Going to Extremes in Biblical Rewritings: Radical Literary Retellings of Biblical Tropes 9783110782141, 9783110781847

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Anthony Swindell Going to Extremes in Biblical Rewritings

Studies of the Bible and Its Reception (SBR)

Edited by Constance M. Furey, Brian Matz, Joel Marcus LeMon, Thomas Römer, Jens Schröter, Barry Dov Walfish, and Eric Ziolkowski

Volume 22

Anthony Swindell

Going to Extremes in Biblical Rewritings

Radical Literary Retellings of Biblical Tropes

ISBN 978-3-11-078184-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-078214-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-078220-2 ISSN 2195-450X Library of Congress Control Number: 2022951351 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

To Angela and Millie

Contents Introduction

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Chapter One: A Survey of Literary Rewriting of the Bible Chapter Two: The Book of Job Across Time

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Chapter Three: Uriah Transposed and Amplified Chapter Four: Lilith and the Reinvented Bible

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76 89

Chapter Five: Angels of Death or Angels of Mercy? The Biblical Archangels Gabriel, Michael and Raphael in Literature 108 Chapter Six: Three Early Twentieth-Century Excursionists: H. Rider Haggard, John Masefield and Claude McKay 124 Chapter Seven: Four Later Twentieth-Century Excursionists: A.M. Klein, Moshe Shamir, Michel Tournier and Sylvie Germain 135 Chapter Eight: Escaping the Straitjacket: Philip Pullman, Richard Beard, Amos Oz, Christopher Moore and Colm Toíbín 150 Chapter Nine: The Hidden Truth: Seven More Rewritings (Louis Levy, Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Leopoldo Marechal, Derek Walcott, 168 Jeanette Winterson, and Hugo Loetscher) Chapter Ten: The Great Disrupters: D.H. Lawrence, C.J. Jung, Alan Sillitoe, Christa Wolf, Lucille Clifton and José Saramago 180 Chapter Eleven: Conclusions

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Appendix One: Summary of Genette’s Main Categories in Palimpsets (Adjusted to Biblical Rewriting) 204 Appendix Two: A Reader’s Guide Abbreviations

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Contents

Bibliography

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Names of Authors

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Titles of Principal Anonymous Works Biblical Themes

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Introduction They say that the nature of anything is best known from examination of extreme cases. Dialogues of Plato trans. Benjamin Jowett, 1875.¹

This book sets out to steer a slightly new course in the exploration of the literary reception of the Bible, after having first given an overview of the literary reception across time. The title, Going to Extremes, reflects the freedom which some of the most interesting modern writers of imaginative literature can bring to rewriting the Bible while remembering that the sheer fact of engagement with any biblical story, theme or persona is significant in itself. The repertoire of modes available to any creative writer of a biblical story or topos (meaning theme or topic) includes the prequel, the sequel, the elliptical (or ‘sideways’) expansion and the full range of variations explored by Gérard Genette in his classic work on rewriting, Palimpsests, and summarized in our Appendix One. The present work seeks to highlight a range of exceptional literary rewritings which are dubbed here “Extreme Rewritings” and which have in common a flamboyant approach to the base text. For clarity we shall mainly refer to the biblical text as the hypotext and any rewriting as the hypertext. Under the general umbrella of Extreme Rewritings, we shall identify a number of sub-sets, in a spectrum ranging from hypertexts which are antagonistic to the biblical hypotext (at least as conventionally received) right through to what we term “Fantastic Excursions” which use the biblical hypotext as a departure point for a rewriting which goes far beyond the structure and horizon of the hypotext and engages in its own idiosyncratic philosophical or theological quest. For our purposes, the category of “extreme rewritings” begins with hypertexts which greatly amplify, or which greatly condense the hypotext. This is something which can be measured simply in terms of length. After this there are hypertexts which shift the focus heavily to the situation before or the situation after the events recorded in the hypotext. These are the analeptic and proleptic continuation, popularly known as the prequel and sequel. Just as important is the elliptical continuation which broadens the range of the hypotext’s “present.” Next there are rewritings which change the register of the hypotext, making it (for example) newly comic or tragic in tone, or which change the perspective of the narrative, perhaps giving new emphasis or de-emphasis to key personages or introducing characters absent from the hypotext. In the course of this study we shall also come across rewritings which seem hostile or antagonistic to the hypotext or oth Plato Dialogues trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875): 149. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-001

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Introduction

ers which are sympathetic to the hypotext but nevertheless seem impelled to supplement it with new material For the sake of clarity, we shall now indicate a few specific examples within the repertoire which we shall be exploring in greater depth later. Both the medieval burlesque The Land of Cockayne and the postmodern novel by Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, are clearly works which adopt a provocative stance towards their respective biblical hypotexts. On the other hand, Sylvie Germain’s The Book of Tobit and Louis Levi’s Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring Fresh Methuselah will emerge as works which adopt a fairly respectful stance towards their biblical hypotexts but then proceed to move in a completely new direction. Between these two poles are rewritings which make radical changes to the base text either for reasons of adaptation or of out of sheer authorial invention. There are two secondary arguments which will be discussed in the course of this book. The first is that there is a cumulative tradition which feeds into each successive rewriting, so that even an apparent novelty like the figure of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost has roots in the antecedent reception history. The second argument is that there is a broad division between hypertexts which seek to supplement the biblical hypotext and those which seek to efface it. In popular usage the adjective ‘extreme’ has come to mean ‘very interesting’, or ‘very challenging,’ as in the phrase, ‘extreme sports.’ The English word derives from the superlative extremis of the Latin exterus , ‘outward,’ and among the earliest instances of usage cited in the OED are the town of Chichester as existing at the extreme edge of the County of Sussex and ‘extreme unction’ as the RC rite administered at the point of death.² ‘Extreme’ thus carries both spatial and experiential connotations. It suggests on the one hand physical boundaries and on the other the limits to what human beings are capable of receiving through the senses or of suffering. By extension ‘extreme’ also connotes ‘going to great lengths in any action, habit, disposition or opinion.’ What might constitute an extreme rewriting? Before we look further at biblical tropes as fertile ground for rewriting and at possible definitions of types of literary rewriting of biblical tropes, it may be worth considering that the works which spring to mind as prominent examples of extreme biblical rewriting (such as the inscription on the Rothwell Cross or Milton’s Paradise Lost or Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers) all tend to make ostentatious changes to the length of the narrative. They also in their different ways impress themselves permanently on the subsequent cultural reception of the biblical tropes which they

 OED (Compact edition): 941.

Introduction

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handle. As mentioned above, for the purposes of this study we shall generally use the terms used by Gérard Genette in his book, Palimpsests, treating the biblical base text as the ‘hypotext’ and the rewriting as the ‘hypertext.’ Occasionally, for stylistic variety, we will refer to the biblical text itself as the ‘base text.’ In view of the scholarly uncertainties attaching to the status of what some like to call “the original” text, we will avoid that term, though recognizing that many literary rewritings actually treat a particular translation of the Bible as their foundation and departure point, whether it be the Vulgate or the King James Version or the Luther Bible. Returning to the spatial connotations of the word extreme, the Genettian terms for the prequel and sequel, the analeptic continuation and the proleptic continuation, help us to see such changes to the hypotext in terms of the extension of boundaries. If the hypotext is regarded as the central space, then narratives which deal with events before and after those described in that space belong to the extremities. Similarly, the elliptical continuation, in inflating the “now” of the hypotext, creates spatial repercussions in the sense that the fixed space of the hypotext is overridden and its boundaries are pushed further out. We could also say that transfocalization by altering the viewpoint of the narration (for example from that of a minor character to that of a major character) shifts the spatial dimensions of the text. A good example is the Dream of the Rood, which radically moves the viewpoint of the Crucifixion from that of an onlooker to that of the Cross itself, allowing us to see or experience the event no longer externally but internally. There is a sense in which the biblical hypotexts considered in this book are themselves already exceptional to the extent that they tower over the remaining repertoire of biblical material. The chief biblical hypotexts handled by the literary rewritings covered in this study include the Fall (Gen. 2), the Flood (Gen. 6), the Sacrifice of Isaac or the Akedah (Gen.22), the stories of Ruth, Exodus, David and Goliath, David and Bathsheba, Queen Jezebel, Belshazzar’s Feast, Job, Tobit, the Virgin Birth, the Visit of the Magi, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Raising of Lazarus and the Crucifixion. All of these in their different ways could be considered extreme stories, since they deal with human suffering in extremis or with events which command our attention in a way which other biblical material does not. The fact that these hypotexts are so exceptionally resonant in terms of human experience is one reason why they have attracted an abundance of literary amplifications, quite apart from the pivotal positions they may occupy in religious history. Geological disasters, military massacres, large-scale atrocities committed against civilians, flagrant miscarriages of justice, gross abuses of power by national leaders, astonishing escapes from death and so on clearly continue to occur in the course of post-biblical history. Yet somehow they do not seriously affect the cultural status of the canonical material until the modern period. One could say that they

