons
and to distinguish dream existence fro dream persons, but the story reverses
these expectations.)

The reversal is developed in two shapes. First, we see what we presume is

an “ordinary” human being giving real existence to a dreamed figure, but, at
the very end, we discover that this ordinary human being was himself
dreamed into reality by somebody else. At that point real/dreamed merge
and fluctuate, and we ask: Is everybody, then, dreamed of another?

This question may seem just a game of rhetorical whimsy unless we think
of its ontological implications. We know that storytellers and dramatists
“dream up” characters and that the best of these become both international
and immortal. They are more real than real persons. I can call somebody a
“Hamlet” and be understood across centuries and continents. If there is only
story, as this book has argued, then we are all characters in vast interlayers
of story. We are all dreamed up by both ourselves and by others. Is it not
perfectly ordinary language to speak of living in the nightmare of Hitler’s
Europe? This tale of Borges is a parable against the claim of a fixed reality,
an objective world out there waiting for our neutral perusal. The story
reminds us of what Borges himself said elsewhere: “We must go even
further; we must suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying
sense inherent in that ambitious word.” There is only story, and that means
there is only carefully disciplined dreaming.

I shall conclude with another quotation from Borges which might well have
stood as the epigraph for this book. “This will be our destiny—to give
ourselves to syntax, to its treacherous linkage, to imprecision, to perhaps, to
the exaggerated emphasis, to buts, to the hemisphere of lies and shadows in
our sayings.” In a word, to story.

THE ART OF THE PARABLE

So much for arrows and diagrams, for systems and structures, and for what
the poet Pablo Neruda calls one’s “shipshape box of tricks.” Is that all there
is to parables, a few lines and a few arrows? A parable is rather like a person.
Everyone has to have a skeletal system, but we usually take its presence
absolutely for granted unless a situation of structural damage arises. But it is
not the skeletal system that renders persons interesting or attractive. The
skeleton is there and surgeons know it. So also with parables. I have been
analyzing only their skeletal systems. Now a few words about their beauty
and their art.

How exactly can one tell a story which attacks and undermines the
hearer’s structure of expectation without the hearer simply shrugging off the
attack by stating that one’s parabolic story just could not happen? It is in the
surface structure and texture that the parabler must use consummate skill
so that the deep structure of the parable gets into the hearer’s
consciousness and is only felt in its full force there when it is too late to do
much about it.

Two examples will have to suffice. In the Kafka story examined above we
are persuaded to accept the story’s “realistic” possibility because we see it
unroll before our very eyes. We see the “doorkeeper in his furred robe, with
his huge pointed nose and long, thin, Tartar beard,” and we, like the man
seeking admittance, “have learned to know even the fleas in the
doorkeeper’s collar.” How can we deny the actuality of such a doorkeeper
when we have seen the very fleas in his collar? Or, as a second example,
note the details in the Borges story. He opens it with what seems like an
exact geographic designation. The stranger’s “home was among the
numberless villages upstream on the steep slopes of the mountain, where
the Zend language is barely tainted with Greek and where lepers are rare.”
We get out a map. But then we recall the interchange between Borges and a
journalist concerning the title story of his collection The Aleph and Other
Stories 1933-1969. “ ‘Ah,’ said the journalist, ‘so the entire thing is your own
invention. I thought it was true because you gave the name of the street.’ I
did not dare to tell him that the naming of streets is not much of a feat.”

It may even be conjectured that parable always has to be short, like all the
examples cited above. Borges had admitted that he cannot write a novel and
has suggested that Kafka could not either, even though he tried it a few
times. Maybe, and I would leave it only as a maybe, parable has to be short
just as myth tends to be long.

It is clear that parable is really a story event and not just a story. One can
tell oneself stories but not parables. One cannot really do so just as one
cannot really beat oneself at chess or fool oneself completely with a riddle
one has just invented. It takes two to parable.
CHAPTER FOUR

Jesus as Parabler
Up to this point I have talked only of spoken or written parables, of
parables of word. Here I wish to begin with parables of deed, parables which
are enacted rather than just spoken or written down. One can oppose a
structure of expectation by word and also by deed.

PARABLE AND DEED

Parabolic deeds are part of the recent experience of protest in this country.
If a black minister sat at a segregated lunch counter or if a rabbi poured
blood over draft files or if a priest burned his country’s flag, the action forced
the viewer to face the following structural dilemma as the minister of God’s
word was led off to jail, as in figure 12.

Figure 12

(Read: one expects the government to give prison to criminals but no prison
to ministers. But if ministers go to prison, are criminals free? And what then
of the government. . .)

The action begets a series of very disturbing questions, and such is, of
course, the very precise purpose of the action. Bad: why are ministers in jail
(single reversal)? Worse still: does this mean that criminals are not in jail
(double reversal)? Worst: what of the government which creates such an
anomalous situation? And now to parabolic deed in the case of Jesus.

Professor John R. Donahue of Vanderbilt University wrote a very interesting

article called “Tax Collectors and Sinners” in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly in
1971. His general conclusions are significant for our present point. It is clear
that stories concerning Jesus’ fellowship with toll collectors and sinners
belong to the earliest strata of the gospel tradition; even though these
stories have certainly been changed and modified in transmission, they still
contain historical reminiscences of the ministry of Jesus. Who exactly were
these people with whom Jesus is accused of consorting? In the classical
publican system of taxation the ruler gave complete charge of all taxes to
local leading citizens who acted as tax farmers, or publicans. These persons
would pay the ruler a set amount in advance, and it would thereafter be their
problem to get sufficient taxes and profits back from the ordinary people.
This system was not in practice in Palestine in the New Testament period. In
the strict sense of the word, therefore, no real “publicans” appear in the
gospel texts. The direct taxes, at that time, were under the supervision of
the central authority, it was the indirect taxes, the tolls and other imposts,
that were farmed out to individual lessees. This farming of taxes brought
with it all the evils of dishonesty and exorbitant tariffs that could be
expected from such a system. We are dealing, then, with toll-collectors
rather than with publicans or even tax collectors in the gospel texts. This is
why, for instance, we come across them at those commercial centers where
the collection of tolls would be expected. We have Levi, the toll-collector, at
Capernaum, in Mark 2:14, and also Zacchaeus, the head toll-collector, at
Jericho, in Luke 19:2. Why “toll-collectors” would be synonymous with
“sinners” is clear from such places as Luke 3:12: when John is baptizing.
“Tax collectors also came to be baptized, and said to him, ‘Teacher, what
shall we do?’ And he said to them, ‘Collect no more than is appointed you.’ ”
In summary, then, the principal reason for the scandal of Jesus would be his
association with dishonest people. The phrase “toll-collectors and sinners”
would not refer to two separate groups but to a single group. It would mean,
“toll-collectors because they are sinners.”

