Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel, Third Edition

Conclusion. The Audience

137 CoNCLusIoN the audience We have been focusing on the storytelling and the story. Now we focus on the hearers, or audiences, as they engage in the process of experiencing the story in performance. Like a reader, the audience responds to the story in a linear, temporal fashion from the first word to the last.1 Unlike a reader, hearers cannot skip ahead, skim, or look back. What is the audience experiencing, and how is the audience being affected by that experience? Here we shift from asking what the story means to asking what the story does to the audience in the course of experiencing the story. the rhetoric Rhetoric refers to the way in which an author writes so as to create certain effects on readers. When we are dealing with performances, rhetoric addresses the impact of the story on audiences. These effects are engendered by the narrative as a whole—both by the particular story being told (the settings, the dynamics of the plot, and the development of the characters) and by the way the story is composed . The rhetorical question is: How do all the dimensions of a narrative work together to affect an audience? You may have read a novel that kept you in suspense. To ask about the rhetoric of that story is to ask: How did the story do that to you? You may respond to a film with greater compassion or perhaps with increased hostility or with a sense of personal courage you did not know that you had. To ask about the rhetoric of that film is to ask: How did the film lead you to react like that? Here we are asking about the rhetoric of Mark: What are the potential effects of Mark’s story on audiences ? And how does the story work to create that impact? 138 Mark as story the Ideal audience Before we consider the responses of real audiences to Mark’s story, we return to the concept of the ideal audience. Throughout this study, we have mentioned how the narrator has led hearers to respond in certain ways to various aspects of the story world. In most cases, this “audience” was not an actual audience, either ancient or modern, since it is not possible to predict the responses of actual audiences . Real audiences will engage Mark from different perspectives and with different reactions. Real audiences may already know about the fate of Jesus and the outcome of the disciples even before they hear the story. Real audiences may or may not understand the story. Real audiences may resist the story—be offended by the story or disagree with its standards of judgment. Rather, our audience has been a hypothetical “ideal audience”—an imagined audience with ideal responses to the rhetoric of the story inferred from the story itself. Most literary criticism on this subject addresses the issue of rhetoric with the concept of the ideal reader, because most interpretations deal with written material that is being encountered in the act of reading. By contrast, since we understand that Mark was composed to be presented by storytellers and to be experienced aurally by gathered communities, we have throughout referred to Mark’s ideal hearers or ideal audience. In actual performances, the storyteller brings out an interpretation of the story for the audience with voice inflection, volume, pace and emphasis, along with the use of gestures, facial expressions, postures, and bodily movements. In our study, we have not addressed physical and verbal aspects of performing Mark. Rather, we have focused on the rhetoric of the story itself and its implied ideal audience. The ideal audience is the audience that the composer creates (has in mind to shape) in the course of telling the story—an imaginary audience with all the ideal responses implied by the narrative itself.2 We could do a detailed analysis of an ideal audience by inferring from each line in the narrative how an audience is being led to respond and react. For there are responses implied for audiences in every line: filling gaps, identifying with characters, being held in suspense, anticipating later parts of the story, recalling earlier parts of the story, being drawn in by the narrator’s asides and irony, having emotions aroused, having expectations raised and revised, experiencing resolution (or the lack of it), and so on.3 However, for our purpose here, we will limit ourselves to giving a brief sketch of the overall experience of the implied ideal...