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Introduction

are digested as illustrations or extensions of the biblical paradigm. However, the twentieth-century saw a reversal in this situation. The enormities of human suffering in the trenches of WWI, the unimaginable atrocities which we refer to collectively as The Holocaust, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the Stalinist purges, subsequent instances of industrialized mass murder as well as racially-driven genocide, together with the onset of the global ecological crisis, have changed the balance to the extent that these events themselves collectively constitute an alternative paradigm to that offered by the biblical material. Biblical rewritings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries mostly reflect this seismic shift. It is an outlook summed up in the title of Gil Eliot’s The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, a work which sets out the bare statistics of mass annihilation during the period.³ As material utilized in rewritings which transfer the setting to wildly different social and political situations, the biblical base texts themselves have been shown to sit uncomfortably in what biblical scholars regard as their original settings. As Brennan Breed argues in Nomadic Text, biblical texts have had a rich reception history precisely because they were already displaced texts within their earliest known contexts.⁴ He calls for biblical texts to be seen not as refugees or migrants from a supposed “true homeland,” but as nomads.⁵ Clearly there are many issues relating to what might constitute a “valid” adaptation or appropriation of a biblical text. Yet at the same time an excessive concentration on validity in interpretation can blind us to the phenomenology of literary rewritings of biblical topoi. To put it another way, literary rewritings of considerable intrinsic quality and force occur throughout Western cultural history. This book deals almost exclusively with literary rewritings which are are unmistakably responses to specific biblical hypotexts and which therefore in the aggregate constitute a record of the de facto meaning of particular biblical tropes and narratives as rewritten by particular poets, novelists and dramatists. Even though we usually do not have access to the “intentions” of these authors and even though intention has long been discredited as determinative of any literary text’s final meaning, nevertheless there is the sheer fact that these works are rewritings of distinct biblical hypotexts and exist in a hermeneutical relationship with them, however this may be defined. Northrop Frye in his book Words with Power in fact argued that the weight which we attach to particular literary tropes and narratives is a product of the de-

 Gil Eliot: The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead (London: Allen Lane, 1972).  Brennan W. Breed: Nomadic Text: A Theory of the Biblical Reception History.  See, for example, Breed: 203.

Introduction

5

gree to which they have been the subject of rewriting. He suggests that what he calls the “profundity” which is associated with (for example) the Grail romances has nothing to do with some irrecoverable original which might be posited as having existed as a source for Chrétien de Troyes. Rather, he suggests, it is the outcome of the process of “accumulation and constant recreation of Grail stories through the centuries to our own day.” ⁶ Applied to biblical hypotexts, this would suggest that their standing in culture is intimately connected to the level and quality of the attention which they have received in literature, the visual arts. music and (more recently) film. One way to approach literary rewritings of the Bible is to see the writer as engaging with the biblical text as a frame for seeing the world. Sometimes this occurs as a product of the cultural or religious loyalties or perspectives of the author. Sometimes, especially in the modern and postmodern periods, it occurs because the author has decided that the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated tropes could be illuminating, as when James Joyce reads the life of one character in Dublin during one day in about 1917 in terms of Homer’s Odyssey or when (in our study) H.G. Wells makes Job the headmaster of a minor English public school. Aside from the question of categorizing any given rewriting in terms of its structural relationship with the relevant biblical hypotext, we need to keep in mind that there is a spectrum in register between extreme rewritings which are combative towards the hypotext and those which use the hypotext as the departure point for some new ontological quest. What they all have in common is that they eschew the teleologies implicit in the construction of the Bible as a collection of conventionally edificatory tales or as a sacred text which is self-explanatory or self-authenticating. In this context enhancing the alterity of the text might lead in either of two opposite directions: to alienation from ontological signals or to the enhancement of such signals. We hope to highlight this phenomenon across the ensuing study. Chapter One provides an overview of the literary reception of the Bible, highlighting some of the landmarks, as well as periods in which particular modes of rewriting emerge. Alongside this linear history, we shall also draw attention to some key hermeneutical issues which arise more generally. After this initial survey, there are four chapters which provide written-up literary reception histories of four biblical tropes: the story of Job, the story of Uriah, the figure of Lilith and what we can loosely call the story of archangels. In each case the panoptic survey seeks to cover the full historical range from the early beginnings of literary reception to recent times. These specimen surveys cover topoi not included in my pre-

 Northrop Frye: Words with Power (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1990): 55.

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Introduction

vious three books. They focus on four tropes which have a particularly strong tendency to tear away from their moorings in their biblical setting and to have a freeranging postbiblical afterlife. They are ‘extreme’ in the sense that they largely float free of the Bible seen as a foundational, quasi-historical record and identify with it through a process of accretion. Because of this, they are particularly useful as measures of the validity of the proposition that the “depth” of a biblical trope is cumulative. The next five chapters concentrate on groups of modern and postmodern literary rewritings which are particularly inventive in relation to the cultural upheavals of their time. Chapter 6 is entitled “Three Early Twentieth-Century Excursionists” and discusses works by three authors writing during the period 1910 – 1934: H. Rider Haggard, John Masefield and Claude McKay. The two novels by Haggard, The Queen of Sheba’s Ring and Belshazzar are adventure-yarns loosely based on biblical tropes and informed by an interest in the theories of Andrew Lang about world religions. John Masefield’s play A King’s Daughter is a contrarian, sympathetic portrait of the biblical Queen Jezebel. Claude McKay’s short story, ‘The Prince of Puerto Rico’, is a modernized version of the story of David and Bathsheba in which Uriah shoots the David figure dead. All four works expand the horizons of their respective biblical hypotexts by engaging in a dialectic with registers not usually associated with their reception. Chapter 7, “Four Later Twentieth-Century Excursionists,” explores three works from the period 1951 to 1999, two of which are extreme amplifications of their biblical hypotexts and two of which are major temporal transpositions. A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll radically adapts the Pentateuch as a matrix for Jewish life after the Holocaust. Moshe Shamir’s The Hittite Must Die retells the story of Uriah from the viewpoint of the man himself. Michel Tournier’s The Four Wise Men dramatizes the story of the Magi, providing startling portraits of each king, including the suppressed Fourth King. Sylvie Germain’s The Book of Tobit is set in post-World War II, rural France where gruesome events unfold along a trajectory which pays homage both to the biblical story of Tobit and to the folkloric tale of the headless rider. Chapter 8, “Escaping the Straitjacket”, moves on to consider works mainly from the period 2010 to 2014, including Philip Pullman’s provocative novel, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Richard Beard’s Lazarus is Dead and Acts of the Assassins, Amos Oz’s Judas, Charles Moore’s Biff and Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary. These recent works belong to an age in which perspectives drawn from historical-critical studies of the Bible are part of the mental furniture of the informed reader and in which the publication of “lost gospels” has become commonplace, allowing these rewritings to attach themselves to this new genre.

Introduction

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Biff is particularly interesting as an analeptic continuation which supplies an account of the boyhood and adolescence of Jesus which involves a long journey into Asia to visit the magi in their home countries. This excursion simultaneously universalizes the teaching of Jesus by locating some of its origins in Eastern religions. Chapter 9, “The Hidden Truth,” discusses a diverse range of works over a wider timeframe, including Louis Lev’s Kzradock the Onion Man and the SpringFresh Methuselah and Thomas Mann’s vast trilogy, Joseph and His Brothers. The others are Robert Walser’s ‘microscript’ version of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Leopoldo Marechal’s expansive novel about Adam in Brazil, Derek Walcott’s Ti-Jean and his Brothers, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Hugo Loetscher’s Noah. These works have in common a quest to move beyond convention to establish a new sort of “biblical truth.” Chapter 10, “The Great Disrupters,” looks at D.H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse, Carl Jung’s Answer to Job, Alan Sillitoe’s The North Face of Lucifer, Christa Wolf ’s Accident, Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light and José Saramago’s Cain. These are works which provocatively disrupt the conventional reception of their respective biblical hypotexts and which in various ways have a quarrel with the Bible. Chapter 11 seeks to draw conclusions about the phenomenon of extreme literary rewritings of biblical hypotexts and the usefulness of the concept of a spectrum stretching from works which seem to be in dispute with the hypotext to works which seem to want to extend the discussion into new territory. As well as examining the question of where one might locate each particular hypertext along a spectrum from antagonistic to adventurous in terms of its relationship to the biblical hypotext, we shall also explore the question of the status of the supernatural in each instance. This is an issue which will be particularly prominent in Chapters 6 to 10, which deal with outstanding biblical rewritings from 1900 onwards. Tzvetan Todorov, in his classic study of fantastic literature, The Fantastic, argues that such material revolves around degrees of uncertainty about the presence of the supernatural in the narrative.⁷ A well-known example is the ambiguity in Henry James’s short story ‘The Turn of the Screw’ over the sense in which the location is haunted or the reports of uncanny happenings are the product of hallucinations experienced by the governess. Using an analogous approach, we shall test the proposition that the biblical rewritings being considered here derive a certain charge from the recognizability or otherwise of the biblical hypotext and that uncertainty over the presence or the influence of the hypotext teases the reader

 See Tzvetan Todorov: The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975): 91– 106.