What is striking in all this is that the earliest layers of the gospel traditions
re cord this scandalous association of Jesus with such dishonest people, but
they are not very clear about its purpose. If these people all abandoned their
morally dangerous, if not downright dishonest, profession, why the scandal?
There would hardly be room for criticism if Jesus’ association with them
obtained repentance, as in the story in Luke 19:7-8: “And when they saw it
they all murmured, ‘He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.’
And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, ‘Behold, Lord, the half of my
goods I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded any one of anything, I
restore it fourfold.’ ” I would suggest that the association was deliberately
shocking and intentionally parabolic rather than a prelude to or a result of
repentance. It was intended to raise questions of who was right and wrong
before God and of how securely or self-righteously such decisions could be
rendered. This shock can be outlined as in figure 13.

Figure 13

(Read: one expects Jesus as a prophet of God to consort with the virtuous
and not with sinners. If he does the opposite, does this mean that the
virtuous are sinners and sinners virtuous, or what?)

The parabolic deed, precisely as parabolic, does not exalt the toll-collectors
as virtuous. It is not a manifesto for theft. But it reminds everyone that God
is even more important than ethics and that God may not always approve
our moral judgments.
PARABLE AND HUMOR

In the fivefold typology of story given above in figure 3, I noted how close
parable is to satire. This section will focus on the satirical humor present in
Jesus’ parables, taking as examples the parables of the Mustard Seed and of
the Lost Sheep and Lost Coin.

The Mustard Seed

The parable can be told from the text of Luke 13:18-19. “He said therefore,
‘What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a
grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden; and it
grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.’
” The mustard seed was proverbial for its small size. Recall the words of
Jesus in Luke 17:6: “And the Lord said, ‘If you have faith as a grain of
mustard seed, you could say to this sycamine tree, “Be rooted up, and be
planted in the sea,” and it would obey you.’ ” Jesus associates the kingdom
of God with this mustard plant, and the text concludes with the pictorial
image of birds nesting in its branches.

This image reminds one of another somewhat similar image in the Hebrew
Bible. (The italics in this and the following passages are mine.) In Ezekiel
21:2-6 the prophet is told by God, “Say to Pharaoh king of Egypt and to his
multitude: “Whom are you like in your greatness? Behold, I will liken you to a
cedar in Lebanon, with fair branches and forest shade, and of great height,
its tops among the clouds. The waters nourished it, the deep made it grow
tall, making its rivers flow round the place of its planting , sending forth its
streams to all the trees of the forest; its boughs grew large and its branches
long, from abundant water in its shoots. All the birds of the air made their
nests in its boughs.” The power of the Egyptian empire is like that of
Lebanon’s mighty cedar, with all the other nations under its branches.
Exactly the same figure is used for Nebuchadnezzar, head of the Babylonian
empire, in Daniel 4:10-12: “I saw, and behold, a tree in the midst of the
earth; and its height was great. The tree grew and became strong, and its
top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the end of the whole earth. Its
leaves were fair and its fruit abundant, and in it was food for all. The beasts
of the field found shade under it, and the birds of the air dwelt in its
branches.” Again, a great and mighty tree with birds in its branches is a
symbol of imperial power and majesty. Finally, in Ezekiel 17:22-23 the
Lebanese cedar is again used but this time to image the Messiah himself as
a cedar shoot whence would grow the messianic kingdom. “Thus says the
Lord God: ‘I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar, and will
set it out; I will break off from the topmost of its young twigs a tender one,
and I myself will plant it upon a high and lofty mountain; on the mountain
height of Israel will I plant it, that it may bring forth boughs and bear fruit,
and become a noble cedar; and under it will dwell all kinds of beasts; in the
shade of its branches birds of every sort will nest.’ ”

So, in the biblical traditions before Jesus, the great cedar of Lebanon, with
birds in its branches, was considered a fitting image for the mighty imperial
kingdom of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and even for the Messiah and the
messianic kingdom itself. But, against such a tradition, Jesus chooses a far
more humble image, one which is a deliberate lampoon on the cedar’s
pretentiousness. The kingdom of God is not like the proverbial cedar of
Lebanon but is like the very ordinary mustard plant. This is a satiric thrust at
the earlier image with its apocalyptic tree whose “top reached to heaven” in
Daniel 4:11, the tree with its “top among the clouds” in Ezekiel 31:3. This
ironic purpose explains certain features of Luke’s text. The tradition does not
seem to have appreciated the irony of Jesus’ story. So it tried to bring Jesus’
story more into line with the earlier tradition by calling the mustard shrub a
“tree” and by having the birds “nest” in its branches. In the original story
they would have been on the ground seeking the seed in the shade of the
tree. By doing this, of course, they would only have highlighted the
incompatibility of the mustard “tree” and cedar of Lebanon! One must
presume that the tradition was not quite as much at home with this gentle
satire on the messianic cedar as Jesus obviously was. Possibly it should have
reread Ezekiel 17:24. “And all the trees of the field shall know that I the Lord
bring low the high tree, and make high the low tree, dry up the green tree,
and make the dry tree flourish.” And trees shall be shrubs, and shrubs trees.

The Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin

The two stories appear in tandem format in Luke 15:1-10. (I include the
verse numbers here). (1) “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all
drawing near to hear him. (2) And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured,
saying, ‘This man receives sinners and east with them.’ (3) So he told them
this parable: (4) ‘What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost
one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after
the one which is lost, until he finds it? (5) And when he has found it, he lays
it on his shoulders, rejoicing. (6) And when he comes home, he calls together
his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have
found my sheep which was lost.” (7) Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy
in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous
persons who need no repentance. (8) Or what woman, having ten silver
coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and
seek diligently until she finds it? (9) And when she has found it, she calls
together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have
found the coin which I had lost.” (10) Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the
angels of God over one sinner who repents.’ ”
When the twin stories are read within their present interpretive frames, as
given in Luke 15:1-3,7,9, there are no problems concerning their meaning, as
outlined in figure 14.

