Clearly, a literal History is not what this book is attempting to provide. Therefore, maybe the inclusion of Bible stories can be seen as non-literal, or mythic. To ignore the book's usage of those motifs would be to completely undermine the book thematically, since it is in relation to those stories (and the tradition around them) that the narrator positions these characters. The most obvious instance is the first one where the woodworms are rejected from the Ark, but sneak on anyway.
The myth of the Ark is one where God saves animals from doom by giving Noah the plans to build an Ark that will survive the flood God has planned. In this story, we find our woodworms who are symbols for deconstruction, because clearly Noah uses wood for construction. These woodworms are like the people in churches who pick away at tradition by questioning the assumptions that tradition protects. This novelist demonstrates that there is an opposition between these people who find their sustenance one way and all the people who find their sustenance another way.
This leads to a kind of disenfranchisement, not just religiously, but politically. What is left to these folks is the path of the mystic, shown in stories like "Project Ararat," which is a quest toward the remnants of Noah's Ark (which landed on Mount Ararat in the biblical myth) and which is like a Holy Grail story, but futuristic and in space. The motif is also shown in "The Mountain" where a religious woman ventures to the remote monastery of a mountain. The mountain is a religious symbol often used to indicate progress "toward God," or religious transcendence.
But what does any of that have to do with the artist's continual analysis of other artworks? That is the relevant question for unpacking these stories in a cohesive way. The title urges the reader to try and synthesize these ten pieces of story into one cohesive narrative, and although the parenthetical is highly ironic and self-defeating, it shows one possible way of doing that. When the narrator explains how he thinks art works, there are elements of religious transcendentalism in his opinion. The use of metafiction itself suggests transcendentalist themes.