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Introduction

and exerts a sort of tension which is essential to the reading process. Read from this perspective, the biblical story itself stands in as a tale of the supernatural, compared with the naturalistic or rationalistic tendency of modern fiction. In a few cases the challenge to the reader may initially reside in a title which disguises any reference to the biblical pretext. Yet in most cases the biblical pretext is clearly signalled and the interest circles around the extent to which the rewriting seriously disrupts the familiar narrative or casts it in a new light. This divergence can also be expressed in terms of the distinction suggested earlier between hypertexts which seek to efface the hypotext and those which seek rather to supplement it. One might also ask in some cases whether the reader experiences the rewriting as a secularized version of a supernatural biblical story, creating another sort of uncertainty. In this context, the sense of estrangement induced by the rewriting may lead to an immediate refreshment of the topos or, alternatively, to the sense that the reader is compelled to entertain a continuing, unresolved dialectic between an ancient worldview and a modern one. We shall pay particular attention to rewritings which defamiliarize the biblical trope. In her study of rewritings of the biblical story of Jonah, Yvonne Sherwood describes such rewritings as “quirky” and non-mainstream. Here we will emphasize the way in which the “extreme” rewritings selected for consideration go far beyond simply adjusting the hypotext to changed cultural circumstances by providing “equivalence”, as when Cain becomes a bad tither in a medieval mystery play or Noah a real-estate speculator in a modern novel. Instead they may convert the trope into something which defamiliarizes the hypotext and at the same time illuminates some facet of the reader’s (or projected reader’s) experience of the contemporary world. In a sense the defamilarized biblical trope exerts a defamiliarizing effect on the postbiblical world of that reader. Again, the focus here will be on the works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries explored in Chapters 6 to 10. Throughout this book we use the technical literary term, “diegetic content”, to refer to the material which any particular literary rewriting conveys from the postbiblical cultural setting which is its foreground. For example, Sylvie Germain’s novel The Book of Tobit incorporates the experiences of Jewish people emigrating to the USA as a result of World War II as well as that of French families losing their breadwinners in the conflict. There are some literary rewritings in which such diegetic content dominates the narrative (becoming almost an excuse for contemporary reportage) and others in which it merely colours it. Some scholars use the opposing terms ‘ancient dress’ rewriting and ‘modern dress’ rewriting to indicate respectively works which seek or purport to replicate the milieu of the historical original and works which are purely concerned to ‘update’ the setting. It is the difference between Shakespeare’s King Richard III performed in medieval costume and the same play set in a modern fascist state

Introduction

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with all the trappings of modern militarism. The broad term for any sort of updating which will be used in this book and which derives from Genette’s work is “proximatizing.” As an overall aim, it is hoped that effect of the assembled studies of the literary retellings covered in this book will be to increase awareness of a hitherto neglected terrain. It is a world in which the Chernobyl nuclear disaster rubs shoulders with the opening chapters of Genesis and in which Jesus’ childhood takes on comic and yet illuminating new dimensions. The reader may conclude that it is the cultural gulf between the ancient text and later times which leads creative writers towards extreme rewritings, either in endorsement of or in refutation of those biblical hypotexts which in their different ways continue to be normative in the West. Throughout this book English spellings are used for such words as “civilisation”, but where technical terms derived from Genette are used, the American style is used for such coinages as “proximatization” and “transmodalization”, since this is how these words appear in the published translation of his work, Palimpsests. The appendices include a summary of the main Genettian categories of rewriting, adjusted and augmented for the purposes of this study, and a bibliographic guide to the literary reception of the Bible.

Chapter One: A Survey of Literary Rewriting of the Bible The purpose of this chapter is to present a general survey of significant literary rewritings of the Bible from the earliest beginnings to the present day, identifying representative texts. Obviously, any such exercise is provisional and affected by such factors as the ready availability of works which may have had limited circulation and (especially in the pre-modern period) by the accidents of survival. This can also only be a selective look at some highlights in the long and complex history of the production of biblical rewritings. Nevertheless, it seems worthwhile to offer an overview as a background to the more specific studies of the succeeding chapters. Apart from anything else, it will help define what constitutes an “extreme” rewriting. This book will deal with rewritings of whole biblical tropes and narratives, bracketing out those highly disruptive literary rewritings which create a bricolage of attenuated biblical tropes such as those found in the plays of Samuel Beckett or the novels of Toni Morrison. Those works often present highly significant rewritings, but they deal with a diffuse assortment of biblical tropes, avoiding the rewriting of whole or complete biblical hypotexts, and therefore fall largely outside our purview.⁸ In the early stages of the reception of the Bible, Jewish haggadic commentary and Christian paraphrases of scripture as well as Jewish and Christian biblicalapocryphal texts all occupy territory which is close to that of “extreme literary rewriting” of the Bible. However, their edificatory, devotional and/or pedagogic framework differentiates them from creative literature as it develops in the Western tradition. Recent studies of the literary material which forms a background to the formation of the Pentateuchal narratives add to the complexities of deciding on the boundary between scripture and literature. Bruce Louden in Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East (2011) argues that the Odyssey is in a dialogic relationship with the Genesis stories of Joseph and Jacob, with the story of Jonah, and with the Exodus story of Moses, as well as with the N.T. frame story about Jesus as the agent of God who can bring mortals back from death and who founds a new religion.⁹

 For studies of the biblical rewritings of these authors, see Iain Bailey: Samuel Beckett and the Bible (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and Shirley A. Stave (ed.): Toni Morrison and the Bible (New York: Peter Lang, 2006).  Bruce Louden: Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-002

Midrashic Departures

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Midrashic Departures For our purposes, the midrashic material is more relevant since it exists in relationship to acknowledged biblical base texts and takes for granted the Bible as a textus receptus (in this case the Hebrew Bible) rather than some embryonic form of the narratives of which it is composed. A convenient compendium of such Jewish material is Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, where one finds a large range of amplifications of biblical hypotexts. There is extensive information about the characteristics of Leviathan and Behemoth.¹⁰ We learn that Abraham was prevented from carrying out his intention to sacrifice Isaac because of the bluntness of his knife.¹¹ Moses spent forty days in heaven receiving the Torah which he then brought down to earth on tablets of stone.¹² The fate of Moses is amplified, with Moses refusing to submit to the Angel of Death and later resisting expulsion from heaven by holding onto God’s throne. ¹³. Even the death of Agag at the hands of Samuel is transmuted in various ways, with some authorities having Samuel tie Agag to four poles which he then pulls apart.¹⁴ Characters such as Balaam and Nimrod, who receive only a brief mention in the biblical hypotexts, receive considerable elaboration. Nimrod, for example, orders the construction of the Tower of Babel in order to provide protection against a second Flood and displays the ultimate hubris in ordering his archers to fire arrows into heaven from its battlements, bringing down the wrath of God. One feature of the haggadic material as a whole is the intertextual tendency to create links between otherwise unconnected biblical tropes or between biblical tropes and those of world mythology. An example of the first sort is the story that Mount Sinai was originally part of Mount Moriah and that it will return to its original place at the end of time. ¹⁵ An example of the second is the magic ring of Solomon, which can be used as an extension of his powers even in his absence.¹⁶ The Book of Job received copious elaboration in rabbinic legend. Later, in Chapter 2, there will be a discussion of the early apocryphon, the Testament of Job, as an important feature in the landscape of large-scale biblical rewritings. In fact, it is a hypertext which comes close to supplanting the biblical base text.

      

Ginzberg: Vol. V: 44. Ginzberg, Vol. V: 251. Ginzberg Vol. III: 114– 117. Ginzberg, Vol. VI:46. Ginzberg, Vol. V: 233. Ginzberg, Vol. III: 84. Ginzberg, Vol.IV: 153 – 157.

