Juvenile Pastimes and Patterning Texts

Previously, I quoted Graham Harman saying of Nietzsche that "Many consider him a sort of juvenile pastime that one has to move beyond, and this attitude is understandable. . ." I'd meant to say something more about this aspect of youth and reading, before I got sidetracked. But I've seen this kind of thing said of Nietzsche a lot. You see it said of Dostoevsky too, that he is a young person's writer. It's further said that young readers get animated by ideas in fiction, whereas presumably more mature readers can read with more distance. Maybe. Is this condescending, or simply the wisdom of age and accumulated reading? Surely plenty of good readers have remained faithful to Dostoevsky and plenty of older readers of philosophy have not abandoned Nietzsche to the dustbin of youthful indiscretion. But to look on a body of work, written over the course of a lifetime, serious work, and dismiss it from a position outside and above it as "a juvenile pastime"!

(I remember Martin Amis saying something similar of Graham Greene, that he was a writer one grew out of. Amis would probably not be happy to think that the same might be said of him: I feel I've outgrown his novels, several of which I found enormously entertaining when I was in my 20s, but which in retrospect seem a bit slight, even if the glow of entertainment has not dimmed. Is it wrong that my consignment of Amis to the status of entertainment amuses me, particularly in light of his complaint, in his review of Hannibal, that Thomas Harris was being reviewed as literature? It seems rather important to him that his writing be literature. No doubt I'm being puerile. But surely I digress.)

Linking to the post noted above, blogger friend bdr teases me a little here, and in a comment says this:

I have a friend, a linguistics prof specializing in second language acquisition, who says learning the specialized language of, say, a philosopher, *is* SLA, and like learning, say, Russian, it gets harder for each year you're older.

As I say there, I'm sure his friend is exactly right. This has been a subterranean theme for me here. Much of the anxiety I still have about reading what I want to read is not just that, being older, I fear I lack sufficient time to get to it all, but that the time has literally passed in which I could have most effectively learned to read it. In which my brain was being organized this way, as opposed to that. Bdr's comment gives me space to flesh this idea out a bit. Nearly a year ago, I wrote somewhat vaguely on the topic of "the decline of symbolic language". I was channeling a Thomas Merton essay I'd recently read which had spoken to me, but I didn't elaborate much (nor did I reference him by name). The problem I sense is not just that I lack the time to play catch-up, given my age and the other demands on that time. The problem is that even if I had the time, given my age it's too late. (And part of my frustration now is that when I had the time and was young enough, I was obsessed with baseball and Led Zeppelin, not to cast aspersions on either.)

I wrote even earlier about what Michael Dirda has called the "patterning texts": the Bible, mythology, the Greeks, the Romans, etc. These are patterning texts in the sense that they form the background of literature, the patterns of narrative, of metaphor, that can be seen across the history of literature, writers in dialogue with the past, and so on. But they are also patterning texts in the sense that they form the culture which patterns the way we see the world, which patterns our very brains.

Let's consider the Bible for a moment. In The Book of God, Gabriel Josipovici approaches the Bible from a number of different directions, including how it's presented to us, both how it's physically bound and its chapter divisions, various traditions of interpretation, and especially its narrative mode. He also talks about how we encounter the Bible as children. Usually it's read to us, and we take the stories to be "true", in the way stories are, as we do all stories when we are children. I've had to take Josipovici's word on this, because for me the Bible was never thus. Though my mother went to church semi-regularly at different times in my childhood, the Bible did not live in our house, the stories were never really told. If I heard them at all it was either in the brief period in which I went to Sunday School myself, or more likely, third-hand, as filtered through the thick layers of culture, all confused and distant. And though I've tried to argue here on behalf of Josipovici's conception of the Bible as resistant to meaning, I'm fully aware that the Bible in fact, especially in this country, is seen rather as a repository of meaning, a container of answers. The manner in which it is framed for most is geared towards particular meanings; people usually have study versions of the Bible, with "key" sections bolded or set aside as pull quotes or areas of further consideration. The point is that, though my almost total areligiosity is probably anomalous in the United States over the period of my life, my sense is that even those who are Christian have that Christianity framed for them with particular meanings in view (which, again, to my mind has less to do with faith itself than with configurations of power), and while they are no doubt much more familiar with the broad strokes of the various religious stories than I am--one would hope--I suspect that in general the patterning work that the Bible once did simply as a matter of course is not being done. And even if it is for those who are broadly religious, the point can be extended to include the mythological texts, the Greco-Roman pantheon and the related tragedies and other works, material that my education barely covered at all. What once was simply widely known to a literate or semi-literate population, is now all but lost, replaced by characters from television shows or comic books who are thin, pale descendants of these archetypal myths. (Or maybe I'm overstating the case? Perhaps I'm just describing myself, in isolation? Perhaps, but somehow I get the sense that I'm not alone in this. The generally depressing discussion that arose around Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones tell me otherwise. But it's about the Nazis and the Holocaust, right? And we all think we know enough to be able to talk intelligently about those subjects.)