Figure 14

In the present Lukan context, in other words, Jesus is the one who searches,
and sinners are those for whom he searches. But here is an interesting point.
In John 10 this image is expanded to a full discussion of Jesus as the Good
Shepherd who “calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he
has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him
for they know his voice” (10:3-4). Not only does Jesus the shepherd lead his
flock to water and to pasture but he even dies to protect them. “I am the
good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. He who
is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf
coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and
scatters them. He flees because he is a hireling and cares nothing for the
sheep. I am the good the shepherd” (10:11-14). But nobody in the entire
New Testament literature picked up the second and parallel story in Luke
and developed the image of Jesus as the Good Housewife. If Jesus and/or God
could be the Good Shepherd of the first story in Luke 15:3-7, why not also
the Good Housewife of Luke 15:8-10? Is this, then, the ironic humor of these
twin stories? Is one trapped into having God and/or Jesus, if a Good Shepherd
(male), then also a Good Housewife (female)? Or is there an even more
profound level of irony hidden in the two stories?

Modern biblical scholarship has taught us to distinguish between the

stories of Jesus in their original intentionality and in their present
interpretations within the gospel texts. We shall see more on this possible
difference between original function and final evangelical usage in the next
section. I am going to leave aside for the moment the interpretive frames in
Luke 15:1-3, which gives a “setting” for the parables, and also the
concluding application for each one in 15:7 and in 15:10. For now I want to
look at the two isolated stories as read in 15:4-6 and 15:8-9. Both tell of a
loss, a successful search, and of the general rejoicing at a happy outcome to
the initial problem.

There are two other parables of Jesus which are very similar to this
sequence. These are also given in tandem format in Matthew 13:44-46. They
are the parables of the Hidden Treasure and the Pearl. “The kingdom of
heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up;
then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again,
the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on
finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”
In these parables the searcher is usually seen as the human person and the
object found is God or the kingdom of God (or of heaven). I would suggest
that this is also what Jesus, as distinct from Luke, intended the stories of the
Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin to indicate as well. In the original stories of
Jesus we are the searchers, shepherd and housewife, male and female, and
that for which we search is the kingdom of God whose finding is the occasion
for communal rejoicing. Hence the “joy” of Matthew 13:44 is exactly the
same as the “joy” of Luke 15:6 and 9.

If this interpretation is correct, the irony is immediately evident. Israel had

a long and magnificent tradition of God as the shepherd of his people. Recall,
for example, these prophetic texts. In Isaiah 40:10-11, “Behold, the Lord God
comes with might, and his arm rules for him. . . . He will feed his flock like a
shepherd, he will gather the lambs in his arms, he will carry them in his
bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.” Since the leaders if his
people have proved themselves false shepherds, God himself must find new
shepherds. So Jeremiah 23:1-4. “ ‘Woe to the shepherds who destroy and
scatter the sheep of my pasture!’ says the Lord. Therefore thus says the
Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who care for my people:
‘You have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not
attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the
Lord. Then will I gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries
where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they
shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over them who will care for
them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be
missing, says the Lord.’ ” Indeed, since human shepherds have failed God’s
flock so badly, God himself will have to be their shepherd .This is the theme
of the entire chapter of Ezekiel 34, and is expressed climactically in 34:11-
12: “For thus says the Lord God: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep,
and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when some of his
sheep have been scattered abroad, so will I seek out my sheep; and I will
rescue them from all the places where they have been scattered of a day of
clouds and thick darkness.”

Once again, Jesus’ story appears as a gentle and ironic reversal of this
great tradition. For the prophets, God was the shepherd and the searcher,
and his people were the lost and wandering sheep, the object of God’s
search. For Jesus, it is the opposite. We are the searchers, but we search for
what we have lost, for what was ours “in the beginning.” In ironic humor
Jesus makes God the lost sheep and the lost coin, and all of us, male and
female alike, searchers for what we have lost. So Jesus called us, long ago,
the Shepherd of God.

PARABLE AND WORD

In this section I will examine a few of the parables expressed by Jesus in
word rather than in deed.

The Pharisee and the Publican

Here is the story as told in Luke 18:10-13, leaving aside the opening and
closing frames of 18:9 and 14. “Two men went up into the temple to pray,
one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed
thus with himself, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men,
extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a
week, I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off,
would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God,
be merciful to me a sinner!’ ”

There is an immediate problem. Parables are supposed to overturn one’s

structure of expectation and therein and thereby to threaten the security of
one’s man made world. Such terms as “Pharisee” and “Publican” (or toll
collector) evoke no immediate visceral reaction or expectation from a
modern reader. In fact, after centuries of extremely nasty and quite
inaccurate polemics against the Pharisees by Christians, the former have
become almost stereotyped villains rather than the revered moral leaders
they were at the time of Jesus. So, our structure of expectation is not that of
the original hearers of the parable, and the parable now leaves us
emotionally rather cold. No doubt we can have it all explained to us in terms
of its original historical impact within the language possibilities of Jesus’ own
day and audience. But a parable which has to be explained is, like a joke in
similar circumstances, a parable which has been ruined as parable. The
structure can be outlined as in figure 15.

Figure 15

(Read: the hearer expects the Pharisee’s prayer to be accepted by God and
the Publican’s to be rejected, but the story has the opposite happen.)

Two items of folklore information may serve to underline the

unexpectedness of Jesus’ juxtaposition of the virtuous Pharisee and the
dishonest Publican.

Heddy Jason wrote an interesting doctoral dissertation at Indiana University

in 1968 with the title Conflict and Resolution in Jewish Sacred Tales. The
tales were collected from Mediterranean and Near Eastern Jews who lived in
Muslim countries for at least part of their past. With the establishment of the
state of Israel this society ceased to exist for the most part, its members
gradually emigrating to Israel. She has this conclusion about the stories.
“The religious leader is implicitly the representative of the supreme values of
the society and a questioning of his personal qualities or his right to
leadership detracts from the validity of these values. For this reason there is
not a single story in the whole Jewish Near Eastern material at our disposal
which portrays the rabbi in a negative light or ridicules him as, on the
contrary the priest is frequently ridiculed in the Christian-European tradition,
or as, occasionally, is the rabbi in Jewish European society.” We today have
to exercise some imagination to appreciate the shock of such a devastatingly
simple reversal as that given in Jesus’ short parable.