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Chapter One: A Survey of Literary Rewriting of the Bible

Christian Legends The early centuries of Christianity saw the growth of legends surrounding some key figures of the N.T. For example, Pontius Pilate was the subject of a profusion of literary treatments, beginning with the apocryphal Acta Pilati. These were to be followed by even further embellishments in the mystery plays and a trajectory running right through to Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. The significant feature of the early apocryphal texts is that they largely exonerate Pilate’s role in the arrest and trial of Christ. The text known today as the Acta Pilati may have borrowed its title from antecedent, lost texts. The Greek A text is cast in the firstperson as the fruit of the researches of Ananias, an officer in the Praetorian guard, who declares himself a baptized Christian.¹⁷ In this way it articulates the work’s function as an exercise designed to satisfy the curiosity of the faith community. The extant work is a major elliptical continuation, filling in the gaps in the familiar account in the canonical gospels of Pilate’s role and incorporating such material as the tropes referring to Jesus healing the sick on the Sabbath. The Jews opposed to Jesus accuse him of being a sorcerer and of being born of fornication. Pilate refutes these charges. A significant addition of fresh material comes when the images on the standards carried with Pilate’s guard bow down to Jesus when he is arrested.¹⁸ Later apocryphal texts provided the content of the correspondence between Pilate and the Emperor and Pilate and Herod, while there is a sharp bifurcation between two types of proleptic continuation: the proto-Coptic texts glorifying Pilate as a Christian saint and the Mors Pilati in which the Emperor Tiberias, having been healed by Veronica’s handkerchief, has Pilate punished and executed. The method of execution here was having him tied to a block of stone and drowned in the River Tiber. However, Pilate’s unquiet spirit was not defeated, and this required further dumping of his body in other locations, ending up with a lake in Switzerland, the foundation of the later Mons Pilatus legend. The Legend of the Seven Sleepers is an early postbiblical legend which has continued to attract rewriting in modern times. Here, at the outset of our encounter with extreme biblical rewritings, it is valuable to be reminded of the contribution made by apocryphal texts of the fifth century, which probably have antecedents much earlier in origin.

 See Elliot: 164– 225 (169).  See Ellliot: 171– 172.

The Cena

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The Latin Christian epic Roger P.H. Green in his study, Latin Epics of the New Testament, explores the fourth-century Latin paraphrases of the gospels in the work of Juvencus, Sedullius and others. While the chief contribution of Juvencus was to arrive at a harmony of the gospels in epic form, Sedullius manipulated the material to emphasize Christ’s miracles. Peter and Paul became the twin heroes of Arator’s rewriting of the Acts of the Apostles, a narrative which mirrored the hero-epics of the writer’s culture. These rewritings could be said to enter the territory of “extreme rewritings” at the point where a received genre, the verse epic, dominates the biblical hypotext. Later in this book we will encounter a postmodern reworking of Acts which deploys the genre of the detective-story to rework some of the same material. During the fifth-century CE there was a further flowering of biblical epics modelled on Latin models. D.M. Kriel points out that only one of them did not dwell on the story of Sodom and Gomorra, which was evidently for these writers the locus classicus for warnings about divine retribution.¹⁹ Drawing on Kriel’s account, one notes the excision of nearly all direct speech in the rendering of Gen.18 – 19 in the generally direct retelling of the Vulgate version within the pseudo-Cyprian Heptateuchos, leaving God with the only direct speech. More significant in terms of the focus here on radical rewritings is the Alethia of Victorius. This work, apparently intended to be a poetic and hortatory version of the Genesis story up until the death of Abraham, in fact culminates in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra, greatly amplifying the biblical account and making this the climax of the whole saga. Thus, we have a segmentary expansion of the Lot pretext allocated to a biblical resumé in such a way as to revalue (in Genette’s terminology) both the pretext and the whole of Gen.1 to Gen.19. At the same time, this reworking censors the incest episode. The De Spiritalis Historae Gestis of Avitus is notable for its emphatic treatment of Lot’s wife as a reiteration of the sinful Eve, making this an early literary example of the subjugation of one biblical story by another. It is also, of course, an example of a rewritten biblical story serving a misogynist master-narrative.

The Cena Not all early literary reworkings were lugubriously admonitory in tone. The Cena Cypriani is an important constituent in the journey from didactic reworkings to

 Kriel (1991), 7. This section relies heavily on Kriel’s article.

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Chapter One: A Survey of Literary Rewriting of the Bible

much more playful treatments. Widely disseminated in the Middle Ages, the earliest form of this biblical parody is thought to date back to the fourth or fifth centuries CE. In outline it presents the story of the feast organized by the King of Cana to which a large and varied assortment of biblical personages is invited. Each figure is characterized by a particular posture: Eve sitting on a leaf, Cain on a plough, Jesus on a well, Samson on a column and so on. The guests’ choice of food and drink is indicated. At length they all fall asleep and are roused by the King, who instructs them to put on new clothes and to prepare to return home. As they offer parting gifts, it emerges that certain items are missing and the blame falls on Achar, who is convicted as a thief and condemned to death. The biblical company kill Achar and bury him before returning to their homes. Martha Bayless describes how the laconic references to miscellaneous characters become a sort of circus.²⁰ The pithy portrayal of biblical personages descends into a farce as this supposed allegory of the feast of the Kingdom of God juxtaposes Isaac sitting on an altar eating dinner with (for example) Job sitting on his dunghill and Solomon donating 120,000 rams as sacrifices. Successive revisions of the Cena led to the inclusion of more and more biblical characters as well as their being placed in order of appearance in the Bible itself. The apotheosis was reached in the Arras version, which enhanced the narrative content. Bayless points to the section in which Abraham renews the feast, with the Cities of the Plain supplying the barbecue and Lot’s wife the saltcellar.²¹ Returning to more solemn narratives, the Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood, dating in manuscript form to the tenth-century but also preserved on the eighth-century Ruthwell Cross, provides a startling innovation in biblical rewriting by recounting the Crucifixion from the perspective of the Cross itself. This transfocalization simultaneously transmutes the story of the Saviour into something akin to the warrior epics of the Germanic tradition, something also evident in the ninth-century Saxon gospel known as the Heliand. Legitimating chronicles provided another avenue for biblical appropriation. Extreme medieval amplifications of biblical tropes include the elaborate elliptical expansions of the life of Moses found in the Old English Genesis and Exodus and, in the same manuscript, the extensions to the narrative of Balaam. The biblical figures of Gog and Magog began to take on a life of their own from the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain (ca. 1170). This foundation chronicle described the arrival of Brutus and his forces in England and the successful wrestling match of his general Corineus with the giant Gogmagog, whose fate

 Martha Bayless: Parody in the Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996): 32.  Bayless: 51.

The School of Caedmon

15

was to be pitched into the sea off Plymouth. The substantial literary afterlife of this trope I have outlined in a journal article.²² What matters here is that a peripheral biblical trope could be harnessed and placed in a proximatizing context quite abruptly and then become the basis of further, often fantastic, elaboration. Geoffrey of Monmouth also made elaborate and imaginative use of numerous other biblical tropes such as the execution of Agag, king of Amalek, as David Fowler demonstrates.²³ Higden’s Polychron is another universal chronicle which transmits colourful variations on biblical tropes.

Medieval Jewish Fantasies Jewish fantasies which take haggadic-style commentary into the realms of fantastic literature include the eight-century elaboration of the story of Jonah in the Pirkei de-Rabbi Elizer and the Midrash on the Ten Commandments, Midrash Aseret ha-Dibrot, dating probably from the eleventh-century. The first is an amplification which connects the story of Jonah with the Crossing of the Red Sea and with world-mythological themes as the prophet is dragged by the great fish into a confrontation with Leviathan and then taken on an undersea voyage to see the foundations of the Jerusalem Temple. The second is an unruly compendium of stories which explore the ramifications of obeying and not obeying the Ten Commandments. A pious man loses his great wealth and undergoes an ascending range of other depredations (including the capture of his wife by a sea captain) until finally his refusal to swear any oath is rewarded by God. An errant young rabbi narrowly escapes being torn limb from limb by a lion after he becomes drunk and succumbs to the wiles of an adulterous woman.²⁴

The School of Caedmon Under the influence of the school of biblical poetry founded by Caedmon, there grew up a strong tradition of biblical paraphrases in Early English Literature, of which Genesis A and B, Exodus and Christ II are important examples. Though interwoven in the extant manuscript, Junius XI in the Bodlleian Library, Oxford, Genesis  See Anthony C. Swindell: ‘Gog and Magog in Literary Reception History: The Persistence of the Fantastic,’ Journal of the Bible And Its Reception, Vol. 3, Issue 1 (2016): 27– 53.  David C Fowler: The Bible in Early English Literature: 200 – 206.  See Rabbinic Fantasies, ed. David Stern and Mark. J. Mirsky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990): 59 – 66 and 91– 119.

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Chapter One: A Survey of Literary Rewriting of the Bible

A and B have been revealed as separate, fragmentary works by scholars, Genesis A remarkable for its colourful treatment of the Creation in alliterative verse, and Genesis B for its extensive treatment of the Fall of the Angels, a major interpolation into the narrative of the hypotext. Meanwhile Exodus provides a very militaristic account of the escape of the Hebrews from Egypt, applying martial imagery to the action of the forces under Moses, who becomes as much a general as a charismatic religious leader. Christ II treats the Ascension as the final and culminating episode of the Six Leaps of Christ in another major reworking of the biblical hypotext. Also of importance from this early period are two works in the Cotton manuscript: Beowulf , the epic monster poem in Old English which connects with the biblical tradition by asserting that the monster Grendel is descended from Cain, making the work a proleptic continuation of the Gen. 4 story; and Judith , a vivid amplification of the narrative of the biblical-apocryphal Book of Judith which amplifies the encounter between Judith and Holofernes, draws out the latter’s death-agonies, and devotes a large amount of space to the battle between the Israelites and the attacking forces, which follows.