I'm going to leave off there, except I will repeat some questions I asked in one of those earlier posts: To the extent that a literature is a lived tradition of a people, is such a thing doomed without a common repository of symbolic language? Or a common repository of much of anything? And is such a thing perhaps already dead, with narrative taking place only in that place of solitude, where the reader finds the text? And if we all have our various tastes, so that increasingly few of us can draw on the same body of literature, what then?

More on Biblical narration and The Adventures of Augie March

Recently I suggested that Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March was in some respects like the Bible in its mode of narration. I had intended to say more about it but did not want to weigh down that earlier post. I won't go into great detail here, either, but I do want to mention something about how it was that I arrived at this idea. As part of this effort, I have since discussed "The Bible Open and Closed", an essay in which Gabriel Josipovici argues that the Bible's basic mode of narration is open (admittedly, that entry is more of a report than anything else). In fact, it was re-reading The Adventures of Augie March that once again brought Josipovici's argument to mind, prompting me to re-read the essay (which is of course much shorter than The Book of God, in which the same argument, among others, is dealt with in greater detail).

This, then, is the passage from Augie March that caught my attention in this regard (Augie, here, is working for his brother Simon at the latter's coal yard):

"Well," he said to Happy and me, "why don't you two take the car and go see some of the dealers? Try to drum up some trade. Here's five bucks for beer money. I'll stay here with Coxie and try to get that back fence in shape. They'll steal us blind [if] we don't do something about it." Cox was the handyman, an old wino in a slap-happy painter's cap that looked like an Italian officer's lid. He sent him scouting along the fence of the Westinghouse plant for old planks. Coxie worked for hamburgers and a bottle of California K. Arakelian's sherry or of yocky-dock. He was watchman too, and slept on rags back of the green lattice before the seldom used front door. Off he limped--he carried a bullet, he claimed, from San Juan Hill--by the mile-long big meshed fence of the corporation in which such needs as fences were met by sub-officers' inviting contractors' bids a tight steel net permitted all to look in at the vast remote shimmer, the brick steeples, the long power-buildings and the Vesuvian soft coal under the scarcely smeared summer sky and gaudiness.

It's that final detail about Coxie--"he carried a bullet, he claimed, from San Juan Hill"--that did it. Then I notice the other character details--he works for hamburgers or a bottle of sherry; sleeps on rags--do some of the same suggestive work. This character never appears again, but a life is briefly allowed to emerge here, before sinking back into the narrative, without any laborious back-story being filled in.

Again, I don't want to over-sell the comparison with the Hebrew Bible (not least because my experience with the Bible is highly limited!)--obviously, for just one example, Augie is the center of his own narrative. But I think such passages as the one quoted above, in the details I've highlighted, as well as Augie's general refusal to assign a meaning to his life and his uncertainty about it all, suggest an approach to literature that is more in the tradition of narrative, as argued by Josipovici, than in that of the novel, dominated as it is by story or even plot.

Notes on Josipovici's "The Bible Open and Closed"

Regular readers of this blog will probably not be surprised to learn that the writings of Gabriel Josipovici have been of prime importance in the evolution of my thinking on matters related to religion and faith. In his case, it is of course through the loving attention he has paid to the Bible itself, along with his illuminating inquiries into suspicion and trust and tradition.

I've always wanted to read the Bible, largely because I felt I ought to, because of its standing as cultural artifact, its importance in history and in literature. I wanted to know what was in it, so that I could better read other things, understand allusions, and so on. And I wanted to know what it really meant, in the face of so many apparent believers in the Bible as repository of Truth and the literal Word of God, and so on. It thus stood tall as the ultimate obligation text. But Josipovici has made the Bible seem approachable for me, just as he has done with so many once-forbidding writers, writers who I'd previously held at arm's length, continually deferring my own reading, writers from Dante to Kierkegaard to Proust. And he has made the Bible come potentially alive for me, as a text. (Which is not to say that I've yet made much headway myself, for a variety of reasons I'll not go into here.)