A second example shows that Jesus’ story is not only unusual in his own
tradition, but also quite unexpected against the general background of
folktales themselves. W. R. Bascom has two essays in The Study of Folklore,
edited by Alan Dundes in 1965. In “Folklore and Anthropology” he says, “In
addition to the obvious function of entertainment or amusement, folklore
serves to sanction the established beliefs, attitudes, and institutions, both
sacred and secular, and it plays a vital role in education in non-literate
societies.” Again, in “Four Functions of Folklore,” he asks the rhetorical
question, “There is no difficulty, of course, in finding instances in folklore
where laziness, complacency, or the lack of ambition and initiative are
condemned, but are there any which suggest that the individual destroy or
even disregard the institutions and conventions of his society?” It is precisely
this that Jesus’ parable suggests.

The Good Samaritan

This is possibly the best known of Jesus’ stories. It was this story which
initiated my own interest in parable several years ago. It occurred to me
then, and I have not been able to exhaust this subject in my own mind as
yet, that there seemed to be a totally different, even generically different,
meaning to this story at an earlier level than is now given to it within the
interpretive frames of Luke 10:25-29 and 10:36.

The present frames in Luke 10 make this story an example of how one
should help one’s neighbor in distress and, indeed, even one’s enemy, if in
need of assistance. It is told in answer to the lawyer’s question, “ ‘And who is
my neighbor?’ ” As the answer to such a question, the story clearly means
that one one’s neighbor is anyone in need, even an enemy. But, let us leave
aside the editorial frames and see the story as story, in Luke 10:30-35: “ ‘A
man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers,
who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by
chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed
by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and
saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed,
came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went
to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on
his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next
day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, “Take
care of him and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come
back.” ’ ”

As with the last story, there are terms in this narrative that have to be
understood by a modern reader. The storyteller is a Jew talking to fellow
Jews, possibly in a Jerusalem setting (from the oblique reference to the
robbed man as going down from Jerusalem to Jericho). The traveler is “one of
us,” in a location we can all easily imagine, says the storyteller. Those who
refuse aid are official religious leaders, a “Priest and a Levite,” chosen most
likely because of the Jerusalem setting of the teller. This is the first surprise,
but the second shock is even greater. The person who performs the good act
and helps the wounded man is a Samaritan, a socio-religious outcast. As John
4:9 put it simply and summarily, “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.”
That is the problem. The “good” act evilly and the “bad” act virtuously. But if
the story really intended to encourage help to one’s neighbor in distress or
even to one’s enemy in need, would it not have been much better to have a
wounded Samaritan in that ditch and have a Jew stop to aid him?

Since “Priest,” “Levite,” and “Samaritan” have no immediate emotional

connotations for the modern reader, I would like to rephrase the story in
contemporary dress and attempt to convey anew its shock and its challenge.
First story. The storyteller is a priest in a Roman Catholic pulpit in Belfast.
The wounded man “lived on the Falls Road,” that is, obliquely, he was one of
us. A member of the I.R.A. passed him by. So did a Catholic nun. A Protestant
terrorist stopped and helped him. Fill out the details. What is the reaction of
the hearers? Second story. The storyteller has just returned from Vietnam at
the time when American soldiers were still fighting there and is on the
evening news. The wounded person is a woman correspondent for NBC.
Those who pass by without helping her are, first, an American Green Beret
and, second, an ARVN soldier .She is saved, finally, by a guerilla fighting with
the Viet Cong. Fill out the details. What viewer reactions will be mailed in to
the station?

In each of these stories the teller would, of course, fill in the action of the
helper in great detail. In fact more than half the length of the story should be
given over to how the unexpected helper acts. My question is this. Do we
really think that the two storytellers would be able to convince an audience
which was about to lynch them that all they were trying to say was: love
your enemies? When I tried out the second story on a class of college
freshmen I found that many could accept the possibility of assistance from
the Viet Cong (this was in 1973) but that they said, “you should have left out
the part about the Green Beret.” The students sensed immediately that
something more than “help your neighbor” or even “help your enemy in
distress” was going on in the Belfast and Vietnam stories. So, apart from the
problem that the terms of the Good Samaritan story evoke no immediate
emotional reactions from the contemporary reader, the structure is still
clearly that of a parable, as in figure 16.

Figure 16
(Read: the hearer expects the Priest and Levite to help and the Samaritan to
refuse assistance, but the story details exactly the opposite.)

That is why, for those who like to count words in Greek, there are forty-six
words given to what precedes the arrival of the Samaritan on the scene but
sixty words devoted to his arrival and, step-by-step, to his reaction. Since
this reaction is so unexpected, it must be spelled out in explicit detail. The
hearer must not be able to shrug it off by saying: No Samaritan would act
that way! He must feel instead: I have just seen the wine and the oil, the
donkey, and the inn. I have just seen the two denarii exchange hands and I
have just heard the Samaritan discuss the situation with the innkeeper. . . .
But whether one’s mind reacts properly or not, the Good Samaritan (“the
good terrorist,” today?) is an attack on the structure of expectation and not a
story which inculcates assistance to those in distress although, of course, it
takes it absolutely for granted that assistance is required in such a case.

The Great Feast

The two previous parables were recorded only in Luke and the analysis was
therefore fairly simple. The parable of the Great Feast is much more
involved, and the investigation is in effect a miniature introduction to
modern gospel criticism. The story appears in three different versions. The
first two are in the canonical gospels in the New Testament, in Matthew 22:1-
14 and Luke 14:16-24. The version in Matthew 22:1-14 has two separate
parts, the feast in 22:1-10 and the wedding garment in 22:11-14. Again, I
include the verse numbers. (1) “And again Jesus spoke to them in parables,
saying, (2) ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a
marriage feast for his son, (3) and sent his servants to call those who were
invited to the marriage feast; but they would not come. (4) Again he sent
other servants, saying, “Tell those who are invited, Behold, I have made
ready my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves are killed, and everything is
ready; come to the marriage feast.” (5) But they made light of it and went
off, one to his farm, another to his business, (6) while the rest seized his
servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them. (7) The king was angry,
and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.
(8) Then he said to his servants, “The wedding is ready, but those invited
were not worthy. (9) Go therefore in the thoroughfares, and invite to the
marriage feast as many as you find.” (10) And those servants went out into
the streets and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good; so the
wedding hall was filled with guests.’ ”

“ ‘(11) But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a
man who had no wedding garment; (12) and he said to him, “Friend, how did
you get in here without a wedding garment?” And he was speechless. (13)
Then the king said to his attendants, “Bind him hand and foot, and cast him
into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.” (14) For
many are called but few are chosen.’ ”

