Genesis and Narratology: The Challenge of Medieval Illustrated Texts

There can be thought about time without narrated time, writes Paul Ricoeur, in his three-volume work, Time and Narrative (3: 241), and the converse is also true: there can be no thought about without engaging issues of time. Thus while structuralists like Roland Barthes might argue that the point of view of narrative, what we call time does not exist, or least exists only functionally, as an element of a semiotic system (99), narratologists cannot avoid recourse to temporal concepts - as when Gerard Genette employs terms like duration and frequency to describe the ordering involved in narrative discourse. The question that arises in turn is whether time functions in the same way in the pictorial arts as it does in the verbal arts, and whether current narratological theories are also applicable to visual modes of storytelling. Here the answer would seem to be yes if one accepts W. J. T. Mitchell's post-Lessing contention that there is semantically essential difference between texts and images insofar as both function as whose representational abilities are not innate (161). Arguing, however, that there are differences at the level of sign types, forms, materials of representation, and institutional traditions, Mitchell also finds problems with the extreme conventionalism of a semiotician like Nelson Goodman (345-62), and his own concern with collapsing differences between the arts is in the interests of exploring why and how visual and verbal signs are made to signify in different ways in different cultures and historical periods. Significantly, this kind of difference is perhaps most noticeable with respect to issues of pictorial narrativity, just as it is herein that the Middle Ages seem most to differ from our modern period. By the same token, an excellent site for testing the viability of current narratological theorizing is to explore the dynamics and implications of the medieval illustrated manuscript, where we have not only a concrete and material instance of two media operating in close proximity but presumably in which both are engaged in telling the same story. Such texts become even more provocative when their content itself is concerned with history, as in the case of the work which I want to examine: the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch. Housed in the British Museum as Cotton Claudius B.iv, and reproduced in a 1974 facsimile version edited by C. R. Dodwell and Peter Clemoes, this manuscript provides an Old English translation of the first six books of the Old Testament and includes some 400 illustrations. The story being told here, in short, is the beginning of time and the genealogy of the human race, presented primarily through episodes of family interaction punctuated by moments of theophany. The temporal issue is also involved in the sense that this manuscript is a latter-day translation of the previous Vulgate translation, just as the manuscript itself underwent various stages of composition, including the addition of some Latin glosses in the 12th century. In examining this manuscript, however, I wish mainly to focus on the technical aspect or the issue of narrative temporality, by which I mean not only the ways in which a indicates temporal relationships between events (by showing, for example, duration, repetition, simultaneity, and causality), but also the ways in which such relationships themselves constitute a fundamental aspect of narrative. Thus, after briefly describing the physical features and general production of the manuscript, I will examine in more detail Ricoeur's notions of time and the contentions of current theorists with a view to then showing how such theorizing might require adaptation in order to deal adequately with the actual practice or techniques used by the translators, scribes, and illustrators of the Old English Hexateuch. In particular, my concern is to highlight the way that temporality serves to suggest causality, and thus I will conclude with an in-depth examination of how the handling of the Judah and Tamar story (Genesis 38) differs respectively in the Vulgate version, the verbal Old English translation, and the illustrations in the Hexateuch. …