Gustave Doré: Moses
The Law & the Prophets:
The Cross-genre text from Ancient Times to the Present Day
- Themes:
- People of the Book
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Primary Text:
- The Bible: from The Book of Job (c.5th century BC) Critical Text:
- Dennis Tedlock: "Towards a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability." In A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections about the Book & Writing (2000)
- The Origins of Genre Theory
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Primary Texts:
- William Blake: from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
- Robin Hyde: from The Book of Nadath (1937)
Author Pages:
- William Blake (1757-1827)
- The Bible (c.1400-400 BC / c.50-200 AD)
- Robin Hyde (1906-1939)
- Dennis Tedlock (1939- )
So the story goes that this friend of mine – a writer, with a bit of a reputation as an avant-garde poet– was sitting in Aotea Square one day when he saw some people off in a corner talking very intensely, and reading out passages to one another from a large, dog-eared, black-bound book.
It was too far off to tell precisely which black-covered book it was: the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon? Quite possibly the latter: the authorised translation of the golden plates revealed by the Angel Moroni to the Holy Joseph Smith at Palmyra in 1823.
In any case, it struck him that no-one ever talks about works of literature like that. You might occasionally run into someone who’s actually read the same books that you have, but even then you probably won’t pull out your copy and start arguing over the minutiae of the text.
Something about the intensity of the response the people he was watching were experiencing as they pored over their sacred book made him think that that was the kind of book he wanted to write.
James Joyce once remarked jokingly that all he required of readers was a lifetime of devoted attention to his works, but even the most extreme Joyceans – Richard Ellmann, Stuart Gilbert; David Wright – have time to do other things as well. Not so with the “people of the book”: Fundamentalist Christians or Moslems, devoting every waking hour to the study of the holy text; Buddhists reciting sutras; even Scientologists reading L. Ron Hubbard on Scientology.
The latter is a particularly interesting case of a pulp science-fiction writer who accomplished the cross-over to writing what were essentially religious texts. Carlos Castaneda, G. I. Gurdjieff , Baghwan Shree Rajneesh ... you might start off as an anthropologist or a scientist, but once you achieve the status of a guru, your words assume a whole new level of importance. In short, you’ve reached critical mass.
My friend was as good as his word. He did write an immense epic philosophical work designed to elevate and educate the masses (and make him a whole barnload of cash into the bargain, I presume). Unfortunately it was so utterly boring that no-one could be bothered to read it – myself included. In retrospect, I think it may have been because his potential readers suspected him of possible insincerity. After all, sheer unreadability and tedium are seldom regarded as fatal objections to the success of a religious texts.
Mark Twain famously described the Book of Mormon as “chloroform in print,” but Madam Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877) or Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health (1875) must surely far outstrip it in that department. It’s worth quoting the rest of Twain’s assessment of the founding text of Mormonism, though:
The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James’s translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel—half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern – which was about every sentence or two – he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as “exceeding sore,” “and it came to pass,” etc., and made things satisfactory again. “And it came to pass” was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.
He concludes: “The Mormon Bible is rather stupid and tiresome to read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of morals is unobjectionable – it is ‘smouched’ from the New Testament and no credit given.” (Roughing It, chapter 16)
That is the problem with such modern works of prophecy and revelation, though: if they come out of the Christian tradition, they have a tendency to sound like poor pastiches of seventeenth-century English; if they come out of the “mysterious East,” the pastiche is of bad translations of the Bhagavad-Gita or the Vedas ...
But perhaps my friend was onto something after all. Just because a thing is generally done badly, that’s no reason not to do it at all. What of William Blake, for instance? For every reader of his great prophetic books such as Jerusalem or Milton, there are a hundred readers of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, but there’s no denying that spiritual revelation and visionary intensity are at the very heart of his work.
Without religion, there is no Blake. And while his voices may (at times) have led him astray, I would contend that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) is one of the greatest poems in the English language. That’s if it is a poem, of course. Certainly it contains passages in poetic form. But it also includes lists of proverbs, prose anecdotes, and – of course – Blake’s vivid line drawings, re-coloured for each unique copy from the original plates. It’s a generic anomaly. It’s also a masterpiece.
