Quick Hitter: If You Want to Complain About Modernity, Complain About This



What struck me about this exchange is how it reveals a way of thinking about stories and how they work.  Rachel Held Evans asserts that the story of Esther is relevant and important to our current situation.  Based on that assertion, her conversation partner immediately jumped to the conclusion that RHE must believe that the story of Esther is, quote, "literal."  Now, "literal" is a slippery term, but I take it from the context that "literal" here means "accurately chronicling a real historical event."

Implicit in this leap is the presupposition that the value of the story is predicated on the fact that it refers back to some actual historical event.  The author assumed that RHE must believe that the Esther story was grounded in some concrete historical event, otherwise (in his mind) it would be nonsensical to hold up the story as something worthy of serious consideration in our modern context.  Conversely, if the story of Esther is not in fact grounded in some historical event, then it must be the case that it has no value.

We might call this "journalistic fundamentalism"--the idea that the only valuable mode of expressing truth can be found in relating accurately events that actually occurred, and thus only the journalist or someone engaging in a journalistic project is a writer of value.  Yeah, sure, "fiction" (defined in the broadest possible way as anything that is not a perfectly accurate chronicle of events) might be a fine distraction from the hard truths of reality, but at the end of the day the only thing that actually communicates truths about ourselves and about our world is this purportedly dispassionate contemporaneous chronicle of events.

The problem with this sort of journalistic fundamentalism is not only that it reflects a radically different attitude than the authors of the Biblical texts (though, that's definitely true), but that it simply not true on its face.  Journalism is simply not the only way to communicate truths about ourselves and our situation.  Or, to approach the problem from the other direction, the truth of a story is not dependent on its connection to actual historical events.

None of the Karamazov family actually lived in 19th Century Russia.  There was no Jean Valjean or Javert in 19th Century France.  Shakespeare's Macbeth and Lady Macbeth had only a tenuous connection to early medieval Scottish historical figures.  Or, for more modern examples, Batman and Luke Skywalker are clearly not real people.  But there is truth in their stories, truths about ourselves and about those around us, that are communicated in the otherwise unreality of the events chronicled in those tales.  The lack of journalistic accuracy is essentially irrelevant to the power and purpose of those stories.

I will confess that I have a very hard time understanding why people are so obsessed with the journalistic content of Biblical stories, especially the earliest ones in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Whether or not Esther actually lived or to what extent the Biblical text tracks with actual historical events (to the extent we can know these things with any certainty) is no more relevant that how much Macbeth is faithful to Scottish history.  Which is to say that it is somewhat interesting as background information, but not really relevant to the impact of the story.  At the end of the day, I don't really care, and it certainly wouldn't take anything away from the relevance of the story one way or the other.

This conflating of "fiction" with either "lies" or "irrelevant nonsense" is really a sad closing off of the human experience.  I hate to be one of these people who immediately jumps to shake his fist at modern education, but I feel like we are doing a terrible job of teaching literature in schools, or more specifically doing a terrible job of teaching why literature is important.  Part of the problem might be a focus on books in general and particular books in particular--it is less about "reading books" and more about "learning to appreciate stories and their importance."  In any event, it seems like we have a large body of people who don't understand how stories work generally and why and to what extent they are carries of truth.  Stories matter, and they matter in a way that is not tied to their historical accuracy.  When you don't communicate that truth to people, the only kind of story that is comprehensible is the journalistic one.  That's a really truncated slice of the potential power of stories.

Anyway, RHE is right--the Esther story matters, perhaps now more than ever.  And that has nothing to do with how accurately that story chronicles real events.

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