And God Saw Literature, That It Was Good
(for complete essay: http://www.tnr.com/article/and-god-saw-literature-it-was-good )
…The necessity of the Bible, if it is to be seen solely as poetry and story, may flatten in the same way. All sacred books contain the wise or stirring pleasures of narrative: the Bhagavad-Gita tells stories, the Taoist scriptures of Chuang-Tse tell stories, the Zoroastrian Zenavesta tells stories, the Koran tells stories, Confucius and Mencius tell stories, the Buddha tells stories; African and American Indian sacred tales abound. The earth is flooded with stories, hymns, and parables regarded as holy in their origins. The literary approach can deflate them all. Flannery O'Connor, an intransigent believer, said of the Christian mysteries that if they were not true, "then the hell with them." A skilled teller of tales, she insisted on a distinction between imagination of the kind that she herself could wield and what she took to be divine revelation. And it may be that if all the world's scriptures had long ago been flattened into literature, and packed side by side, despite their dissimilarities and divergences, into a single bookshelf–much as Madame Bovary, say, can stand in civil proximity to Crime and Punishment, and Joyce cheek by jowl with Proust–all our habitations and histories might have been far more pacific. Novels and stories do not war with one another; neither, pace Harold Bloom, do they always engage in supersessionism (at least not of the jihadist variety).
But stories, though they influence and enlarge us, do not deliver Commandments. The Bible cannot be pumped up from literary prestige to divine prerogative through arguing from the power of human imagination, even when that power is "kindled" by positing measureless structures of transcendent dominion. What, then, are unbelieving readers of the Five Books left with? Unless they happen to be moral philosophers who will deduce law and right conduct from reason, it is stories they are left with, and–for non-philosophers–isn't that enough?
On their face, the Patriarchal Tales, like all literature that endures, touch on everything recognizable in ordinary human life: crises between parents and children, between siblings, between husbands and wives; hunger and migration, jealousy and reconciliation, sudden ascent and sudden subjugation, great love and great hatred. Universally felt, they are family annals in a family album. The Joseph narrative is doubtless the most moving story of all: here stands Joseph, Pharaoh's mighty viceroy, interrogating the humbly petitioning brothers who in the past flung him into a pit and sold him to traders on their way to Egypt. Catching sight of Benjamin, the tender younger son of their mother Rachel, "Joseph hurried out, for his feelings for his brother overwhelmed him and he wanted to weep, and he went into the chamber and wept there. And he bathed his face and came out and held himself in check and said, 'Serve bread.'"
In this enclosed fraternal scene, God is not needed, and seems not to be present. So far, the drama of Joseph appears to resemble the stories we call literature; and yet it does not, because Joseph will not permit God to be exiled out of his world. When, bowing before Pharaoh's deputy, the brothers plead for forgiveness, Joseph is again swept into weeping, and invokes not only God, but God's design: "And Joseph said, 'Fear not, for am I instead of God? While you meant evil for me, God meant it for good.'" And further: "Do not be pained and do not be incensed with yourselves that you sold me down here, because for sustenance God has sent me before you … to make you a remnant on earth and to preserve life, for you to be a great surviving group. And so, it is not you who sent me here but God." A few verses on, Joseph dies, at one hundred ten, and is embalmed according to Egyptian custom. And now, portentously, the Book of Genesis ends: "He was put in a coffin in Egypt."
That coffin signifies more than a human story. It is God's story: Egypt will become a coffin for the Hebrews until God redeems them. God in the Hebrew Bible is Causality, and Causality, unlike Joseph or Benjamin, cannot be a character in a tale–an assertion that has been broadly contradicted, or at least qualified, in formulations by both Harold Bloom and Jack Miles. In his winning and ingenious book God: A Biography, Miles is moved to ask, "How did all this feel to God?" and sets out to see Him as a "character who 'comes to life' in a work of literary art." Miles's God has an indelible, even a familiar, human personality, not unlike the mercurial protagonist of an epic, or an opera, or a labyrinth of motives by Henry James. And while it may be possible to transmute aspects of Scripture into literature by means of the fictive imagination– certainly Thomas Mann succeeded in turning the Joseph chronicle into a massive and masterly novel–finally Scripture itself rebels against it. Mann's fiction can claim no greater authority than writerly genius.
Just here is the nub and the rub of it: if the God of the Bible is not "real, " then–in creative-writing-course argot–the Bible's stories won't and don't work. For the faithless skeptic or rationalist confronting Scripture (a category of modernity that includes, I suppose, most of us), there is nothing more robust to lean on than suspension of disbelief, the selfsame device one brings to Jane Austen. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley, salvational creations both, are not real; we believe in them anyway. Causality deserves better. Causality escapes the mere "comes to life" of character.
It is the directness and the consummate clarity of Robert Alter's rendering that forces this conclusion. The translator's richly developed notes and reflections are informed by scholarship, wit, and intuition; without the intrusions of didacticism, they educate. But the antique words, on their own power, and even in a latter-day language, draw us elsewhere, to that indeterminate place where God is not a literary premise but a persuasive certainty–whether or not we are willing to go there.