Whether those who heard the oral tales that came to be attributed to a Homer or the tales of what would become part of the Tanakh, tales like the two creation stories, the tale of Jacob and Esau, the story of Abraham and Isaac, or the tale of Moses in the Old Testament book of Genesis, took these tales literally or believed they were literally true is a question that cannot be answered since we don’t have the notes of readers in the margins of these books, which, of course, did not become “books” in the modern sense until late in the historical game anyway.
There were what might be taken as notations in manuscripts copied by scribes beyond the marginalia one finds in copied manuscripts. Scholars, for instance, can find variants and mistakes in copied texts like the Bible and additions to texts, as in the works of Josephus, in which ideologically interested scribes tried to correct or harmonise textual variants to prove the veracity of the biblical tales. Mass notations in mass produced books, however, had to wait for what constituted the mass production of books after the invention of the printing press and this has led, in some cases, to the fascinating exploration of how readers read texts by scholars like Robert Darnton whose essay on the marginal notes of an Enlightenment reader of Rousseau in his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Essays in French Cultural History and the meaning Rousseau had for this member of the bourgeoisie, for example, is just one effort to define and delineate a historically sensitive social and cultural approach to how readers read texts. In the twentieth century biblical scholar Brevard Childs explored, if rather briefly how readers read parts of the biblical Book of Genesism across time and space.
What we do know about many readers of the Bible is that many came to believe in the literal truth of the tales in the Bible over time. By the twentieth century many Americans, for example, came to believe that Adam, humankind, from adamah, those who eke out a living from the ground or the earth, and Eve, hawwah, living, the source of life, were literal people, ish, male, and ishshah, female, who literally existed and literally lived in a paradisiacal Garden of Eden. For them Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden were not just metaphorical, allegorical, or symbolic, all prominent approaches to the biblical texts by elites before the twentieth century. This literalism arose, in large part, as a reactions within the American Christian community to the controversial theory of evolution—geological, human, historical—a theory that became prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States and throughout the Western world and as a reaction to the rise of a higher biblical criticism which claimed that the Torah was made up of various documents—J, E, P, and D, written at various times and in various spaces and hence was not written by Moses as tradition had it.
By the twentieth century a culture of biblical literalism had developed in the United States, a culture in which many readers or hearers came to believe that what they read or heard was literally factual or true. They came to believe that Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Jacob, Jospeh, Abraham, Moses, and Joshua, for example, were really flesh and bones people who strode like giants around Israel and Judea. This literalist or fundamentalist, as polemicists and apologists of biblical literalism came to call their brand of Christianity, also led to readings which ignored contradictions in their literally true text, a text they now came to see as authored by god—a notion of authorship that was impacted by post-Enlightenment romanticism--such as the inconsistencies in the two stories of creation, the two stories of what happened to Jericho when the “chosen people’ conquered Canaan, and the multiple tales of the life of Jesus in the Christian addition to the Tanakh, the New Testament and which, as a consequence, could not be false since god was truth writ large. This belief in the literal truth of mythic tales and legends also led to decontextualisation as many came to believe that it was unnecessary to put these tales into economic, political, cultural, geographic, or demographic contexts since an all knowing god was the author of this “history”, the author of this salvation history, a history that floated fully formed outside of time and space.
This religious literalism fed into other forms of literalism as several scholars have noted. Many American Christians came to believe, as many British Israelites before them believed, for instance, that they were now god’s chosen people and that god guided America, if, of course, it and its people lived up to its part of its covenant with god as expressed in holy writ. As a consequence, many came to believe that the American Constitution, for example, was inspired, divine, part of god’s plan for his chosen country and his chosen people. In turn, many came to believe that the US Constitution had to be taken literally and that it was essential for Americans and for American judges to discern the original intent of those who authored the Constitution, a Constitution whose original author, many cane to believe, was ultimately god almighty himself who was writing through the faithful and saintly founding fathers.
One can readily find a secular version of this literalism in many reaction videos to movies and television shows on the social media site YouTube. The advent of the new digital media, of course, and the increasing number of reaction videos by reactors, most of whom react to movies, television shows, books, or current events in order to make money, something that in itself impacts how reactors react to what they are reacting to and which, in turn, raises questions about the dispassion of reactors, has made it easier for researchers, at least in some ways, to explore, how some “read” the movies or television shows they are reacting to. While researchers may not know some demographic, economic, political, cultural, and geographic facts about these readers, these reactions do reveal quite a lot about the cultural and ideological presuppositions of reactors. One of the things researchers do know about many if not most of these reactors culturally is that many if not most of them take a literal approach to the movie or TV texts they are reacting to and downplay and often ignore, for whatever reason, metaphorical, allegorical, mythological, political, economic, other cultural, and geographical approaches and aspects of the texts they “react” to. Secular fundamentalism.
