The Art of Interpretation

A quiz question for you: what connects these three people? The artist David Hockney, the actress Gwyneth Paltrow and the novelist Ian McEwan? I’ll give you some time to think about. 

This is the time of the year when the newspapers are full of quizzes, puzzles, games – I suppose they reckon that people have more free time on their hands and want a bit of fun, although I suspect the hidden reason is that it’s to stop families cooped up together over the holidays from killing each other.

Family life, as we know, is the space where all the passions of the human heart play themselves out, all the blessings of love, companionship, nurture, dependability – as well as all the painful antagonisms: warring partners, fractious children, all the rivalries, enmities, and inter-generational mental derangements that family life also gives rise to.

This is of course an old story, a universal story, the ways in which the dynamics of family life can promote both tenderness, intimacy and a joyful sense of well-being - and yet can also be a crucible for violence and cruelty: disabling, disfiguring eruptions of jealousy, envy, competitiveness, even murderousness.

We read today in the synagogue from chapter 45 in the Book of Genesis - we’ve nearly reached the end of Genesis in our annual cycle of readings – and as a piece of literature, a piece of ancient storytelling, we can see the way in which, because the book is cast in the form of a multi-generational fable of family life, it contains an extended exploration of these themes: human themes, personal themes, everyday themes. The writers of the Hebrew Bible were some of the earliest exponents of the art of narrative storytelling. They were writing about the complex dynamics of family life two and a half millennia before it became a staple of modern fiction. George Eliot, Thomas Mann, Isabel Allende and the rest are all writing in the wake of the narrative artists of Genesis.

The story of Cain and Abel shows rivalry turning murderous, Abraham and Sara deals with marital discord, in the next generation Isaac and Rebekkah each have their favourites, which generates hostility and estrangement between their sons, Jacob and Esau, and the effects of this dysfunctional family dynamic spill over into the next generation where the character at the centre of the story we read about today, Joseph, becomes Jacob’s favourite – remember that coat of many colours? – and as the saga unfolds the traumas of family life are played out in full view.

Joseph is only in Egypt because his brothers first plan to kill him, then he's sold instead to a passing band of merchants. Out of sight, out of mind. Or so they thought. As people do. But the text portrays with great psychological acuity how life doesn’t work like that: the past is always haunting the present, even if we try to shut it away. Maybe particularly when we try to shut it away (thank you, Professor Freud). The brothers’ guilt reverberates through the narrative; and, deceived by his sons into believing that Joseph is dead, Jacob in particular bears the cruel pain of that imagined loss for decades.

The chapters that speak about Joseph are actually a brilliant piece of narrative art, they form a kind of novella in themselves within the larger arc of Genesis: Joseph is portrayed as unpleasantly self-obsessed as a young man – ‘up himself’ in today’s idiom – and he’s filled with unconscious aggression towards both his siblings and his parents; the tears of Joseph that we read about this week are the culmination of years of suppressed emotion.

But what I want to highlight here – and this should take us straight to Gwyneth Paltrow – is a small scene (Genesis 37: 12-17) near the beginning of these 14 chapters of the Joseph novella. It’s a scene that any self-respecting novelist today would probably cut in a later draft because it seems to have no purpose. Jacob has sent his sons to feed the sheep in the next valley, Shechem; they go off; Joseph doesn’t go with them; then Jacob calls Joseph and says, ‘Go and find out how they are getting on, then come back and let me know.’ So Joseph sets off but he can’t find them. The storyteller describes him wandering around in a field. And then a man, a stranger, sees him and asks what he’s looking for. Joseph explains he’s looking for his brothers who are shepherding the family’s flocks. Oh, they’ve left here, the man says, they’ve gone on to Dothan. And off goes Joseph to Dothan, where he finds them - and the narrative continues with the brothers deciding to get rid of him.

But what’s the point of this? The stranger doesn’t have a name, he doesn’t get a thank you from Joseph - you don’t need this scene. It seems irrelevant to the story, this mini-drama. The narrator could have taken us straight from Joseph going off to find his brothers to just meeting up with them. We wouldn’t have missed anything. And yet we sense at the same time that this piece of everyday co-incidence – he just happened to meet this man, who just happened to have seen the brothers go off to Dothan – is somehow vital: the rest of the story depends on it. If he hadn’t met this random stranger, then Jewish history would have stopped there, so to speak.   

I think the deeper purpose of this scene is its randomness. This is how life is, we sense, a series of random events, one thing after another, along with the choices we make about them, and  how we interpret them. In the Gwyneth Paltrow film ‘Sliding Doors’ you see this theme played out. Catching the train leads to one outcome, missing the train to a very different outcome.  Part of the popularity of the film, I suppose, lies in it dramatizing something we all do recognise from our own lives: how small moments in our lives can have huge consequences, small decisions can alter our destiny. You go to a party even though you are tired and you meet the love of your life. It was meant to be, you say, when reminiscing. But was it? You could have gone to bed, had a good sleep and met someone else who could also have transformed your life in a different direction. Or who could have been a disaster. Who is to say?

Or it’s raining and you can’t be bothered to go out and meet your friend, but you know they are lonely so in your kind-heartedness you get in your car and you’re involved in a life-altering accident. Each moment in life, every choice we make, every situation we find ourselves presented with, a chain of events can unfold, for good or for ill, and we can’t predict which way things will turn out.