Genesis B and the Julius manuscript Although general literary history has often placed much weight on Milton’s development of the figure of Satan in Paradise Lost, in fact Genesis B, dating to the tenth century, and preserved in the Julius Manuscript, already marks a major stride in this direction. In the form in which it survives, Genesis B is an interpolation into the manuscript of Genesis A, also an Old English poem in the same manuscript, probably dating to the ninth-century. Genesis B is one of the earliest major literary expansions of the biblical Genesis pretext, remarkable for its characterization of both Satan and Eve.²⁵ Satan is here the disgruntled exile from heaven, intent on having revenge on God by inveigling the protoplasts into disobedience. He begins by trying to tempt Adam, and, when this fails, he turns his attention to Eve, who becomes the instrument of his plan. One particular innovation is Satan’s ability in this text to appear as the Angel of Light and there is some ambiguity over whether he appears as a serpent to Adam and as an angel to Eve. Rosemary Woolf argued that details shared by

 This account leans on Susan Oldrieve’s translation of Junius manuscript, Genesis II, 235 – 285, available on the internet at: homepages.bw.edu/~uncover/oldrieve.htm

The Amplification of Minor Characters

17

Genesis B and the later Jeu d’Adam point to a lost common source, probably an apocryphon from the East.²⁶ The portrait of Satan as the embittered prisoner of a truly graphic hell is very powerful and his efforts to subvert first Adam and then Eve have a compelling quality for the modern reader, even though this is a document of the tenth-century. This vivid dramatization and psychologization of the Christian doctrine of the Fall begins, thanks to the fragmentary nature of the manuscript, with a shocking abruptness, “Leave alone that tree….,” which adds to the immediacy. Although the Genesis B interpolation contains this major imaginative amplification, Genesis A, while generally more faithful to the Vulgate text, contains its own striking departures. Abel’s blood feeds the growth of a malignant tree which seems to be a counterpart of the two trees which Adam and Eve originally faced in the Garden of Eden. In the story of Noah, the ark is depicted as a towering fortress and the rising waters as an attacking army. This martial theme is carried over into Exodus, as Daniel Anzelark observes, where the pillar of fire is re-inscribed as a cosmic guardian and the returning waters of the Red Sea in their turn become a merciless army. ²⁷

The Amplification of Minor Characters Later in this study there will be an examination of the literary trajectories of the figures of Lilith and the Archangels Gabriel and Michael, which have a presence in the reception history far outweighing their slender biblical origins. It is also the case that the literary imagination alights upon a number of other figures whose place in the Bible seems peripheral. We examine one of these now. Malchus is the name given in Jn 18:10 to the high priest who assaulted Christ and whose ear was cut off by Peter at the time of Jesus’ arrest. He is unnamed in the other gospels. Only Luke records that Jesus healed the ear (Lk 22:51). ‘Malcus’ is also the name given to one of the magi in an Irish biblical apocryphon (Herbert and McNamara:36). In the folkloric tradition recorded in the Leimonarion of Johannes Moscos, Malchus was an Ethiopian condemned to wander the earth indefinitely for his insult to Jesus Christ. This tale forms an early branch of legend of the Wandering Jew (Anderson: 13). As a character in the English mystery plays, he is most fully developed in the Towneley ‘Conspiracy’ play, where ,as Malcus Miles,

 Rosemary Woolf: Art and Doctrine (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), 15 – 28.  See David Anzelark (ed. and trans.): Old Testament Narratives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press: x, xi, xvi, 2– 245.

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Chapter One: A Survey of Literary Rewriting of the Bible

he is in the forefront of the plan to capture Jesus. He tells Pilate that he is ready to “die for Mahound’s sake” and when Peter severs his ear, he laments the fact that he is bleeding to death. Whereas the healing in the Coventry, Chester and York plays causes Malchus to be overcome with gratitude, here he becomes more venomous and, reporting back to Pilates, proposes that they murder Jesus, a scheme which Pilate rejects. Finally, he brings Jesus to Caiphas “with much abuse.” (Pollard: 227). Christ’s healing of Malchus’ ear features in many European medieval biblical plays, with the Provençal version stipulating an elaborate false head with blood supply. In the play from Freiburg im Breisgau, Malchus appears at the Crucifixion to offer Jesus wine to drink when he says “I thirst,” in gratitude for the healing of his ear (Muir:249, 253).). Malchus enjoyed a twentieth-century revival. In Amos Wilder’s play of 1928, The Servant’s Name Was Malchus, Malchus asks that his name be removed from the Bible since the episode makes him seem ridiculous. This prompts a discourse from Jesus to the effect that his own project has been ridiculous: “Ridiculous because I suffered stay from the delusion that after my death I could be useful to men.” (Wilder: 42). He invites Malchus to be ridiculous with him.

Judith in Early European Literature Judith is another figure who has perhaps, for the modern reader, an unexpected prominence in pre-modern European literature. The fact that the Old English poem Judith shares the same manuscript as Beowulf is enough to draw attention to the ways in which the latter mirrors the story of Judith intertextually. ²⁸ Even more significant is the treatment of the story of Judith as a sort of antidote to the story of Nebuchadnezzar in the Early Middle High German epic known as Older Judith where the common theme is God’s triumph over idols and Judith becomes the direct agent of salvation history.²⁹ In fact Judith has a considerable presence in European literature, art and music, as a major collection of essays has shown.³⁰

 British Library, Cotton Vitellius A, xv. I am indebted to Paul Cavill’s article, ‘Prayer in AngloSaxon England,’ in The Glass, Spring 2019, No. 31: 3 – 9, for this point.  See Magda Motté: ‘The Bible and Poetry: A Biblical Epic by a Woman (Ava) and a Biblical Epic about a Woman (Judith),’ in Kari Elisabeth Børresen and Adriana Valerio: The High Middle Ages (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015): 149 – 166.  Kevin R, Brine, Elena Citti and Henrike Lähnemann (eds.): The Sword of Judith: Judith Across the Disciplines (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010).

The Mystery Plays

19

The Mystery Plays The European mystery plays mark an important stage in the unfolding development of literary rewriting of biblical tropes. They are particularly important as examples of “proximatizing”, the term Genette uses to describe rewritings which modify the hypotext to changed historical, geographical and cultural conditions. Dealing with some of the landmarks, in biblical-thematic order, the Wakefield Mactacio Abel stands out as play which represents Cain as a figure embarking on the path to damnation, while various other English cycles exploit the digressive potential of the story of the Flood, as a gradually more naturalized Noah emerges. In the York Shipwright’s Play (ca. 1376) Noah frets about his lack of shipbuilding skills. In the Newcastle plays he falls asleep during God’s long speech and has to be woken by an angel, though the plays usually end with a long speech or sermon by Noah himself. The episode of his drunkenness chimed with the impulse to proximatize in a play composed for the Burgundian wine region. In the Chester Flood play Noah’s wife sets out on her literary trajectory as the rebellious spouse. In Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ (ca. 1392), partially a burlesque on the Flood story, the significantly unnamed Noah-figure, the carpenter, is the dupe of the student cuckolder Nicholas, thanks to his ignorance of what should be a familiar biblical text. After the Reformation a more earnest approach is found in Michael Drayton’s epic poem Noahs Floud (1630) and in Vondel’s stern drama Noah (1667), with Noah as the reformist preacher in these large-scale amplifications of the hypotext. Comedy of a kind returns, however, with Edward Ecclestone’s grandiose Noah’s Flood or The Great Deluge (1679) in which Noah becomes a rather bombastic and at times hapless participant in a dramatic battle between God and Lucifer. This admixture of gravity and farce crops up again in Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations (1861) where Noah and his Ark form a sort of background theme. As John Cunningham shows, the prison ship which Pip espies on the novel’s first full day is a parodic Noah’s Ark.³¹ It is a black hulk “cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains,” Like a wicked Noah’s Ark.” The image returns later in the novel, where it is part of a larger riff on the Christian theme of renewal through baptism, recalling the typological interpretation of Noah’s ark as a prefiguration of that rite. Among other allusions to the ark, we find the character Abel Magwich receiving new clothes at the inn named The Ship after the dramatic pas-

 John Cunningham: ‘Christian Allusion, Comic Structure and the Metaphor of Baptism in “Great Expectations”,’ South Atlantic Review, Vol. 59, No. 2 (May 1994):35 – 51. For the passage describing the Hulk see Dickens:36.

