David asked me to talk about the first 10 chapters of the Bible, and I’ll try to lay some things out, think a little about Leela’s discussion last week, and end by thinking a little about Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, particularly the famous chapter “Odysseus’s Scar,” which compares the narrative styles of Genesis and Homer’s Iliad.
First I want to start with the core violations in the opening chapters of the Bible—primarily the Fall and Cain’s murder of Abel. These are clearly sites of pain and regret and, as far as aetiological stories go, they help to explain why the basic functions of life (working for food and giving birth to other humans ) cause so much pain, why man fights nature, why man fights man, why there isn’t seamless crossover between our desires and the results of our actions, why your will is always necessarily compromised by virtue of just being a human.
All this, it seems to me, is a matter of fact to the Homeric mind in the Iliad. This is just the way it is—the beginning of the poem is indeed a post-fall world, with a complicated system of relations marked by self-interest, conflict, force, negotiation, compromise, refusal. In there we have human appeals to the supernatural, human appeals to other humans, supernatural appeal to humans. This is the Homeric indicative, in other words—the way things are. It seems to me that one of the crucial problems for the characters in the Iliad is: what are you going to do about all this, how are you going to see your way through this? If you’re Paris, you maybe chill out with Helen in bed, if you’re Diomedes you put your head down and just keep fighting, if you’re Agamemnon you seek your own glory and honor, if you’re Hector you seek other-directed forms of glory and honor, if you’re one of the various Gods you try desperately, through negotiation and systems of indebtedness, to try to get as much as you can given the realistic constraints of fate and the other powers that surround you. And, perhaps most interestingly, if you’re Achilles you leave the fray, contemplate leaving for good, but eventually return. Book 9 is one of his great get-me-off-this-ride moments, his subjunctive moment if you will, when he lays out his options:
If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,
My journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
My pride, my glory dies… True but the life that’s left me will be long,
The stroke of death will not come on me quickly. (Book 9, 500-505)
This is only, crucially, an imagined possibility, a subjunctive that stays a subjunctive. Because Achilles does come back, because, in some sense, he must come back, the poem seems to really want to know what’s recoverable about having to be involved in this agonistic, compromised, self-interested, indicative world. And, what’s great about the poem, is that to a large extent those things are found, as we discussed—sympathy through identification and recognition of shared pain (as we discussed regarding Priam and Achilles, Diomedes and Glaucus), respect for the body and the realization of shared bodily limitations—as in the beautiful moment when Priam and Achilles realize they have to stop their negotiations for Hector’s body because they both have to eat. They both need food.
So the Iliad spends a lot of time thinking about what it might mean to be subjunctive, and what you get when you eventually return to the indicative of your embedded world, which you must do.
So much of the force of the stories in the Bible, however, turn upon the lack of a subjunctive option; so much of the stories are about not what you get when you join the indicative world, but of what you lose and give up. Substituting necessity for “indicative” here perhaps puts a finer point on it. Necessity ends up being benign or at last recoverable in the Iliad—Achilles and Priam must eat, Achilles must give Hector’s body back, we all must die–but in the Bible necessity is always painful and occasionally monstrously horrific. Compare Abraham and Achilles as decision makers. They are a good pair to think of together because both are involved in events that are imagined and planned for but which actually don’t happen– Abraham doesn’t kill his son, Achilles doesn’t leave Troy. When God tells Abraham to kill Isaac, here’s a moment where some thinking out of the box, Achilles style, may be good. But the horror of the story lies in the fact that this isn’t even an option. In some sense, the story confuses or perhaps reverses the subjunctive and indicative. That is, if I’m an ancient Near Eastern patriarch, shouldn’t I definitely not kill my son? God wants him to do the unthinkable, which, of course he ends up not having to do. But no matter—God’s point has been proven. A lot of the work the Bible does in Genesis is of course to wrench the indicative away from its traditional bounds: family, custom, old religious systems, and towards one and only one: God. Reconciliation between God’s ways and man’s happen more fully in Exodus with the Ten Commandments, when, in some root sense, the two become interlinked. The Law is a sanctified ethical system that allows man access to God largely through just action towards man. But this hasn’t yet been figured out, though there are key prefigurements of that Law in the early covenants between God and Noah, God and Abraham.
It oftentimes feels to me that the Patriarchs and Matriarchs float in a flux where everything is being renegotiated. I mentioned one—the story of Abraham and Isaac and the renegotiation of father/son ties; any others could be used here; some which stick in my mind are the renegotiation of custom and family, as when Rebecca and Jacob plot successfully to steal the birthright of the first born son; another is basic bodily intactness, which too must be compromised, as when Abraham agrees to circumcision as part of the terms of God’s covenant. Now I skirted around about Adam and Eve earlier and said that after them the subjunctive hero is not possible. But what about them? Adam and Eve are a really special case, because it is their subjunctive desire—what if we did what God told us not to do?—that actually creates the conditions for the human indicative that stays indicative, even after the old customs and ways that I mentioned before leave the scene. Adam’s curse, in other words:
3:15 And I will put enmity between thee [the serpent] and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed, it shall bruise they head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
3:16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
3:17 And unto Adam he said, because thou has hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.
In this sense, the Bible imagines the subjunctive of desire as something that caused the human indicative, that is, the life we find ourselves in—a life of pain, enmity between man and nature, labor, sorrow. The next core violation, is man against man, Cain and Abel. Another core violation we meet early is the Tower of Babel: why vast groups of people don’t get along and can’t communicate. But every violation is meant to recall the primary violation, because each is really a violation against God.
This idea of primary or core violation is instructive to compare to Book I of the Iliad. It too presents itself as an origin story, albeit one of a specific event and not a metaphysical reality (our cursedness). The Iliad is obsessed with causes and explanations—take Book I. We are met with a quite complicated set of causal questions—what first drove Achilles and Agamemnon to clash? Achilles was mad because Agamemnon stole his girl, Agamemnon stole his girl to make up for the loss of Chriseis, Agamemnon lost Chriseis because Apollo started slaughtering Greeks, Apollo started slaughtering Greeks because Chryses appealed to him, Chryses appealed to him because Agamemnon took Chriseis and wouldn’t give her back. You start to get the sense that this has no end–we can go deeper into this, back to the abduction of Helen, back to the judgment of Paris. Homer is obsessed with causation, with explanations, here and throughout the Iliad—hence his favoring of the elaborative style—every object, every soldier, has a backstory, has a reason that got them to where they are. This elaborative style is compared unfavorably to the elliptical style of the Hebrew Bible by Auerbach. He thinks the elliptical style of the Bible—its sparseness, its lack of explicit psychological investigation—is part of its psychological richness as opposed to the shallowness of the Homeric mind, concerned with surface and objects. But if we think about this less in terms of style and more in terms of issues of causality, Homer may not come out so bad. If you are a character in the Bible, at any point, and you ask: why are things the way they are? You can, it seems, always hit bedrock at the core violation of the fall. If you are a Homeric character, however, and you ask the same question which indeed Homer does at the beginning, you sink into quicksand—if you go back far enough into human relations you find more tangled webs of causes and effects; if you go upwards to the Gods for answers you just find a mirror of the conflicts you yourself are trying to resolve and figure out. So much for Homer’s psychological shallowness.
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