On the restricted scale of their highly laconic narratives, the ancient Hebrew authors contrived to achieve something resembling Flaubert’s aspiration in his seminal art-novel to “achieve dramatic effect simply by the interweaving of dialogue and by contrasts of character.” In Flaubert’s case, the ideal of authorial impassivity, the desire to be everywhere present but always invisible in the work, stems from a dream of godlike omnipotence; from a horror of being personally contaminated by the distasteful human reality of the represented world, and from the need to escape the effusiveness that had vitiated so much European literature of the previous half-century.
In biblical narrative, impassivity would seem by contrast to flow from an intuitive sense of the theologically appropriate means for the representation of human lives under the overarching dominion of an ultimately unknowable but ethical God . . .
The Hebrew narrator does not openly meddle with the personages he presents, just as God creates in each human personality a fierce tangle of intentions, emotions, and calculations caught in a translucent net of language, which is left for the individual himself to sort out in the evanescence of a single lifetime.
Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative (1981), 86.
For the future … Flaubert vs. Trollope?