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Chapter One: A Survey of Literary Rewriting of the Bible

sage in which he and Pip are shipwrecked on the Thames after their rowing boat is truck by the steamer.³² . Later James Joyce revives the christological reading of Noah, albeit in an ironic vein, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Noah becomes a displaced character in W.B.Yeats’s play The Player Queen (1922) where the character playing Noah in a play he has written himself finds that his wife is unwilling to co-operate, preferring another, more archaic drama. In C. Day Lewis’s play Noah and the Waters (1936) Noah finds himself riding the tide of history as communism promises a better future for the downtrodden masses. On the eve of the great watershed marked by the onset of WWII Noah makes another offbeat appearance in H.G. Wells’s final utopia, All Aboard for Ararat (1940), in which a happy outcome seems like wishful thinking. Other important literary trajectories with their roots in the mystery plays include the treatment of the Raising of Lazarus, the story of Dives and Lazarus and the Descent into Hell. The Coventry Lazarus play introduces four “consolators” who engage with Lazarus during his sickness and even urge the importance of optimism for his recovery.³³ The same inventive playwright filled in the interval required for Noah’s construction of his ark with the story of Lamech. In two European plays what is a parable in the hypotext of Lk. 16:19 – 31 becomes the dramatic reenactment of an interchange between two palpable human characters. Dives orders his dogs to be set on Lazarus in the French play Maulvais riche, in a deft development of the detail of the dogs licking Lazarus’s sores. In the greatly expanded Sterzing version of the play (Lynette Muir reports) Dives has a retinue of attendants serving him with food and wine before he goes to hell and Lazarus to heaven. Underlining the lesson about human iniquity, the brothers of Dives fight over their inheritance and finally kill each other.³⁴ In a similar way to the transformation of this parable, Christ’s descent into hell in the plays brought a doctrinal statement into the realm of visible drama. Again, the inventive Coventry playwright gave extra prominence to the topic by presenting the Harrowing of Hell twice, first as an event within the Passion and then as part of the Resurrection sequence. Finally, hell returns to the stage again in the “Doomsday” play which concludes the cycle.

 Dickens: 419 – 423.  See R.T. Davies: 221– 235 for a modern translation.  Muir: 122– 123.

Divine Dictation

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Divine Dictation A topic which has received only scant attention in accounts of the literary reception of the Bible is that of authors who consider themselves divinely inspired agents of biblical supplementation. The ambitious scale of Dante’s biblical rewriting is impossible to convey in a survey of the kind being undertaken here and, in any case, has been described magisterially by Piero Boitani.³⁵ Suffice it to observe that Dante in The Divine Comedy (ca. 1320) compares himself forcefully with King David (author of the Psalms) and with St Paul. In Paradiso XXVII: 64– 66 he is actually instructed in heaven by St Peter to go back down to earth to carry God’s message. Similarly, Milton at the beginning of Paradise Lost (1667) addresses the Holy Spirit as his instructor in giving a true account of the Fall, as he seeks to “justify the ways of God to me.”³⁶ Effectively he sees his work as an extension of the Bible. Later on William Blake in the introduction to Illustration 4 of the epic poem Jerusalem (written 1804– 1820) receives the poem in direct dictation from Jesus himself: Of the sleep of Ulro! And of the passage through Eternal Death! And of the awaking to Eternal Life. This theme calls me in sleep night after night, & ev’ry morn Awakes me at sun-rise; then I see the Saviour over me Spreading the beams of love & dictating the words of this mild song.³⁷

In these cases, the rewriting of the Bible seems to amount to extending the Bible under divine inspiration, perhaps by analogy with the tradition in which biblical translation often assumed the sacred aura belonging to scripture itself. As a way of validating a rewriting, an authorial claim to divine inspiration nevertheless is an extreme move, though clearly it depends on the nature of the rewriting. Both Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost amount to substantial swerves in the tradition. One final example may help to provide a different perspective on the issue. In an article on Alfred Tennyson and the Bible, Kirstie Blair provides evidence which suggests that Tennyson was seen by Thomas Carlyle and others as “both an inter-

 Piero Boitani: ‘Dante and the Bible: A Sketch,’ in Michael Lieb, Emma Mason and Jonathan Roberts (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 281– 293.  Paradise Lost, 1: 17– 26.  William Blake: Complete Writings: 622.

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Chapter One: A Survey of Literary Rewriting of the Bible

preter of God’s word and a vessel for it.” ³⁸ By implication Tennyson’s own biblically infused poetry invited this impression. Yet Tennyson’s actual treatment of biblical material could not be considered “extreme” in the sense I which that term has been used in this study. Even if in poems like ‘The May Queen’ he privileged Victorian fantasies of Heaven over biblical notions of an afterlife or even if in ‘In Memoriam’ he invented an episode in which Lazarus was asked by Mary “Where wert thou, brother, those four days?”, with the poet dwelling on the absence of any record of a reply, the actual usage of the Bible could not be considered extreme. It is more that Tennyson had embarked on his own, idiosyncratic approach to using the Bible as a quarry for thematic material relevant to the topic of mortality and to the philosophy suggested by the title of his collection, The Higher Pantheism. It should be added that there can be little doubt that this writer’s reputation depended quite heavily on the abundance of biblical allusions in his work, something evidenced by the many editions of George Lester’s Lord Tennyson and the Bible (1892).

Shakespearean Fixations Some authors make heavy use of a limited repertoire of biblical topoi. Elsewhere I have documented Shakespeare’s reliance on the theme of the Prodigal Son in the plays Henry IV, Parts One and Two , All’s Well That Ends Well, and King Lear, amongst others.³⁹ What appears to be a fixation with such a restricted biblical code could be attributed to such factors as the limited religious or biblical knowledge of the projected audiences of the plays, the currency of this particular trope at the period of writing, or perhaps a sort of authorial fixation. Possibly all three factors should be given some weight in this case. Preaching of the period tended to focus on a narrow band of biblical subjects. The seventeenth-century saw a surge of Prodigal Son plays as the mystery plays gave way to more didactic dramas favouring the new Protestant ethic, as Alan Young has shown, and there is also plenty of evidence of the popularity of scenes from the narrative of the Prodigal Son in popular art of the time.⁴⁰ The phenomenon of authors focusing on a thin range of biblical tropes is something observable across a wide historical list of writers, from Chaucer through to Thomas Hardy and even James Joyce. Shake Kirstie Blair: ‘Alfred Tennyson,’ in Rebecca Lemon et alii: The Bible in English Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009): 496 – 511 (510).  Swindell (2010): 247– 248.  See Alan R. Young: The English Prodigal Son Plays: A Theatrical Fashion of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Lampeter: Edward Mellen, 1979).

The Age of Reason

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speare was also capable of using a particular biblical trope as a leitmotif, as he did with the ‘Book of Life’ in Richard II.

The Folkloric Factor Among the mass of traditional material present in the Shakespearean corpus is an allusion to the legend of Cain as the Man in the Moon. “With Cain go wander through the shades of night…” urges Henry Bolingbroke of the soul of the murdered King Richard.” (Richard II. Act 5, Scene 6.) Hitherto largely ignored by scholars in the field of biblical reception-studies, folkloric reception has recently been the subject of a major academic collection.⁴¹ In the particular case of Cain and Abel, the image of the two as “The Brothers on the Moon” is reported by Florentina Badalanova to be widespread in Slavic and, in particular, Belarussian culture, which reads the images on the Moon’s surface as those of Cain carrying his brother on a pitchfork, which he is destined to do until the day of the Last Judgement.⁴² There is an equivalent earthy plasticity in the strange metamorphosis of the bellicose Judith of the OT/HB into the Judy of Punch and Judy of the British seaside puppetry tradition, where she is joined (in a riotous nod to the Apocrypha) by Tobit the dog.⁴³ Both the Belarussian Cain tradition and the British Punch and Judy trope are forms of ethnic cultural appropriation of biblical hypotexts. They are also conspicuously plastic metamorphoses of their subjects, translating a literary motif into something which retains a literary base and yet is highly visual and observable, approaching the ubiquitous. We might note that a Hungarian folkloric version of the Cain legend has the images of the prone Abel and Cain running away placed on the moon by God as a warning for people to see “here below.”⁴⁴

The Age of Reason As Bertram Schwarzbach has shown, the Age of Reason was a period in which the Bible came under fire from the rationalists for the number of passages which de-

 Eric Ziolkowski (ed.): The Bible in Folklore Worldwide (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).  Florentina Badalanova: ‘The Word of God by Word of Mouth (Belarussian Versions of the Book of Genesis),’ New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 2003: 1– 22 (14).  See Anthony Swindell: ‘British and Irish’ in Ziolkowski (ibid): 183 – 209 (187– 188).  Annamária Lammel and Ilona Nagy: La Bible Paysanne trans. Joëlle Dufeuilly (Paris: Bayard, 2006): 74.

