Late-Coming Restraint
My brother-in-law is a painter. Though our medium for art is different, we still love to talk shop about art, as well as the projects we are working on. One day, we were talking about how long it has taken both of us to “find our voice,” as some would say. Both of us, it seems, stumbled on this experience in our thirties. Then my brother-in-law said, “When I listened to your most recent piece, what stuck out to me was its restraint.” That honestly was one of the best compliments I’ve received over the years. In earlier works, I tended to stuff my pieces with ideas and experimental techniques. But in my more recent works, I tend to have a better judgment of what one or two ideas need to control the composition’s direction.
Restraint is an essential ingredient in good art. Think of the restraint in the book Dracula, where we only uncover the truth bit by bit as we read diary entries describing people’s experiences. Or think of how the director Alfred Hitchcock produced unprecedented sensations of horror in his films by implying events offscreen rather than showing them onscreen. Or think of how a Mahler climax is felt so viscerally precisely because he spends several minutes teasing us with hints and promises of a climax before it fully arrives in a blazing fury. Examples like these could be enumerated.
Restraint may be one of the last skills an artist learns, but it is one of the most important. In order to help developing artists sharpen their eye for restraint, I would like to set before us an example for study. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, there exist two versions of the story called Esther. One version, the Hebrew version, comes earlier and demonstrates profound restraint in its storytelling. The next version, the Greek version, expands upon the earlier version by weaving more explicit commentary into the story’s structure. Both versions of the story are valuable for a variety of reasons. But from an artist’s perspective, I would like to make the case that the earlier Hebrew version—with all its restraint—is the more powerful version on account of its subtlety. Let’s take a look at the two versions of Esther.
A Case Study: Esther
The Hebrew version of Esther famously excludes all mention of God. On first reading, the clearest intuition one might have for reading it theologically is simply that it exists within the same collection of scrolls which are more obviously theological. Apart from this context clue, however, how are we to understand the book’s purpose? The answer is, through its artistry. First, the book brilliantly uses what scholars call “intertextuality,” which is a fancy way of saying the scribes use words or imagery from other biblical stories to shed light on the present story. For instance, when Mordecai refuses to bow before Haman, the imagery and language evoke the story of Daniel’s three friends who refuse to bow before the king’s golden image. In Esther, we are not told why Mordecai refuses to bow; but the connection with the book of Daniel makes us wonder if we are about to see God’s people suffer and then miraculously delivered. In this fashion, an earlier story illumines the otherwise opaque significance of the story in question.
Another way that the Hebrew book of Esther embeds the meaning of its story into the artistry of the writing is through literary design. At the end of the book, there is a chapter that gives you a kind of summary of the story just told. It’s as if the scribes tell you, “Now the purpose of me telling you this story is …” What they say, though, is surprising: “The festival of Purim came about because of the casting of the Pur.” That sentence is as ridiculous as it sounds. The author picks up on an almost absurd detail in the story—when Haman cast Pur (which is something akin to casting dice) to decide the day on which he would kill the Jews. The summary is a kind of dramatic understatement, similar to when an obituary was wrongly published about Steve Jobs and he quipped, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” It’s a kind of absurd understatement: “The celebration of Purim was decided by the random casting of the Pur.” One can’t help but laugh and say, “What! That’s it?” The rhetoric invites deep meditation on the providential significance of the story, how the day “chosen” for Israel’s death was inverted for their deliverance.
The Greek version of Esther is (as said before) much more overt in its theological meditations. It opens with symbolic dreams which pre-interpret the story we are about to hear. For instance, the fighting dragons conjure scriptural imagery of sea monsters and Leviathan, as well as the particular stand-off between the serpent-staff of Moses and the serpent-staffs of the Egyptian sorcerers. It’s as if the story, from the outset, uses recognizable imagery to say, “Watch for how God will use a chosen leader to deliver his people from slavery and death.” Additionally, in its closing passage, the character Mordecai interprets the dream he had in detail: Mordecai and Haman were the two dragons fighting in the dream. There is less of a need to meditate deeply on the symbolism from the book of Exodus, because the dream’s symbols are cleanly interpreted and applied to its present-day context.
As a theologian, I find the theological expansions of the Greek Esther explosive. They give us powerful insight into how later Jewish audiences heard these texts and understood them to be part of their larger story. As an artist, however, I believe the greater honor goes to the shorter Hebrew version of the story. Its use of artistic tools to reveal the same message is exemplary. It forces the reader to ponder and question what the significance of these events is. It demands thoughtful homework as you think about potential parallels with other biblical stories. And it demands patience as you contemplate the literary design and the strange, almost coy, summary of the book. Yet it is precisely this agonizing and slow process of uncovering its meaning that makes the story linger in your imagination. It is its refusal to moralize or give easy answers that makes it such a masterpiece of art and an inheritance for artists today.
Application for Artists
I hope this exploration of restraint will help you as you think through what you need to keep and what you need to remove from your own artwork. It’s so easy to want your audience to grasp what you’re doing on a quick pass. But art that lingers is willing to leave people with unanswered questions, with the riches buried deep in the fabric of the art, waiting for a patient observer to excavate its depths. Restraint requires walking the lonely road of being misunderstood. And restraint requires the painful choice of eliminating material that is objectively good. But I hope you will be convinced after the case study above, that the quality of artistry that results is worth the pain. And to those of us who have the eye for the deliberate restraint of a master, we will be glad for the gift you have given us.
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