Alter's Canon and Creativity

I've recently read Alter's little book Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture. Like so much of what Alter does, this study is rich and fascinating, and yet rather lacking in the requisite theoretical groundwork. For example, Alter wants to claim that writers of faith, writers in faithful ages, can produce destabilizing, even subversive literary reflections upon biblical material, only because they have a sense of the 'double canonicity' of the Bible. The Bible, that is, both organizes religious life and theological reflection and is the linguistic/literary repository of biblically-informed culture. Thus, when faithful writers playfully rework biblical texts in unorthodox ways, they are merely taking up the biblical language (i.e., the second sense of biblical canonicity), divorced from any and all religious or theological concerns. The reason for this claim?: "if the canonicity of the Bible were strictly a matter of doctrinal truth [i.e., if there were only a single way of understanding the Bible as canon] . . . radical [literary] redirecting of biblical language would be unimaginable" (48). What's lacking here is any awareness - odd, because Alter does know better - of poststructuralist textuality, intertextuality, etc., or even a much more basic appreciation of the multiple ways in which scholars of reception history complicate questions of interpretation and meaning.

This idea of 'double canonicity' seems ultimately a device for gauging a writer's religious commitment. If so-and-so alters biblical language in such a way as to call into question the Bible's authority or some basic doctrinal point, then so-and-so must be writing beyond or outside of faith. Why this simplistic binary should be attractive is quite unclear to me, but that it is attractive to some (like Stanley Fish or James Wood) is obvious. Unfortunately, it's also the very thing against which I must struggle in my Bible and Literature courses every year. Perhaps actually teaching Alter, thereby trying to encourage students to reflect critically upon their own positions by getting them to notice the flaws in his, would be one way to go.

Teaching the Fall

I'm about to teach David Maine's Fallen. It's an excellent retelling of the Fall, but in reverse. We begin on page 3 with chapter 40, featuring Cain as an old man, and we end with chapter 1 on the last page of the book, with Adam and Eve still in the garden. Additionally, each of the novel's four books takes up the narrative from a new character's perspective, but without disrupting the reverse plot trajectory. Really, it's a remarkable novelistic feat. In terms of biblical rewrites, Nino Ricci's Testament similarly attempts to divvy up the narrative into Rashominic segments, but it's less successful, in my view, than Maine's work. Maine seems to be making a career of biblical rewrites, having also written a book about the Flood (The Preservationist) and another called Samson. See his blog for more info.

This term I've also taught Paradise Lost and Byron's wonderful little verse drama, Cain: A Mystery, in which Lucifer (the Romantic enlightener) takes Cain on a cosmic journey to the "pre-Adamite" worlds, and to the realm of death. Almost immediately after his return to earth our hero has a rather unfortunate spat with his brother. However, because Cain is now a Romantic rebel, his biblical verses are spoken by his wife/sister Adah - which has the effect of making Cain seem radically indifferent to his punishment. He has already embraced his essential alienation and thus is already (figuratively if not yet actually) a fugitive and a wanderer in this earthly life.

Our Seminar at the ACLA

Second Comings and Strange Goings (On): Versions of the Messianic

• Seminar Organizer: Jay Twomey, U of Cincinnati, W. David Hall, Centre College

In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples, on the eve of his crucifixion, “if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you” (16:7 NRSV). This nexus of arrival and departure, of a future coming at the expense of the departing present and its specific pasts, is characteristic of the messianic in a variety of its manifestations — in religious texts, in writers like Nicanor Parra, Gore Vidal, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in theorists like Walter Benjamin and his interlocutors, in theologians like Catherine Keller, in films or television shows like the new Battlestar Galactica, and so on. Taking up the theme of the 2008 American Comparative Literature Association meeting in Long Beach, CA, “Arrivals and Departures,” this panel seeks to engage scholars from across the humanities in a series of discussions on the messianic. What is it? What is it not? How does it work? Where can we find it? And most importantly: is it good for us? Prospective panelists whose work draws upon relevant scholarship in religious studies and/or recent work by theorists such as Giorgio Agamben will be given highest priority. Most ACLA panels function as two- and three-day seminars. We are proposing a three-day panel, for which we will only consider participants who can commit to staying for the duration of the conference (April 24-27, 2008).

Please go to the ACLA conference Web site for information on submitting paper proposals.