Could the same be said for Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake [or "Spoke"] Zarathustra? Described by him as a “Book for All and None” it purports to present the doctrines of the Persian prophet Zoroaster, but in fact is a poetic distillation of Nietzsche’s own philosophy of life, the idea of eternal recurrence and – of course – the concept of the übermensch. Wikipedia describes it as a “philosophical novel,” and it is indeed quite difficult to know what else to call it. Once again, it defies genre. One of the earliest English translators, Thomas Common, “reasoned that because the original German was written in a pseudo-Luther-Biblical style, a pseudo-King-James-Biblical style would be fitting in the English translation.” Subsequent translators have tried to escape from this trap of pseudo-archaism and reproduce more closely the fierceness of the original German text.
Certainly it was under the direct influence of Nietzsche’s social and ideological critique that New Zealand poet Robin Hyde composed her own Book of Nadath in the mid-1930s (first published posthumously in 1997). However, American prophet and poet Walt Whitman also had a voice in her long lines and gnomic free verse – not to mention the translations from Maori poetry which she would have read in the Grey papers in the Auckland Public Library.
It’s worth remembering that, while literary critics have always tended to concentrate on the aesthetic and narrative aspects of traditional epics (Homer and Gilgamesh, for instance), these texts also had a strongly ritualised and religious side. When one attempts to read the Central American creation epic Popol Vuh, for instance, it’s hard to see it as literature exactly, being rather a repository of an entire system of beliefs.
Let this be, then, our first step towards defining the many faces of the multi-genre text in literature. One can read authors such as Blake and Nietzsche as if they were simply composing poems or philosophical novels, but that would be to ignore the way in which they allude to and echo the structures of Biblical texts such as the Book of Job.
Job, too, has been referred to as a fiction or a fable somehow interpolated into the prophetic and historical narratives of the Bible, but does that really make sense as a description of this book. Was there really a Job? Even the most devout Fundamentalist Christian must surely entertain some doubts at certain aspects of the story which is told about him (the devil’s role in it, above all). What genre does it inhabit? Poem? Short story? Edifying fable?
Propp and the motif-index
- Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (1895-1970)
- Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. 1928. Trans. Laurence Scott. Introduction by Svatava Pirkova-Jakobson. 1958. Rev. Louis A. Wagner. Introduction by Alan Dundes. 1968. American Folklore Society Bibliographical and Special Series, 9. Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, 10. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.
- Propp, Vladimir. Morphologie du conte; suivi de Les Transformations des contes merveilleux; et de E. Mélétinski, L’Étude structurale et typologique du conte, traductions de Marguerite Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov et Claude Kahn. Collection Poétique, ed. Gérard Genette & Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Seuil, 1970.
- Stith Thompson (1885-1976)
- Thompson, Stith. The Folktale. 1946. New York: The Dryden Press, Inc., 1951.
- Thompson, Stith, ed. One Hundred Favorite Folktales. 1968. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974.
- Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975)
- Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovitch. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. 1975. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press Slavic Series, 1. 1981. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.
- Herman Northrop Frye (1912-1991)
- Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. New York: Atheneum, 1969.
- Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance . The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1974-1975. Cambridge, Mass; Harvard University Press, 1976.
- Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. 1982. Ark Paperbacks. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
The image of this astonishing Americanization of the German pathos can be seen in the smiling face of Louis Armstrong as he belts out the words of his great hit "Mack the Knife." As most American intellectuals know, it is a translation of the song "Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera, a monument of Weimar Republic popular culture, written by two heroes of the artistic Left, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. There is a strange nostalgia among many of the American intelligentsia for this moment just prior to Hitler's coming to power, and Lotte Lenya's rendition of this song has long stood with Marlene Dietrich's singing "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt" in the Blue Angel as the symbol of a charming, neurotic, sexy, decadent longing for some hazy fulfillment not quite present to the consciousness. Less known to our intelligentsia is an aphorism in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, a book well known to Brecht, entitled "On the Pale Criminal," which tells the story of a neurotic murderer, eerily resembling Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment who does not know, cannot know, that he committed murder out of a motive as legitimate as any other and useful in many important situations, but delegitimized in our pacific times: he lusted after "the joy of the knife." This scenario for "Mack the Knife" is the beginning of the supra-moral attitude of expectancy, waiting to see what the volcano of the id will spew forth, which appealed to Weimar and its American admirers. Everything is all right as long as it is not fascism! With Armstrong taking Lenya's place, as Mai Britt took Dietrich's, it is all mass-marketed and the message becomes less dangerous, although no less corrupt. All awareness of foreignness disappears. It is thought to be folk culture, all-American, part of the American century, just as "stay loose" (as opposed to upright) is supposed to have been an insight of rock music and not a translation of Heidegger's Gelassenheit. The historical sense and the distance on our times, the only advantages of Weimar nostalgia, are gone, and American self-satisfaction - the sense that the scene is ours, that we have nothing important to learn about life from the past - is served.
- Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. A Touchstone Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1987): 151-52.
I've always chuckled at this passage from Allan Bloom's strident anti-relativist manifesto of the late 1980s. He's so pathetically keen to remind us that he knows German: making sure that Marlene Dietrich's saucy song from Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] is given its correct original title, which translates as "I'm in love from head to toe" (though it's generally referred to in English as the more decorous "Falling in Love Again").
Where he really goes wrong, though, is in assuming that Louis Armstrong, for all his "smiling face" did not understand the meaning of his "great hit 'Mack the Knife.'" Armstrong grew up among whores, thieves and murderers, in the poorest quarters of New Orleans. To imagine that because one can see possible sources for the amoral sentiments of Brecht's "Mackie Messer" in the works of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky one somehow has superior insight into the significance of this brutish character is surely a singular privileging of library-trawling over lived experience.
Bloom's laughable attempts to pontificate about the depths of Brecht's knowledge of Nietszche are also rather confounded by the fact that more than 80% of Die Dreigroschenoper is now known to have been written by his "collaborator" Elisabeth Hauptmann. Perhaps she's the one who knew Thus Spake Zarathustra and Crime and Punishment so well.
In any case, all this is largely beside the point. Bloom's error is, I would argue, mostly based on genre confusion. He imagines that because a particular song was written a long time ago, in a culture far away from our own, that a large amount of contextual detail is required to understand it. And this might well be so in some cases. When it comes to the wiles of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, though, sexy nightclub singers need little introductions to audiences of any epoch. Is the continuing appeal of her performance now based primarily on nostalgia for the sexual licence of the Weimar epoch? Possibly. But that was certainly not the intention at the time. The sultry seductress is an archetype which goes back at least as far as ancient Babylonia or Egypt, if not further back.
As for Louis Armstrong's "smiling face," it's hard to avoid the feeling that Bloom's patronising tone here verges on implicit racism. Armstrong's ignorance of German (which is assumed to disqualify him from any knowledge of Brecht and Weill's original song) undercuts his performance of "Mack the Knife" - "it is all mass-marketed and the message becomes less dangerous, although no less corrupt."
This is a very odd statement. Brecht's own ignorance of English disqualified him from any close assessment of John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera in the original. Does this mean that his updated version of it, like Armstrong's, lacks "all awareness of foreignness"? Luckily Elisabeth Hauptmann was fluent in English. Perhaps, though, the merits of the Threepenny Opera stem from its brutal and amoral evocation of the underworld in 1920s Germany, and have little to do with archaeological explorations of its approximate origins.
By the same token, you don't have to be a close student of the life and times of Louis Armstrong to realise that his adroit tightrope walking over the realities of life in a brutally segregated society taught him far more about the workings of the "American mind" than the cloistered existence of a University of Chicago mandarin could ever do. "Mack the Knife" could hardly have often been heard as a jolly piece of "folk culture" by even the most naive listener. Bloom appears to have succeeded in this endeavour, though. When Armstrong sang of a "body oozing blood," one can't help feeling that he had in mind one of the numerous murderers and pimps he knew in his youth. Bloom, on the other hand, leaps at once to a more probable analogy with one of the more obscure sections of Nietzsche's strange prophetic poem. The "foreignness" of the song's origins obscures (for him) any conceivable applicability it might have to the life going on around him.
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