No, that isn't the name of a law firm or a singing group. It is the combination I arrived at when I was ruminating over my two passions: Bible study and love of good fiction writing. For similar musings, see my posts “Finnegans Wake” and “The Literary Influence of the Bible.” Let me explain the title above, if I can.
One of the classic modern novels is The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. However, this author also wrote a very interesting 1956 book titled Pincher Martin. Both of these works have underlying religious themes with Pincer Martin having implications regarding the persistence of hope and the afterlife. I will briefly describe the plot of this book, but I would not like to ruin its ending if you haven't read it before and might be planning to do so in the future. So this is a spoiler alert cautioning you to stop at this point.
O.K, I warned you. In Pincher Martin, the hero finds himself suddenly thrown into the ocean when his ship is hit by a U-boat attack during WWII. He finds that he is the only survivor of the catastrophe, but he has the presence of mind to immediately kick off his heavy seaboots and inflate his life jacket. He manages to make it to the shore of a deserted island, and the rest of the novel concerns his Robinson Crusoe-like existence there for a number of years during which he starts to hallucinate from the enforced isolation.
The last chapter of the book switches its perspective entirely to two men on a jetty looking for survivors from the U-boat attack. They find the hero's quite dead body still in his life jacket washed up on the rocks. One of the men wonders if he suffered much, and the other one replies, “Then don't worry about him. You saw the body. He didn't even have time to kick off his seaboots.”
When I read this surprise ending years ago, I was immediately reminded of the same technique used much earlier by the Civil War correspondent and short story writer Ambrose Bierce. Some of you may have read his classic 1890 story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” while in school. If not, I again urge you to stop reading this post if you don't want the ending spoiled. Although if you have gotten this far you will probably suspect that it has a similar surprise twist at the end, and you would be correct.
A Southern plantation owner named Peyton Farquhar is captured by Union forces during the Civil War, taken to a bridge where his hands are tied behind him and a noose placed around his neck. He is dropped off the bridge to be hanged, but the rope breaks, he lands in the stream, manages to free his hands, is not touched by the bullets fired at him from the bridge by the troops, escapes into the woods and eventually makes it back to his home 30 miles away where he runs toward his wife and family waiting there. The justly famous last sentence in the story reads, “Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of Owl Creek Bridge.”
This identical plot device has even been utilized more recently in the movies in Stay, Jacob's Ladder, and the excellent but chilling Terry Gilliam creation Brazil. It has been suggested that it goes back in time even earlier than Bierce's story, perhaps originating with Charles Dickens' “A Visit to Newgate.” But I think that the first germ of that plot device, in which the illusion of hope existing only in a character's mind is dashed for the reader by the breaking in of grim reality at the conclusion, goes back thousands of years earlier to the Book of Judges.
Judges 5 consists of a song by Deborah and Barak which retells the prose story (Judges 4) of a battle between the Israelites and the Canaanite army which is commanded by Sisera. The poetic account in chapter 5 is noted for its strikingly modern storytelling techniques, most notably when it breaks away from the encounter between a fleeing Sisera and a woman named Jael in order to explore the mind of Sisera's mother waiting at home for her son to return from the battle with valuable spoils for her to enjoy. We have here many of the elements present in the later creative works mentioned above, but presented in a slightly different manner.
As a literary exercise, I decided to see what would happen if I just changed the order of the verses a little and made a few minor alterations to the wording. The purpose of this exercise is not at all to improve on the original biblical text, but to demonstrate how this account may have been in the subconscious mind of much later writers who proceeded to make it their own. You can compare my own “version” below with the original biblical text of verses 24-31 which tells of Sisera's fate as he fled as a lone survivor from the battlefield into the tent of Jael. I will rely on the NRSV for most of the wording and include the explanatory verses from Judges 4 where appropriate to clarify the plot:
4:17-18 “Now Sisera had fled away on foot to the tent of Jael wife of Heber the Kenite; for there was peace between King Jabin of Hazor and the clan of Heber the Kenite. Jael came out to meet Sisera, and said to him, 'Turn aside, my Lord, turn aside to me; have no fear.'”
5:24-25 “Most blessed of women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, of tent-dwelling women most blessed. He asked for water and she gave him milk, she brought him curds in a lordly bowl.”
4:21b “He was lying fast asleep from weariness.”
5:28-30 “Out of the window she peered, the mother of Sisera gazed trough the lattice: 'Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the hoofbeats of his chariots?' Her wisest ladies make answer, indeed, she answers the question herself: 'Are they not finding and dividing the spoil” – A girl or two for every man; spoil of dyed stuffs for Sisera, spoil of dyed stuffs embroidered, two pieces of dyed work embroidered for my neck as spoil?'”
5:26-27 “She [Jael] put her hand to the tent peg and her right hand to the workman's mallet; she struck Sisera a blow, she crushed his head, she shattered and pierced his temple. He sank, he fell, he lay still at her feet; at her feet he sank, he fell; where he sank, there he fell dead.”
5:31 “So perish all your enemies, O LORD! But may your friends be like the sun as it rises in its might.”
Whether one rearranges the elements in the biblical story or not, note some of the correspondences with later stories which may have drawn inspiration from it:
It takes place during wartime.
The action follows the adventures of someone on the losing side of the conflict who is in fear for his life.
Just when you think that the protagonist is safe, you realize that it is just an illusion.
Much of the story is told in a stream-of-consciousness manner from the point of view of an untrustworthy narrator.
The secret is only revealed at the very end of the story.
One could even imagine that the wishful musings of Sisera's mother only happen in the unconscious mind of Sisera as he lies down to sleep in the seconds before he is killed, just as in Pincher Martin and “An Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge.” By the way, a similar depressing ending was in the original version of the movie “Brazil” which I saw, but I believe that it has since been totally re-written to a happy conclusion due to tremendous pressure from disappointed fans.
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