The second account is in Luke 14:16-24, but note that in this case there is
only the feast story and nothing about any wedding garment. (16) “But he
said to him, ‘A man once gave a great banquet, and invited many; (17) and
at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those he had
invited, “Come, for all is now ready.” (18) But they all alike began to make
excuses. The first said to him, “I have bought a field, and I must go out and
see it; I pray you, have me excused.” (19) And another said, “I have bought
five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them; I pray you, have me excused.”
(20) And another said, “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.”
(21) So the servant came and reported this to his master. Then the
householder in anger said to his servant, “Go out quickly to the streets and
lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and maimed and blind and lame.”
(22) And the servant said, “Sir, what you commanded has been done, and
still there is room.” (23) And the master said to the servant, “Go out to the
highways and hedges, and compel people to come in, that my house may be
filled. (24) For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my
banquet.” ’ ”

The third version needs a few words of explanation. Around the same time
that those famous scrolls were discovered at Qumran on the northwestern
shore of the Dead Sea, another collection of manuscripts was found at Nag
Hammadi in Upper Egypt. These were written in Coptic and seem to be the
remnants of a library belonging to a Gnostic sect. One of the documents—
The Gospel according to Thomas—is of special importance for the present
discussion. This is not a gospel in the usual sense of that term. It does not
have the standard “story” format, starting with John the Baptist and ending
with Jesus’ death and resurrection. Instead, it has around 114 sayings and
parables of Jesus, most of them beginning with a simple “Jesus said.” What
concerns us here is that we have another version of the parable of the Great
Feast in this apocryphal, or noncanonical gospel, in the saying (or logion) 64.
Here is that version. “Jesus said: A man had guest friends, and when he had
prepared the dinner, he sent his servants to invite the guest friends. He went
to the first, he said to him: ‘My master invites thee’. He said, ‘I have some
claims against some merchants; they will come to me in the evening; I will
go and give them my orders. I pray to be excused from the dinner’. He went
to another, he said to him, ‘My master has invited thee’. He said to him, ‘I
have bought a house and they request me for a day. I will have no time’. He
came to another, he said to him, ‘My master invites thee’. He said to him:
‘My friend is to be married and I am to arrange a dinner; I shall not be able to
come. I pray to be excused from the dinner’. He went to another, he said to
him: ‘My master invites thee’. He said to him: ‘I have bought a farm. I go to
collect the rent. I shall not be able to come. I pray to be excused’. The
servant came, he said to the master: ‘Those whom thou hast invited to the
dinner have excused themselves’. The master said to his servant: ‘Go out to
the roads, bring those whom thou shalt find, so that they may dine.
Tradesmen and merchants shall not enter the places of my Father.’ ”

Scholars still debate whether the Gospel of Thomas is derived from our
canonical gospels or represents instead an independent tradition of the
sayings and parables of Jesus. It does seem that the latter is the best
possibility at the moment. There is also a problem about whether Matthew
and Luke have a common source or are mutually independent versions. For
now, I shall leave aside these problems in source criticism and work with
three variants of one original story. I shall be concerned with what that
original story said and with what changes were effected in it and why. Even a
cursory reading of the three versions given above discloses the general
similarities and also the individual differences in the three accounts.

I have two reasons for spending so much time on this parable. First, it is a
classic case of the tradition’s change of a parable of Jesus into an example-
story and an allegory of the history of salvation. If we understand this case,
we will have grasped a process at work in all the parables of Jesus. Second, it
is a somewhat amusing example of what happens when a parable is taken
literally. Matthew finds he has to add a postscript to the story, warning that
there might be some at the feast who would get thrown out by the master!

Invitation to the first guests. The festive occasion has grown dramatically
from a small dinner party in Thomas, to a great banquet in Luke, and into the
wedding banquet of a king’s son in Matthew. The degree of culpability on the
part of the refusing guests is much greater in Matthew and Luke than in
Thomas. In the first two cases they had accepted a past invitation, but, upon
being reminded of the present arrival of the date, they refuse to come. This
makes their excuses sound like deliberate insults. But in Thomas the story is
both simple and realistic. The man prepares a dinner and sends out
invitations, apparently that very day. By the time the servant goes around to
the guests and gets back with their refusals, the dinner is already prepared
and will be wasted now that no one is coming. The refusals seem much less
insulting and much more normal in Thomas.

Servant(s) and refusals. The most obvious difference is now between

Matthew and the other two sources. Matthew sends out two groups of
servants, and those in the second group are murdered; a lethal note enters
in the heretofore somewhat amusing story. Neither Luke nor Thomas have
two groups of servants or, indeed, even one group. Each has a single servant
going from one guest to the next, inviting them in turn. Both have the
dialogue in direct speech between servant and guest. The only significant
difference is that Luke has three refusing guests while Thomas has four
excuses and refusals.

Punishment. Since Matthew alone has the murder of the servants, he alone
has the punishment for this murder, and it involves the burning of the
murderers’ city.

Invitation to new guests. There are two major differences. Luke alone has
two separate invitations to two groups of replacement or new guests.
Second, Luke alone specifies the new guests as “the poor and maimed and
blind and lame.” Matthew has “bad and good” among them, but Thomas
simply says “those whom thou shalt find.”

Conclusion. The most striking difference is in Matthew. He alone has a

whole new act in the drama, that of the wedding garment. Presumably it is
because of this addition that he has made the banquet a wedding from the
very beginning. But this incident does not really fit too well with the earlier
story. When guests are gathered in from the streets without warning, it does
not seem fair to expect sartorial elegance from them!