His marvelous study, The Book of God, is vitally important in this area, obviously, but here I want to discuss a later essay I've recently re-read. In "The Bible Open and Closed", a beautiful essay collected in The Singer on the Shore, Josipovici discusses the decentred nature of the Bible's narrative mode, its openness. The Bible is, he writes, "a series of narratives" (italics his):

Narrative was clearly how these ancient Semitic peoples made sense of the world, as it was the way the Greeks of the time of Homer, and so-called primitive peoples all over the world did. Yet we in our culture have a problem with narrative. What does it mean? we ask. What is the guy trying to say? And if the book in question is a sacred text the problems grow even more acute. For then it is even more important to understand clearly what it is saying, since our very lives may depend upon it. We need to feel we are dealing with a text that is closed, in the sense that its meaning can be clearly understood and translated into other terms; yet the Bible, like all narratives, but, as I hope to show, even more than most, is open, that is, it resists translation into other terms and asks not so much to be understood as lived with, however puzzling and ambiguous it may seem.

He then proceeds to discuss examples of what he means. One involves a certain Phalti or Phaltiel, son of Laish. When David rebels against Saul, Saul gives David's wife Michal to Phalti. Later, after Saul's death, when Saul's son Abner and everyone else realize that David now has the power, Michael must be returned. Here Josipovici quotes the relevant passage from the Bible:

And Ishbosheth sent, and took her from her husband, even from Phaltiel the son of Laish. And her husband went with her along weeping behind her to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, return. And he returned. (2 Sam. 3:15-16)

These are the only times Phalti appears in the Bible. It would have been one thing, Josipovici observes, for this obscure character to appear once or twice, and no more. But the narrator "chooses instead to bring this man momentarily to life, to make his pain, whether wounded pride or anguished love, all the more palpable for remaining unspoken." So troubling are such examples, so counter to our expectations, particularly our expectations of how a sacred document should operate, but also counter to how we expect a story to be told, used to novels as we are, that we insist on assigning reasons for it. Indeed, the history of Biblical interpretation is full of just this sort of reason-finding. There must be something missing, or maybe this is meant, or perhaps that. But the Bible proceeds as an open narrative. What this means, he says, is that the text's meaning is not certain, not nailed down, not closed. Meaning is sought, but the Bible does not disclose meaning. There is no center to the narrative. All is rendered contingent--not just meaning, but the stories themselves, whether a given story is told, versus another. The characters, like Phalti, who simply walk on the stage, evidently have lives that could have been narrated too, but are not--and we are made to feel it, however briefly. Looked at from the outside, especially from this late date, we think we know that Phalti is of little consequence, so chances are good we will not even notice his appearance. And the Bible does not offer reasons why things happen or why certain people are affected or chosen--why Abraham? for example; indeed, why the Jews?--and of course this is how life is. Things happen. Things are. What matters is how we respond to things. In this way, he argues, the Bible is above all, realistic, which may seem odd to us, given how used to the conventions of the so-called realist novel we are, and how unlike such a novel the Bible is, regardless of our attempts to read it as if it were one.

Now, Josipovici is primarily talking about the Old Testament--for one thing, the New Testament clearly has a central figure in Jesus--but even the New Testament, he argues, can be seen to operate within this tradition. With the Gospels, he shows how Matthew's and Mark's version of certain events are different, in their mode of narration, than is Luke's. With the former, the narrative proceeds with elements similar to that of the Hebrew Bible: "the deadpan of narration, its refusal to comment on the action from some position outside and above it; and (what follows from this), its depiction of man as a being existing in time. . ." Whereas Luke tries to impose meaning. The former, the way of the Hebrew Bible, and of Matthew and Mark, for example, is "open" because, in the case of Jesus, "we are forced to experience Jesus's anguish [as when he asks 'My God, why has thou forsaken me?'], his sense that what he desires and what he has to be are not one and the same, and his sense that he does not know how things will turn out." His ultimate acceptance is more real, more forceful, when we are not assured, as Luke tries to assure us, that everything will be ok. Only with this openness, this kind of narrative movement, "can Jesus's remarkable acceptance be grasped for what it is: a gesture of trust."

All of this makes the Bible seem like something other than the boring, obligatory religious text I have at times tried to force myself to read. And it's method, it seems to me, does have implications for writing and for literature, as well as for important extra-literary matters--the notion that the Bible resists meaning rather than imparting it clearly seems to me to have radical implications in our politics and our religion. But these are topics to explore another time. For now, let me close with another passage from Josipovici's essay, this one from near the end:

It is remarkable that a religious document should place narrative above theology, reality above consolation in this way. But the Bible does. And it does so, it seems to me, because it recognizes that in the end the only thing that can truly heal and console us is not the voice of consolation but the voice of reality. That is the way the world is, it says, neither fair nor equitable. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to live so as to be contented and fulfilled? And it contains no answers, only shows us various forms of response to these questions. And from Adam to Jesus it is constant in its reliance not on teaching, not on exhortation, not on reason, but on the one human form that can convey the truth that we are more than we can ever understand, the only form that is open, the form of narrative.