Forgetting Lot's Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship

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Forgetting Lot’s Wife On Destructive Spectatorship Martin Harries Fordham University Press New York 2007 Copyright 䉷 2007 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harries, Martin. Forgetting Lot’s wife : on destructive spectatorship / Martin Harries.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2733-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8232-2733-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2734-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8232-2734-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Influence (Psychology) 2. Violence. 3. Suffering 4. Audience— Psychology. 5. Spectators—Psychology. 6. Memory. 7. Recollection (Psychology) I. Title. BF774.H37 2007 155.9⬘35—dc22 2007014127 Printed in the United States of America 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1 First edition As things were in Lot’s days, also: they ate and drank; they bought and sold; they planted and built; but the day Lot went out from Sodom, it rained fire and sulphur from the sky and made an end of them all—it will be like that on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. On that day the man who is on the roof and his belongings in the house must not come down to pick them up; he, too, who is in the fields must not go back. Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it; and whoever loses it will save it, and live. —Luke 17:28–33 The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels. —Erich Auerbach, Mimesis ...