What do all these changes and differences mean? I would propose an

original story which would have gone, in summary, like this. A man decided
on a small dinner party. He sent his servant to incite three guests, and he
made preparations for the dinner (to be held that evening). By the time the
servant had gone to all the guests and returned with the bad news that all of
them were otherwise occupied, the dinner had already been prepared.
Exasperated, no doubt as much with himself as with his friends, the master
sent the servant out to bring in anyone he could find. In this version we have
the standard folkloric threesome as in, for example, Goldilocks and the Three
Bears. (In 1909 Axel Olrik wrote a now classical article, “Epic Laws of Folk
Narrative,” in which he said that, “The Law of Three extends like a broad
swath cut through the world of folk tradition, through the centuries and
millennia of human culture. The Semitic, and even more, the Aryan culture,
is subject to its dominant force. The beginnings of its rule are, in spite of all
the recent excavations and discoveries, lost in the obscurity of prehistory.”)
So we have three guests in the original parable. What, then, happened to
this earlier version? Two separated but inter-connected forces of
transformation have been allowed to play upon it. It has been moralized in
the direction of an example or exemplary story and allegorized as an image
of the history of salvation. I shall take these transformational processes one
at a time.
Morality. In the case of Thomas the concluding statement, “Tradesmen and
merchants shall not enter the places of my Father,” makes the author’s
understanding of the story quite clear. This conclusion also explains why he
would want to expand the number of refusing guests from the original three
to four “tradesmen and merchants.” Just as the businessmen of the story
missed the dinner, so also such persons will not reach “the places of my
Father.” The story is a negative example, a story of how one is not to act.
With Luke the story is primarily an example, but the emphasis is on the
positive side, on what one is to do. In the immediately preceding section in
Luke 14:12-14 Jesus had said, “ ‘When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not
invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest
they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast,
invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed,
because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the
just.’ ” Luke then inserted into the story of the Great Feast this listing
(italicized above) of the social outcasts in 14:13. But the point is surely quite
different in the two units. In 14:12-14 Jesus says not to invite one’s friends
but to invite the outcasts, in order to obtain heavenly rather than earthly
return. The story would say, if taken as an example, “invite first your friends
but, if they cannot come, then invite the outcasts so as not to waste the
food.” This makes it clear that Luke himself added the mention of “the poor
and maimed and blind and lame” from 14:13 to 14:21 and thereby made of
the story a positive example of how one should act.

Allegory. There may also be some implicit allegorizing in Luke’s version of

the story. He may have intended the first or refusing guests to be those in
Israel who had not accepted Christ, while the new guests represented those
in Israel who believed in Christ (those in “the streets and lanes of the city”)
and the Gentile believers as well (those in “the highways and hedges”). This
is, in any case, a very slight allegorization compared with Matthew, where
the allegorizing process is so heavy-handed that it renders the story
somewhat incredible. The murderous refusal is narrative overkill, the
punitive expedition “during” the feast is unlikely, and, as already seen, the
wedding garment does not fit well with the preceding story. But all this is
quite reasonable if we read the story as an allegory of the history of
salvation, as Matthew sees it. It is then clear that parts of the story of the
Great Feast have been influenced by the preceding story of the Evil
Husbandmen in Matthew 21:33-46. Compare these verses, for instance:

Parable of Evil “And the tenants took

Husbandmen his servants and beat
one, killed another, and
“he sent his servants . . . stoned another”
he sent other servants” (21:35);
(21:34,36);
“He will put those
wretches to a miserable “while the rest seized his
death” servants, treated them
(21:41). shamefully, and killed
them ”
Parable of the (22:6);
Great Feast
“he sent his troops and
“he sent his servants . . . destroyed those murder-
he sent other servants” ers and burned their
(22:3,4); city”
(22:7).

The lethal situation allegorized in the parable of the Evil Husbandmen ahs
been allowed by Matthew to infiltrate the more domestic story of the Great
Feast. But this renders Matthew’s purpose clear. The story is an allegory of
salvation history. Israel has not accepted the invitation to the banquet and
has, for Matthew, killed the prophets who brought the invitation. Hence he
has the servants in two groups, representing the earlier and later prophets.
Israel, says Matthew, was punished by the destruction of Jerusalem in the
year 70 A.D. But even within the Christian community Matthew finds “bad
and good” present, and so he adds the wedding garment incident to warn
that even some Christians might be rejected by God., that more is needed
than mere presence within the Christian community. This reflects a problem
within the Matthean community well known from many other places in his
gospel. So, in summary, Matthew allegorized the story and Luke and Thomas
moralized it. But the parabolic structure of the original story is still clear
behind these changes, as figure 17 indicates.

Figure 17

(Read: one expects a host to have his friends at dinner and not strangers,
but in the story strangers are present and friends are absent, all quite
plausibly.)

Or, as Jesus might have said, the kingdom of God will strike you as being as
nonsensical as a dinner with all one’s friends absent and only strangers
present.

At this point I want to say to the Host of the Great Feast as to the
Doorkeeper of Kafka’s story, “All this is quite impossible.” But then I recall
what Soren Kierkegaard said in his Panegyric Upon Abraham. “Everyone shall
be remembered, but each became great in proportion to his expectation.
One became great by expecting the possible; another by expecting the
eternal, but he who expected the impossible became greater than all.
Everyone shall be remembered, but each was great in proportion to the
greatness of that with which he strove.”

PARABLE AND KINGDOM

These few examples of the parables of Jesus will have to suffice. The
parable of the Great Feast was treated in some detail because it is a classical
case of an original parable being transformed by the tradition towards moral
example and historical allegory. In his magisterial work The Parables of Jesus
Joachim Jeremias delineated very clearly these two major transformational
processes at work in the parabolic tradition. But there is an element of
unconscious irony running through his analysis. On the one hand, he
carefully and correctly separates the moralizing and allegorizing additions
made by the tradition and usually treats these additions with something less
than enthusiasm; on the other hand, he all too often introduces very similar
moralizing and/or allegorizing tendencies back into his interpretation of the
original version. What goes out the text’s door comes back in the
interpretation’s window. But whether or not one agrees that most or even all
of Jesus’ stories were originally intended as parables, it is clear that the ones
indicated in this chapter place Jesus squarely in the tradition of parable
teller.

I do not mean to claim any superiority for parables over examples or

allegories. My aim in distinguishing these types is to show that in the change
from parable into example-story and/or allegory a sea change is effected and
one should not be surprised if the result is a rather forced example and/or a
rather strained allegory. The point is not that there are examples and
allegories in the gospels and that these are bad types of literature but that
the examples and allegories in the gospels are bad members of these
species; the main reason for their failure is not the literary incompetence of
the evangelists but the difficulty, if not impossibility, of changing original
parables into example-stories and allegories. Recall the typology given
earlier in figure 3 and note how parable is quite removed from apologue. Yet
examples and allegories would be subforms of apologue. To quote a final
time from Sheldon Sack’s book Fiction and the Shape of Belief, “Christian
allegories [are] a subclass of example or apologue.” Parables are not
“better” than examples or allegories, they are simply different literary forms
with different functions .As a storyteller, Jesus was a parabler rather than a
moralist or an allegorist.

All of this leads to some very important conclusions regarding the message
of Jesus. Scholars generally agree that Jesus proclaimed the “kingdom of
God.” What would such an expression have meant to Jesus’ audience? In his
book Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus Norman Perrin states that “the
primary and essential reference is to the sovereignty of God conceived of in
the most concrete possible manner, i.e., to his activity of ruling. . . . The
Kingdom of God is the power of God expressed in deeds; it is that which God
does wherein it becomes evident that he is king. It is not a place or a
community ruled by God; it is not even the abstract idea of reign or kingship
of God. It is quite concretely the activity of God as king.” The term “kingdom
of God,” then, places the major emphasis on the act wherein and whereby
God’s sovereignty is made manifest.