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Chapter One: A Survey of Literary Rewriting of the Bible

fied the eighteenth-century sense of scientific rationality, from Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt to Jonah’s survival in the belly of a whale.⁴⁵ These are all examples of what the period considered outlandish and unacceptable to enlightened thought. Central to this onslaught was Voltaire’s La Bible enfin expliquée (The Bible Finally Explained). Yet this same author was quite capable of entertaining historical imaginative embroidery of a biblical narrative as a source of meaning. Voltaire, as Bernhard Lang shows in his study, had a continuing interest in the Joseph story.⁴⁶ The focus here will be his account in the Dictionnaire philosophique of 1764.⁴⁷ Beginning by referring to the analogues to the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife in classical literature, Voltaire dwells on the child who, in rabbinic and Quranic tradition (he only refers to the Quranic evidence), witnessed the event, exonerating Joseph. He speculates, wryly, that the existence of the child is evidence of the woman’s previous dalliance with an unknown lover. The recounting of Joseph’s interpretation of the dreams of Pharaoh’s servants and then the crucial dream of Pharaoh himself is followed by a digression on other dreams, discussing Jacob’s dream of the ladder to heaven and his dream of how to increase his sheep; Joseph’s dream recounted to his brothers; and Abimelech’s discovery from a dream that Sarah is Abraham’s wife. Voltaire concludes that ’today’ (even in Asia) no king would grant high office for explaining a dream. The outcome is that Joseph manages the food crisis in Egypt, contributing to the amassing of despotic power by the Pharaoh, and in the process displays forgiveness and magnanimity towards his brothers. The short rewriting ends with a conversation between Jacob and Pharaoh, in which the aged patriarch declares that he is one hundred and thirty and has never enjoyed a happy day. This pithy account, what Genette would term a paratext, succeeds in satirically drawing out some of the unresolved tensions in the hypotext and its tradition. In scale it is at the opposite pole from Thomas Mann’s novel (which will be discussed below) and yet it demonstrates clearly the value which Voltaire found in treating the subject as a ’conte philosophique.’(philosophical tale).

 Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach: ‘Reason and the Bible in the So-Called Age of Reason, ‘ Huntingdon Library Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 3 (September 2011: 437– 470.  Bernhard Lang: Joseph in Egypt: A Cultural Icon from Grotius to Goethe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009): 270 – 316.  This account is based on the actual translation of Voltaire’s text given in Lang (ibid): 278 – 280.

Dickens and Urbanity

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Epochal Revival One feature of the repertoire of literary rewritings of biblical hypotexts is the tendency for particular tropes to rise and fall in the attention paid to them. Jehu, after a lengthy period of literary neglect, became a lively topic first in politically inflected European writings of the early modern period and then in the “alternative history” romantic fiction of the twentieth-century. In the revolutionary politics of seventeenth-century England Jehu’s revolt could be used as an exemplum by either side in the conflict. Sir Walter Raleigh in his History of the World (1614) cited Jehu as one whose actions revealed that primogeniture had no hold in the OT/ HB. John Milton justified the regicide of his time (the execution of King Charles I) by citing Jehu’s action as the demonstration of a good act commanded by God in his work A Defence of the English People (1651). Later John Dryden would characterize Lord Shaftesbury as “this new Jehu” in The Medal (1682) and castigate the anarchic reading of Scripture which drove “Each Jehu lashing on with furious force” in The Hind and the Panther (1687.) By the time of William Congreve’s comedy The Double Dealer (1693), the name was mockingly given to a rough coachman. Yet the cognomen still had force for the 1857 novel of Alexander Dumas The Companions of Jehu (Fr. Les Compagnons de Jehu), where it is applied to a group of young aristocrats acting as highwaymen to fund the restoration of the monarchy during Napoleon’s rise in France.

Dickens and Urbanity Before moving on to consider examples of writings by Romantic writers which could be characterized as extreme, one could suggest that the novels of Charles Dickens provide a foil. This is not because the general approach of Dickens to biblical tropes was either bland or pious, but because it was complex, nuanced and far from consistent, as Janet Larson demonstrated in her study, Dickens and Broken Scripture. ⁴⁸ If one had to choose a single adjective, it might be “urbane.” For example, in Oliver Twist the biblical trope of the Good Samaritan is invoked to portray the plight of Oliver as he falls down in fatigue on the road to London and is rescued by Jack Dawkins. Then the trope is used to dramatize the attack of the housebreakers upon Oliver, who is left injured and lying in a ditch.⁴⁹ Those who help him and those who fail to help him are cast neatly (at first) into the duality

 Janet Larson: Dickens and Broken Scripture (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985).  Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): 52– 54 and 257.

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of Good Samaritans and Bad Samaritans. The Bad Samaritans include the parish authorities who are only interested in punishing the destitute. Yet the initial rescuers, Dodger and Fagin, emerge as distinctly bogus Good Samaritans during the ensuing developments, even though their venal modes of behavior are depicted as adaptations to the reality of their circumstances. Meanwhile the character Nancy, as Larson shows, represents “the Samaritan ensnared in a morally ambiguous place.”⁵⁰ The relationship of the novel David Copperfield to the biblical story of King David and of Bleak House to the biblical books of Job and Esther is still more complex.⁵¹

The Romantic Revolt The Romantic poets were anything but urbane. Three works will serve as the representatives of the Romantic revolt in this survey, Lord Byron’s Cain (1821), Victor Hugo’s La Fin de Satan (written around 1856 and published posthumously in 1886), and Arthur Hugh Clough’s ‘Adam and Eve (1869). They are all contrarian and illustrate the range of possible Romantic responses to the biblical text, with Byron’s work engaging rather despairingly with the vertiginous uncertainties of modern cosmology, Hugo’s epic poem optimistically envisaging the rehabilitation of Satan at the end of time in a reversal of his Miltonic fall, and Clough’s Adam finally assuming a sanguine cheerfulness in the face of the unravelling cosmos. These very basic summaries are intended only to point up the extreme narrative departures evident here. Hugo’s La Fin de Satan is the second part of an epic trilogy which began with La Légende des Siècles, this time depicting the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil as Satan falls from heaven, the Flood occurs and Nimrod, having violently triumphed on earth, prepares to assail heaven. Although the assault fails, Hugo (following the Sefer Hayashar) has one of the warrior’s arrows return blood-soaked to earth, suggesting that it has injured God. The poem provides an extensive summary of Old Testament history with a very adverse portrait of an angry and vindictive God, before setting the scene for the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In the final section, salvation history takes a new turn as Satan is rescued from his depravity by his daughter Liberté and resumes his angelic status in heaven under  Larson: 62.  See Eitan Bar-Josef: ‘ “It’s the old story”: David and Uriah in II Samuel and “David Copperfield”,’ The Modern Language Review, Vol. 101, No. 4 (October 2006): 957– 965. Also Janet L.arson: ‘The Battle of Biblical Books in Esther’s Narrative,’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 38, No. 2 (September 1983): 131– 160.

The Romantic Revolt

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his former name of Lucifer, just as the capture of the Bastille finally signals the complete defeat of Evil on earth. ⁵² Lord Byron’s Cain: A Mystery teases the reader in its title with the idea that it falls within the tradition of the English mystery plays, whereas the portrait of Cain in this play is much more sympathetic than in anything found in medieval drama. Indeed, Cain emerges essentially as the victim of a tour of the universe (led by Lucifer) which induces in him intense melancholy and finally propels his murder of Abel. In all this, Byron’s work amounts to a parodic reversal of Milton’s Paradise Lost, with the cosmic vision the opposite of that vouchsafed to Adam in the latter work. Cain: A Mystery is at the same time ingenious in its complete faithfulness to the words of the Gen.4 hypotext, allowing the poet to anticipate his critics in the play’s preface with the exhortation: “Behold the Book, in imitation of Bishop Watson. ⁵³ It was to have a considerable influence on later literature, including most prominently Unamuno’s Abel Sanchez, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. ⁵⁴ Arthur Hugh Clough’s dramatic poem, ’Adam and Eve,’ which appears in the standard editions of his poems as ’The Mystery of the Fall,’ has a complex textual history, suggesting that it is the fusion of two separate poems, one being a dialogue between Adam and Eve after the Temptation in the Garden and the other a dialogue between Adam and Cain.⁵⁵ As it stands, this segmentary expansion of the Gen.2 story begins with Adam and Eve’s very different reactions to the Fall, takes in Cain’s murder of Abel as the moment when Cain achieves a form of self-authentication, and ends with Adam’s death-bed speech. In the poem there is a sharp contrast between Eve’s piety and Adam’s cosmic uncertainties (was it the voice of God which spoke to them?) and also between Cain’s activism and Adam’s attitude of sitting out the confusions of the moment. Although critics have taken the work as a manifestation of the author’s religious procrastination, an unresolved agonizing over the sense in which the Genesis story might be true in the context of the debates of the time⁵⁶, the speeches of Adam articulate a very clear note of anguish in the face of the vertiginous uncertainties of the protoplast’s world. It is also a surprisingly rare Victorian literary treatment of its subject matter, compared to the attention given to Cain as a romantic hero.

    

This very brief summary relies on the much fuller account in Avni: 228 – 240. Lord Byron: The Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961): 520. See Ricardo Quinones: The Changes of Cain (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). See Scott (1981.) See Miyoshi (1965), 695.