Edwards and contemporary evangelicalism

In December, I’ll be presenting a paper at MLA on reappropriations of Jonathan Edwards in contemporary evangelical thought, with a particular focus on a strain of crisis theology running through evangelicalism’s revival of Edwards (one of my main primary texts will be the volume of essays, A God Entranced Vision of all Things). Some of you have already offered insightful suggestions and provided helpful citations for further reading in other discussions I’ve had with you about my larger interest in the half-life of Edwardseanism. But I thought I’d beat the BibleAnd bushes just to be thorough. I’m particularly interested in any studies of contemporary revivals or other attempts to recover colonial Puritan or other early American thinkers or theology for presentist purposes. That said, we’re all eclecticists now, so anything you might think worth passing along, please do.

All the best in your fall term.

The Fountain

Last year's The Fountain (2006), by Darren Aronofsky — director of at least two other notable films, Requiem for a Dream (2000) and Pi (1998) — is blogworthy for its easy syncretism of putatively Mayan mythology, a Biblical theme, and Yogic imagery.

The first frames of the film quote Genesis 3:24, concerning the flaming sword that severs humanity's connection to the tree of life. Throughout the story, Aronofsky plays with the idea of pushing back against that sword, telling stories of humans who attempt to defeat death, who, like the man and the woman in the garden, might live together forever in the presence of God if they weren't prevented from doing so (Gen. 3:22).

In this picture, Aronofsky himself pushes against narrative conventions – a much different kind of flaming sword – telling a refracted story about the marriage of a dying woman (Rachel Weisz) and about the story of her hand-written novel manuscript. The mundane "historical" context of this fantastic novel's story is its author's relationship to her husband, a research doctor (played by Hugh Jackman) trying to cure his wife's brain tumor by testing out drugs on monkeys. He discovers the medical key to reverse the aging process and cure all disease, but is just too late to save his beloved. His reading of her novel unfolds the full story of the film. The novel, also called "The Fountain," provides a parallel story involving the tree of life. The tree of life is discovered and captured in a Mayan temple by 15th century Spanish conquistador (also Hugh Jackman).
The sword referred to in the opening frame reappears in the hands of a Mayan warrior-priest guarding the halls of a secret, hidden temple which contains the tree of life. The conquistador, although he loses his beloved queen of Spain (also Rachel Weisz), gains access to immortality. Perhaps a thousand years later or more, the same man brings the tree into distant space. He is no longer a conquistador, but is now a cosmic explorer surviving by slowly eating at the flesh of the tree. The sword also comes back as the distant nebulae of swirling, fire-colored clouds to which, across the vastness of space, the cosmic explorer brings the aging and dying tree. He travels in a bubble of air, a new garden of eden, meditating his way through the light-years in full-lotus position, floating in the microgravity of the tree's capsule. At the end, he appears to be reunited with God, or sacrificed for God, in a kind ekpurosis or self-dismemberment. Then, like the Vedic being Purusha or like the putative Mayan "first father" he is identified with in the film, his death becomes a cosmogony, renewing the tree of life, recreating the world, and also bringing reunion with the beloved, discovered now at last in the divine bosom.

The second shot of the movie dwells on a gold replica of the shekinah of God, part of the altar tabernacle before which the conquistador worships, vowing to succeed in his quest for the tree. Its radiant beams of gold, surrounding a mirror-like polished silver globe, represent the burning light of purification that simultaneously reveals God and annihilates all flesh which approaches, suggesting that humanity and God remain forever severed, that our union with the divine comes only in the dissolution of life.

Thus, in the other story line, the "real" one perhaps, the novel remains a novel, and the bereaved doctor who lost his wife, the book's author, remains cut off from the beloved, separated by death, left with only a token golden ring.

At times reminiscent of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and at others of Tarkovsky's Solaris or even of Greg Egan's novel Diaspora, this movie seems to be consistent with a narrative pattern that imagines a divine human connection mediated by a journey into the distant reaches of space, and overcoming the problem of mortality, death, and meaning through solitary searching into the beyond.

I was surprised because I liked this complex film less than I thought I might — perhaps this is because the mundane romance at the film's heart is slow paced and not particularly moving. I wonder how others responded to the movie, and I wonder where Aronofsky will take his unique filmmaking from here.