Scholars also agree that Jesus taught in stories. What is the connection
between these two points, the kingdom of God and the stories of Jesus? I
would suggest that the connection is summed up in the maxim: Parables
give God room. The parables of Jesus are not historical allegories telling us
how God acts with mankind; neither are they moral example-stories telling
us how to act before God and towards one another. They are stories which
shatter the deep structure of our accepted world and thereby render clear
and evident to us the relativity of story itself. They remove our defences and
make us vulnerable to God. It is only in such experiences that God can touch
us, and only in such moments does the kingdom of God arrive. My own term
for this relationship is transcendence.

Perhaps it is only in moments of mortal jeopardy that this exclusion of

security comes most deeply home to consciousness. At such times we best
realize that security is the serenity that comes from accepting insecurity as
our mortal lot. As in so many other matters, Shakespeare caught a glimpse
of this problem long ago. In King Richard II, act V, scene 5, the king has been
imprisoned by Bolingbroke and thinks,

For no thought is contented. The better sort,--

As thoughts of things divine,-- are intermix’d
With scruples, and do set the word itself
Against the word:

As thus,--Come, little ones; and then again,--

It is as hard to come as for a camel
To thread the postern of a needle’s eye.”

The “better sort” of thoughts, like those in the Bible, do not furnish easy
assurance but challenge us with their contradictions even of each other.
Epilogue

THE PARABLER BECOMES PARABLE

Being now no more a singer but a song . . . .

Swinburne
I have interpreted the stories of Jesus as parables intended to shatter the
structural security of the hearer’s world and therein and thereby to render
possible the kingdom of God, the act of appropriation in which God touches
the human heart and consciousness is brought to final genuflection. I have
also argued that the tradition of the primitive church changed these stories
from parables into moral examples or exemplary stories and/or historical
allegories. These latter described in story how God acts towards his people
and/or how they should act in response to him or towards one another. In
reflecting this change the early church moved these stories back into literary
types well-known from the carefully constructed pedagogical methods of the
rabbis. I did not mean to imply in describing this process, that it was an
illegitimate or decadent transition in itself. I did question, however, if they
had always or could ever succeed in making a smooth change from parable
to example and allegory.

But what is most fascinating for me in this process of change from parables
to examples and allegories is the phenomenon of human transformation
going on before our eyes. And this gives rise to our final problem. How was it
possible or necessary for this transformation to take place? How and why did
the tradition change these stories from parables to examples and/or
allegories?

My answer to this crucial problem of the transition from the message of the
historical Jesus to the message of the primitive church is guided by this
saying: The parabler becomes parable. Jesus announced the kingdom of God
in parables, but the primitive church announced Jesus as the Christ, the
Parable of God. Two examples of this transformation will be discussed.

Jesus had gathered around him a group of followers who had committed
themselves deeply to his vision as a challenge from God. This decision had
already involved them in severe tension with other groups within their
religious community. And then Jesus was hung on a Roman cross, crucified
as am insurgent against the imperial power. This execution may well have
been triggered by a parabolic action in which he symbolically “destroyed”
the Temple, bringing a parabolic word such as that of the Good Samaritan to
its logical parabolic deed. Be that as it may, the followers had now to face
the awful question: had it all been some terrible mistake? Was this
crucifixion the judgment of God against Jesus, the repudiation by God of
Jesus’ claims and assertions? Jesus had said that the kingdom would meet
his followers where and when their world was overturned and challenged at
its very depths .And they had nodded in agreement at this very interesting if
somewhat abstract proposition. Now it had all come to them at last. There
was the Cross, and the immediate conclusion was that it represented the
divine rejection of Jesus. But if Jesus’ parabolic vision was correct, then the
Cross itself was not rejection but was itself the great Parable of God. Now,
and probably only now, they finally understood what Jesus had been telling
them all along. The Cross replaced the parables and became in their place
the supreme Parable. The parables themselves, no longer the center, were
freed to become examples and allegories—otherwise they would probably
have been lost to us forever. All this Paul explained to the Corinthians, who
were much impressed by their spirit and gifts of speech and action: “Where
is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has
not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of
God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through
the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand
signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling
block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and
Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness
of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1
Cor 1:20-25). Instead of signs and wisdom, parables and Parable. So the
parables of Jesus became the examples and allegories of the church, and the
Cross of Jesus became the Parable of the church. Jesus died as parabler and
rose as Parable.

A second example is the creation of the gospel format by Mark. In a recent

work, The Kingdom in Mark, Werner Kelber has argued that Mark was written
after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. to validate the parabolic claim that
Galilean Christianity, not Jerusalem Christianity, was the focal point of
obedience to God. Once again, parable is renewed. God is not found where
one would expect, with the relatives and disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem, but
with the community of Jews and Gentiles in Galilee. In his article “The
Incomprehension of the Disciples in the Marcan Redaction,” which appeared
in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 1972, David Hawkin summed up Mark’s
intention with these words: “Mark’s task as a writer is to introduce his
readership to a new scheme of things, in which ordinary values are reversed
and reasonable judgments disqualified. The destiny of Jesus is the paradigm
of Christian existence. To ‘comprehend’ is to discover and affirm the law of
the cross as the supreme eschatological reversal. The dimensions of Mark’s
pedagogical task, then, are considerable. His strategy is to thematize
incomprehension not only as superficiality and ignorance, but above all as
that blindness that comes from the contradiction of human appearances and
ambitions.” Each time the Parable is in danger of becoming fossilized and
turned into as myth, it subverts its own domestication and breaks the very
structure that would contain it.