In his latest novel, Lessons, Ian McEwan has illustrated at some length how we all live at the intersection of a web of large and small events. He juxtaposes major events in world history, like the Cuban missile crisis, with personal events like his protagonist’s relationship with a predatory piano teacher, and  shows how we are always living at this intersection. As McEwan puts it: “In settled expansive mood Roland” – that’s the novel’s central character – “occasionally reflected on the events and accidents, personal and global, miniscule and momentous, that had formed and determined his existence. His case was not special”, says McEwan, “all fates are similarly constituted”.

How do we manage all this randomness? We meet a stranger in a bar, fall into conversation, and something they say sticks in our mind and determines a decision we make, which leads our lives in a direction we would not otherwise have taken. But what if we had ignored them?  How might our life have unfolded then? Might we have had more fun, or success, or satisfaction in our lives if we hadn’t been so susceptible to the musings of a stranger? Both Ian McEwan’s ‘Lessons’ and Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘Sliding Doors’ speak about this: how the circumstances we face, and the decisions we make in response, determines our destiny, and just how much is down to chance, or luck, or what we later come to think of as fate.

And that’s the essence of the Joseph narrative: that when he re-meets his brothers after twenty years, twenty years in which he’s developed from being a spoilt brat to being the most powerful man in Egypt, Pharoah’s right hand man, Joseph offers them an interpretation of what has happened between them – ‘You thought you’d got rid of me, sold me into slavery - but actually all this was meant to be, it was God’s plan, it was so that you could be saved, the whole family could be saved, from this famine that is raging in our lands’. (There it is: the small scale family drama intersecting with the large scale political drama being played out in the region).  

When you first hear Joseph’s words, you might be tempted to think the storyteller is offering you a conventional piece of religious thinking – one you do still hear, and it sort of drives me mad -  ‘oh, it’s all in God’s hands, what’s happened (whether it’s good or bad); it was meant to be, it’s part of the divine plan, ours not to question’.  But what I find most remarkable about this Genesis text is the literary artfulness of the narrator: one needs to note how  the storyteller puts this conventional theological interpretation into the mouth of his character, Joseph – all the pain Joseph has endured, all the pain he knows his father has gone through, Joseph explains it, rationalises it, as having a higher meaning. But I think we are meant to notice that this is the character’s interpretation, not the narrator’s.

It’s as if our anonymous author, when he gives those lines to his character, is sort of winking at us: ‘You may think this is how life works, but this pious interpretation is my character’s view – it has no more authority than that’.  

It reminds me of the fictional politician Francis Urquhart in the TV series, ‘House of Cards’:   “You might very well think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.” The art of plausible deniability.

And if you think what I’m saying is a bit exaggerated, or far-fetched, I’d just draw your attention to the rather remarkable fact that in the 14 chapters of this novella, from chapter 37 to the end of the book, you never have (as you do throughout the saga’s earlier chapters with the patriarchs and the matriarchs)  a single scene where God is shown speaking to Joseph. The storytellers show you Joseph referring to God, using God as a reference point, but not addressing God. And God certainly never intervenes and speaks to Joseph. This is all storytelling of a very sophisticated kind.

The narrators withhold narrative certainty about the one religious question that all readers, and all audiences, from then until today, wish to have certainty about. How does God work in the world, in events big and small? Does God work in the world at all, in events big and small? Or is life all ‘Sliding Doors’ randomness, and chance, to which we poor humans attribute meaning? Or don’t find meaning in at all.    

Joseph is portrayed as projecting meaning onto his experiences, in retrospect. In Yiddish we have this word  bashert - ‘meant to be’ - which is a comforting thought for some people, perhaps many people, and you don’t have to be Jewish to be comforted by the idea of bashert, that events in life can seem to fit in to some larger, harmonious pattern. I have been known to be comforted by this mode of thinking and feeling myself. But when I do allow myself to be comforted by it, I also remind myself that the millions-strong Jewish communities of Eastern and Central Europe who spoke Yiddish, and who did have religious faith in life as bashert, were also those who were annihilated in their millions, within living memory.

For survivors, bashert can always be a comfort. But not, I think, for victims.

I think our Hebrew Bible is a radical text, in parts, because it subtly undermines certainties – and our wishes for certainty – about how life is patterned, what meaning it contains. Those literary artists who created sacred literature for their people seemed to want to both promote particular ways of seeing and thinking and believing for their people, while at the same time withholding any  definitive perspective from which a reader can say they, we, have a solid understanding of, or grasp on, that enigmatic character the storytellers called the God of Israel, The Eternal One, Who Is.

Joseph, the great dream interpreter, seems to be their literary vehicle for the notion that it’s not just dreams that need interpretation, but life itself. And that just as dreams don’t come with their own interpretations, neither does life. We are required, like Joseph, to find an interpretation that works for us. 

And David Hockney? Reaching a Biblical age - he’s now 85 - with a new immersive show opening soon, he’s long been dedicated to interpreting life as he sees it in front of him. He shows us what is there, often the natural world,  through his own eyes, helping us to see anew. Asked if he was looking forward to this new venture he answered, as if he was some kind of a mystic: “I live in the now. It is the ‘now’ that is eternal”. That’s a profound interpretation of life - and it was said both straightforwardly, and with a showman’s twinkle in his eye. Which is perhaps the best way to offer one’s vision.

[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 31st 2022]