The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists As Biblical Interpreters

388 Book Reviews / Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 375-393 The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists as Biblical Interpreters. By Terry R. Wright. Burlington: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xii + 188. Terry Wright’s The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists as Biblical Interpreters is a broad comparative study of the fictional creations of twentieth century authors beginning with Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Mann, continuing to contemporary writers Jeanette Winterson, Jenny Diski, and Anita Diamant. It is concerned with the biblical book of Genesis as a starting point for modern novelists. Informed by concepts such as midrash, intertexuality, and deconstruction, Wright’s study is at the same time as much about authors as about their works. Indeed, much of the text is concerned with the intellectual development of each artist, with the novelist’s exposure to the midrashic tradition often considered a matter of prime importance. The first chapter reviews the tradition of biblical criticism—both within religious studies and the “Bible-as-literature” movement—before explaining the author’s use of the terms midrash, intertextuality, and deconstruction. Wright acknowledges that both midrash and intertextuality can be slippery terms, and for the former, opts for a flexible and broad analogous or figurative usage, and hence glosses it as an imaginative completion of a biblical narrative. Despite presenting ample documentation on intertextuality, his usage of this term, or its conceptual and practical limitations, is less clear. Wright does develop the Derridean notion of difference—as a filling in of textual gaps and thereby a stimulation of fresh meaning—with great clarity and shows it to be of great heuristic potential for this study, particularly with reference to the gendered reinterpretations of the Bible presented in Chapters 3 to 6. The following chapters discuss Mark Twain and John Steinbeck, respectively. Chapter 2 discusses the repeated rewrites of the Bible’s creation account in Twain’s works such as Letters from the Earth, Diaries of Adam and Eve, and The Mysterious Stranger, in which he wrestles with the notion of original sin. Twain’s biblical commentary and rewrites were at times vituperative, and some of it only published posthumously. Refuting previous portrayals of Twain as a bitter old man, Wright instead presents Twain as a widely-read and thoughtful writer. He convincingly shows that Twain was indeed obsessed with biblical narrative, and his reworking thereof raises new questions for contemporary readers. Chapter 3 discusses Steinbeck’s East of Eden, particularly his rewriting of the Cain and Abel story. It is here that the use of midrash and intertextuality are perhaps most loose in their application, because Steinbeck’s novel cannot be shown to owe anything to either the midrashic tradition or the works of Louis Ginzberg and Joseph Campbell, which Wright discusses at length. Wright does, on the other hand, offer an astute comparative reading of Steinbeck’s The Journal of a Novel, showing how Steinbeck’s notions of the biblical Cain and Abel developed over time, and argues that he brings modern psychoanalytical ideas to bear on our understanding of relationships and belief. The next three chapters discuss Jeanette Winterson, Jenny Diski, and Anita Diamant. Chapter 4, on the independent and critical contemporary novelist Winterson, is a © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156851508X307047 Book Reviews / Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 375-393 389 sympathetic look at an author whose works have often been vilified. Wright shows how Harold Bloom’s The Book of J informs Winterson’s concept of productive revision, and how Northrop Frye’s questioning of literalist reading has also informed her work. Her fiction defamiliarizes the Bible’s contents in such irreverent works as Boating for Beginners (in which she retells the story of the flood) and Lighthousekeeping (which rewrites the tower of Babel story). Chapter 5, on Jenny Diski—author of Only Human and After These Things—discusses midrashic commentary by Ginzberg, Shalom Spiegel, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, and Robert Alter, all of whom Diski cites in acknowledgments. As Wright notes, in recounting the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Diski’s omits the miraculous elements, focusing instead on what is “only human” in the Akedah and its aftermath. Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent—a rewriting of the biblical Joseph story from the perspectives of women, and of Dinah in particular— is the focus of Chapter 6. It presents a journalist and an author more highly regarded as an interpreter of modern Jewish life—especially liberal Judaism—than noted for literary merit, but whose work has garnered a wide readership. Her success, Wright argues, demonstrates the need for retellings that make sense of biblical stories in a modern context. More importantly, Wright demonstrates that Diamant writes against the midrashic tradition, which has often been less sympathetic to Dinah and the other women of the Joseph story. Chapter 7 traces Thomas Mann’s spiritual journey, and situates him with regard to the philosophical intertexts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. Ultimately, Wright goes on to show, as a case of Harold Bloom’s notion of misprision, Mann would become more sympathetic to religion than all three. Mann read and heavily annotated Die Sagen der Juden, an anthology of midrash, and was otherwise well aware of this tradition which informed his own work. Mann’s debt to Jewish tradition is, as Wright shows, increasingly acknowledged in contemporary scholarship. In Wright’s view, Mann’s tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, goes to the heart of the biblical story. In his brief conclusion, Wright notes that while none of the authors studied gives imaginative substance to God as a character, they—like previous redactors of Genesis— continue to rewrite these stories in ways that are revealing of its mysteries. Covering the works of two Nobel Prize laureates among other contemporary fiction writers and thus admirably broad in focus, Wright’s study demonstrates a deep knowledge of the midrashic tradition as well as a mastery of the intellectual development of creative fiction writers working within—and often against—the established customs of reading the Bible and biblical interpretation. What some readers may find disconcerting, however, is the disproportionate attention given to biographical criticism when compared to textual analysis and commentary. At times the undertaking is speculative, replete with the conditional, where no firm evidence of the novelists’ working within midrashic tradition can be found. Given Wright’s attempt to show not only marked references but also intellectual debt, it would have been helpful if Wright had distinguished more clearly the differences between the theory of intertextuality and that of influence. Yet .

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