I would agree with Robert Frost against W. B. Yeats on this point. Yeats had
argued in “Two Songs from a Play” that Jesus had introduced violence into
the world against the toleration of Greek culture. But Frost countered in A
Masque of Mercy,

[Yeats] charged the Nazarene with having

Brought
A darkness out of Asia that had crossed
Old Attic grace and Spartan discipline
With violence. The Greeks were hardly strangers
To the idea of violence. It flourished
Persisting from old Chaos in their myth
To embroil the very gods about their spheres
Of influence. It’s been a commonplace
Ever since Alexander Greeced the world.
‘Twere nothing new if that were all Christ
Brought.
Christ came to introduce a break with logic
That made all other outrage seem as child’s
play:
The Mercy on the Sin against the Sermon.
Strange no one ever thought of it before Him.
‘Twas lovely and its origin was love.
People are fond of discussing two types of religion, historical and mythical,
and of asserting that Judaism and Christianity are in the former category
because they link their claims to the objective reality of certain key events.
Maybe the time has come to retire this distinction as irrelevant and to
replace it with another. The more useful distinction might be between
mythological religion, a religion that gives one the final word about “reality”
and thereby excludes the authentic experience of mystery, and parabolic
religion, a religion that continually and deliberately subverts final words
about “reality” and thereby introduces the possibility of transcendence.

Which do we prefer, comfort or courage? It may be necessary to make a

choice.
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1970 [See p. 95]
Popper, K., Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge.
London, 1963 [See p. 46]

Pound, Ezra, The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1972 [See
pp. 521-2]

Ricoeur, P., “The Problem of the Double-Sense as Hermeneutic Problem and

as Semantic Problem,” Myths and Symbols, Eds. J. M. Kitagawa & C. H.
Long. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1969 [See p. 79]
Rilke, R. M., Selected Works: II. Poetry. Trans. J. B. Leishman. New York: New
Directions, 1967 [See p. 244]

Snow, C. P., Times Literary Supplement, July 9, 1970.

Van Buren, P., The Edges of Language. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

Waismann F., “Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein,” Philosophical Review 74

(1965) 12-16.

Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality. New York: Macmillan, 1969 [See p.
303]

Williams, W. C., “An Approach to the Poem,” English Institute Essays, 1947.
New York, 1948 [See p. 60]

Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan

Paul, 1922.

Chapter 2. The Ways of Story

Auden ,W. H., “For the Time Being,” Collected Longer Poems. New York:
Random House, 1969 [See p. 138]

Eliot, T. S., “The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1943 [See p. 39]

Frye, N., “The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary
Criticism,” Daedalus 99 (1970) 268-342 [See p. 297]

Kermode, F., The Sense of an Ending. New York: Oxford U. Press, 1967 [See
p.39]

Leach, E., Genesis as Myth and Other Essays. Cape Editions 39; London:
Cape, 1969 [See p.11]
Lévi-Strauss, C., “The Structural Study of Myth,” Structural Anthropology.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967 [See p. 226]

Maranda, P. (Ed.), Mythologies: Selected Readings. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin,

1972 [See p. 213]

Maranda, E. K. and P., “Structural Models in Folklore,” Midwest Folklore 12

(1962) 133-92; slightly adapted in Structural Models in Folklore and
Transformational Essays. Approaches in Semiotics 10; The Hague Mouton,
1971 [See pp. 26, 36, 87]

Sacks, S., Fiction and the Shape of Belief. Berkeley & L.A.: U. of California
Press, 1966 [See pp. 7,24-26]

Vail, L. M., Heidegger and Ontological Difference. University Park & London:
The Pennsylvania Stat U. Press, 1972 [See p. 64]

Chapter 3. The Traditions of Parable

Auden, W. H., The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Random House,
1962 [See p. 24]

Barth, John, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” The Atlantic Monthly 220 (August
1967) 29-34

Barthes, Roland, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits,”

Communications 8 (1966) 1-27 [See p. 17]

— Critical Essays. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern U. Press, 1972 [See p. 137]

Belitt, B., “The enigmatic predicament: some parables of Kafka and Borges,”
Prose for Borges ═ TriQuarterly 25 (1972) 269-293 [See p. 273]

Borges, J. L., “The Circular Ruins,” Ficciones. New York: Grove 1962. Pp. 57-
63 ═ Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New
Directions, 1962, Pp. 45-50 ═ A Personal Anthology. New York: Grove,
1967, Pp. 68-74 ═ The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969. New York:
Bantam, 1971, Pp. 34-40. See also pp. 190 & 193.

— “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Other Inquisitions 1937-1952.

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964 [See p. 104]

— The question which concludes my section on Borges is taken from A. M.

Barrenechea, Borges the Labyrinth Maker. New York: New York U.
Press,1965 [See p. 81]
Eissfeldt, O., The Old Testament. An Introduction. New York: Harper & Row,
1965 [See p. 480]

Frost, R., “What Fifty Said” and “A Masque of Reason,” The Poetry of Robert
Frost, Ed. E. C. Lathem. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969 [See
pp. 267 & 475-76 resp.]

Greimas, A. J., Sémantique structurale. Recherche de méthode. Paris:

Larousse, 1966 [See p. 180]

Kafka, F., “Before the Law,” Parables and Paradoxes. New York: Schocken,
1961. Pp. 61-79.

McKenzie, J. L., A Theology of the Old Testament. Garden City, N.Y.:

Doubleday, 1974 [See pp. 121-22]

Miles, J., “Laughing at the Bible: Jonah as Parody,” The Jewish Quarterly
Review 65 (1975) 168-81.

Neruda, P., “Autumn Testament,” Selected Poems. Ed. N. Tarn. New York:
Delta, 1973 [See p. 405]

Chapter 4. Jesus as Parabler

Bascom, W. R., “Folklore and Anthropology” and “Four Functions of Folklore,”

The Study of Folklore, Ed. A. Dundes. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1965 [See pp. 33 & 297]

Donahue, J. R., “Tax Collectors and Sinners,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 33

(1971) 39-61 [See esp. pp. 48-49, 54, 59-60]

Jason, H., Conflict and Resolution in Jewish Sacred Tales. Ann Arbor, Mich.:
University Microfilms, 1968 [See pp. 1 & 90]

Jeremias, J., The Parables of Jesus. Rev. Ed.; New York: Scribners, 1968.

Kierkegaard, S., Fear and Trembling & The Sickness Unto Death. New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1954 [See page 31]

Olrik, Axel, “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative,” The Study of Folklore. [see above]
Pp. 129-141 [See p. 134]

Perrin, N., Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus. New York: Harper & Row,
1967 [See p. 55]
Sacks, S., Fiction and the Shape of Belief. Berkeley & L.A.: U. of California
Press, 1966 [See p. 263]

Epilogue. The Parabler becomes Parable

Frost, R., “A Masque of Mercy.” [See Chapter 2 reference P. 511]

Hawkin, D. J., “The Incomprehension of the Disciples in the Marcan

Redaction,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91 (1972) 491-500 [See p. 500]

Kelber, W., The Kingdom in Mark. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974