One of the forms this secular reaction literalism has taken is pointed up, for example, in a reaction by the Review Crew to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "What’s My Line” I recently ran across in my ethnographic explorations of YouTube. At one point in their reaction to the second hour of this episode, for instance, some members of the three member Review Crew maintained that they hadn’t been informed by the canonical text as to why one of the characters in this season two episode of Buffy, the vampire paramour of vampire Spike Drusilla, is ill and needs to be cured, one of the foci of the episode, and implicitly complained about it.
This need for continuity by many readers or viewers, of course, did not originate with Buffy. As I noted fundamentalist Christians came to impose continuity on inconsistent biblical texts. In some cases secular literalism with its devotion to continuity was not able, at least initially, to sweep inconsistencies under the rug. Devotees of the Sherlock Holmes tales of Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance, noted the inconsistencies in the canonical text as to where Doctor Watson, Holmes’s companion, was shot during his medical service in the British military during the Afghanistan war. Devotees of the British television show Doctor Who noted the many inconsistencies that appeared in that show over its sixteen year run. One episode guide to the show, in fact titled The Discontinuity Guide, even pointed out these discontinuities in its analysis of each episode celebrating this, to some extent, in the process. Devotees of The X-Files noted the inconsistencies in the mythological aspects of that TV show, something many X-Files fans are averse to doing these days and who are more than willing to attack, often with ad hominems, any one who has the “bad manners" to do so these days as comments on X-Files reactions to “negative” reactions on YouTube show. Can the criminalisation of empirically grounded critical comments on The X-Files and the categorisation of them as hate speech be far behind in these selective politically and ideologically correct looney McCarthyesque days?
As television in the UK and US changed and became more serially oriented beyond the inherently serial adaptations of classic novels by people like the Brontes, Austen, and Dickens in the seventies and eighties, however, devotees or fans of these shows became ever more concerned about perceived discontinuities in their favourite television shows. Some tried to smooth these discontinuities over imposing continuities on and over the discontinuities just as Christian fundamentalists had done before them with the Bible. In the process they ignored the fact that Conan Doyle was ambivalent about the Holmes stories and this ambivalence led to discontinuities, that Doctor Who’s personnel changed over the years and that not all of them were devoted to continuity particularly in the early years of a show when the show was not that highly regarded particularly by higher level bureaucrats at the BBC, and that the popularity of The X-Files (and Twin Peaks before it) and the fact that popularity in American television extended a shows run to that of a dead horse generally meant that a show had to be prolonged and that this prolongation wasn’t always good for what was already laid down in the canonical text and hence for continuity.
Eventually a kind of priesthood developed, a proprietary priesthood that held those who made cultish television shows like Doctor Who responsible for maintaining continuities and simultaneously held them responsible for and accountable for what they saw as discontinuities. Many in the Doctor Who fan clubs that arose, for instance, decried the change in tone that occurred in the Graham Williams-Douglas Adams years of the show seeing them as undermining the continuity and seriousness of the show.
There are many paradoxes in this cult like devotion to continuity among movie and television show cults. While the Williams-Adams years were largely initially demonised and held by many at the time of their broadcast to be some of the worse episodes of Who ever made many now consider them some of the best ever episodes of the show. The Review Crew’s complaints about unanswered questions in “What’s My Line” miss the fact that Spike referenced an ugly mob in Prague attacking both he and Drusilla. Attention spans are always at attention. Paradoxically, in other words, many reactors to Buffy (and Angel and Firefly and the new Who miss some of the more “subtler” continuities in each show in addition to the metaphorical and allegorical dimensions or levels of the show.
There are a number of things I find interesting about the cult of continuity beyond how time can change aesthetic perceptions and how readers and watchers are not always attentive to detail, which in themselves raise questions about the cult of continuity. One of the things I find fascinating, for instance, is the apparent “need" of readers and watchers for answers from the canonical text itself about certain “facts" instead of surmising the answers from information presented in the text, logically speculating or hypothesising about details in the show and coming to conclusions about them via verification of falsification, or using common sense to grasp that in a forty minute to one hour television show decisions have to be made about what must be put in to an episode and what is not essential to be put in and thus can be left out under the assumption that readers can make the connection themselves. It is not necessary, for instance, to show Buffy going from school to home since if Buffy has arrived home after leaving school. Clearly any viewer can assume she got home in some way, shape, or form via plain logic
I find what this says about readers fascinating. It seems to confirm that most readers are not only literalists or fundamentalists but that they need those in charge to provide answers about such issues to them rather than to discern them themselves. And what this says about authoritarianism and the authoritarian personality is interesting and fascinating. Don’t question authority. Defer to Authority. Accept authority. On the other hand, what the demand for continuity from makers of films and television shows by fans says about fans and about politics is also interesting. I suppose some commentators might see fan advocacy and calls for continuity as democratic. But then one can also argue that some forms of the Protestant every person his or her own Bible interpreter is also democratic. It is also, however, at the same time ultimately anti-intellectual at least in most of its generally literalist forms.
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