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Beginning by ridiculing the idea that he should feel guilty about the Fall (“What!/ Because I plucked an apple from a twig/ Be damned to death eternel!”⁵⁷), Adam resolves not to be unnerved by what seems to have been a dream. He later bids Cain to be not over-scrupulous, looking to the future rather than the past. His final words, as he dies, confirm that his life has answered ’to a certain impetus within’ which proved a better guide than ’doubt, despondency and death.’ ⁵⁸ Clough’s poem was partly inspired by his reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Drama of Exile, another example of the story of the Fall in dialogue with the Victorian crisis of faith.

Romanticism and Supernatural Fantasy George Macdonald’s novel Lilith (1895) also dealt with the story of Adam and Eve, though concentrating on the demonic figure of Lilith, the extra-biblical first wife of Adam and (in this work) agent of the Shadow or Satan. This large-scale fantasy was to influence the writings of C.S. Lewis and, in what we may regard as a further example of an ‘extreme’ biblical rewriting, develops the idea of Adam and Eve continuing to exist in a parallel universe to that of the first-person narrator, Vane, who gains access to this Otherworld by passing through a mirror in the house of the aged librarian, Raven. (Raven himself turns out to be the alter ego of Adam.) It could be classified as an important early example of the modern fantastic excursion on a biblical theme.⁵⁹ (The work is discussed more fully in Chapter Four). Structurally, the idea of the biblical world as a supernatural layer existing alongside the quotidian world is a major innovation.

Supernaturalism Suppressed Not all rewriting aimed at rehabilitating supernaturalism. The story of Elijah provided the hypotext for Grazia Deledda’s novel Elias Portolu (1903). Set in rural Sardinia, the biblical story is inverted to make the main protagonist powerless to prevent the death of the young boy, Berte, who is his illegitimate son by Maddalena, the wife of his drunken brother, Pietro. Yet this Elijah achieves his own spiritual solace and a form of redemption in the wake of the boy’s death by becoming a  Scene I, lines 25 – 27.  Scene XIV, lines 40 – 50.  See Anthony Swindell: ‘Lilith and the Future of Biblical Humanism,’ in John. T. Greene and Mishael M. Caspi (eds.): In the Arms of the Biblical Women (New York: Gorgias Press, 2013): 301– 317.

The Age of Scepticism: Laurence Housman

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priest in penance for this sin. This is an example of the naturalism which became common in twentieth-century rewritings of biblical tropes. Perhaps the most common form of naturalism in biblical rewriting of the period was the urbanity found in the novel by the Brazilian writer Joaquim Machado de Assis, Esau and Jacob (1904), itself an inheritor partially of the legacy of Charles Dickens, who (as we saw) managed to weave biblical paradigms into large-scale naturalistic novels in a way which suggested a sort of studied ambivalence towards their meaning. Machado de Assis in this novel was also the precursor of the exotic, discursive late twentieth-century Latin American novels which played with biblical themes, such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Demetrio Aguilera-Malta’s Babelonia (1985). These works seem to drown the biblical trope in an ocean of diegetic content related to life in various countries of South America.

The Age of Scepticism: Laurence Housman In some cases, naturalism shades off into outright hostility to biblical supernaturalism. The dramatist and painter Laurence Housman wrote a group of biblical plays in the 1940s which eventually appeared in the collection Old Testament Plays (1950). Driven by a programme of eliminating the miraculous from the Bible, these plays are ‘extreme’ in the sense that everything is subordinated to that aim. At the same time Housman’s approach is productive of some plot and perspective changes which are of interest independently from the author’s didactic message. In ‘Abraham and Isaac’ the debate centers on how Abraham is to identify the authentic voice of God. Much dramatic attention is paid to Abraham’s parrying of Sarah’s anxieties about the expedition to climb Mount Moriah. Resolution is found in the disclosure by Sarah, after the safe return of the pair, that while they were away she offered hospitality to a family from the hill-city of Zoar who were seeking refuge from having to sacrifice one of their sons to the god called Moloch. ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ emphasizes the duplicitous character of Jacob and, in the revised version printed in this collection, has two Voices commenting from the wings on Jacob’s behaviour. ‘Ramoth Gilead’ adds a concluding chorus, emphasizing the truth of Micaiah’s warnings against the ‘false spirit’ preached by the prophets who supported the action of Ahab and Jehoshaphat against Syria. ’The Burden of Nineveh rationalizes Jonah’s maritime exploits into a version in which he is cast into the sea on a wooden crossbeam and only later devises the story of the big fish, in order to capture the attention of his audience in Nineveh as he calls them to repentance. Samuel the Kingmaker paints a thoroughly pessimistic view

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of Samuel as a political schemer, with the author insisting that his account is entirely consistent with the biblical text. These plays apply a form of twentieth-century rationalism to their biblical subjects but seem strangely impervious to the larger moral challenges suggested by the events of two World Wars or of the Holocaust. Housman the biblical rewriter is wedded to a rationalizing, progressivist view of revelation which ignores the onset of an era in which such conceptual tidiness appears to be beside the point.

Responding to the Traumas of the Twentieth Century Among the first radical reworkings of biblical themes in twentieth-century literature is Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘The Parable of the Old Men and the Young.’ This work famously alters the outcome of the Gen. 22 story of Abraham and Isaac, with the old man slaying his son, together with “half the seed of Europe, one by one.” It is a landmark both in war poetry and in biblical rewriting, reversing the plot so pithily and to such sharp effect. Reducing the biblical hypotext to about one third in size, the poem accelerates towards its fierce ending. Apart from the dramatic plot reversal at the end, the poem makes two other significant changes. Firstly, Abraham is called ‘Abram’, as though to recall a more primitive stage in Abraham’s life before he became the mellow and almost docile figure of faith associated with his re-naming by God. Secondly, the poem has the angel draw attention at the critical moment to a ram caught by its horns in a thicket, suggesting that the patriarch “sacrifice the Ram of Pride” instead of his son. But Abram refuses to do this. There is no mention in the Genesis text of such a ram. The poem therefore alters the base text both through plot-reversal and through intensification. The novelist Pat Barker was to revisit Wilfred Owen’s poem in her novels about the trenches of the First World War, Regeneration and The Ghost Road, where the character William River, a military psychologist, confronts the trope of Abraham and sacrifice in a way which suggests the older generation’s growing awareness of its own guilt.⁶⁰ Barker’s novel is a very clear example of the cumulative literary tradition at work.

 See Catherine Lanone: ‘Scattering the seed of Abraham: The Motif of Sacrifice in Pat Barker’s “Regeneration” and “The Ghost Road,”’ Literature and Theology, Vol. 13, No. 3 (September 1999): 259 – 268 and Kaley Joyes: ‘Regenerating Wilfred Owen: Pat Barker’s Revisions,’ Mosaic, Vol. 42, Issue 3 (September 1999): 169 – 183.

Expansive Rewritings

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Anton Tamsaari A work which appeared on the brink of WWII was the novel by the Estonian writer, Anton Tamsaari, The Misadventures of the New Satan (1939). This was a rewriting of the commissioning by God at the beginning of the Book of Job, whereby Satan is sent into the world on a quest. This time, however, it is Satan himself who will undergo the suffering, as he takes on human form in an attempt to prove to St Peter that it is possible for a human being to lead a good life on earth and thereby attain salvation. The novel becomes a satire on human deviousness, as well as on the deleterious effects of the ownership of land by foreign landlords.⁶¹ As a biblical-rewriting tour de force it compares with Macdonald’s Lilith, discussed earlier. Equally, it bears some resemblance to T.F. Powys’s somewhat neglected masterpiece, Unclay (1931), another novel which introduces a determinedly supernatural biblical element into an otherwise apparently naturalistic narrative.

Expansive Rewritings No account of the period would be complete without mentioning Thomas Mann’s monumental trilogy, Joseph and his Brothers, published in stages between 1933 and 1943. It will be discussed more fully later in this book. Here it serves as an example of a vast amplification of the hypotext, creating a novel of 1207 pages out of thirteen chapters within the biblical Book of Genesis. With its combination of Christian master-narrative and strongly philosemitic stance, the novel offers the paradigm of a more eirenic and multi-cultural form of biblical rewriting. It also makes a very creative use of midrashic material and of the midrashic approach, as Alan Levenson shows in an article, demonstrating Mann’s commitment to creating an alternative path to the dominant modes of biblical scholarship of his time. The decision to make Tamar the central female figure of the final part of the trilogy and to make her the pupil of Jacob is a strong example of Mann’s creativity. ⁶² Joseph and his Brothers is a work which essentially pays homage to the biblical hypotext, whereas some of the expansive American biblical rewritings of the same period, such as John Steinbeck’s novels The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952), occupy a more ambiguous position in relation to the biblical paradigm. The first can be read as an inverted version of the Exodus story, in which the  See Anthony Swindell: ‘Three 1930s Novels about Satan,’ Journal of the Bible & Its Reception, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2014): 237– 251.  See Alan Levenson: ‘Christian Author, Jewish Book? Methods and Sources in Them as Mann’s Joseph,’ The German Quarterly, Spring 1998, Vol. 71, No. 2: 166 – 178.

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central journey of the Joad family is from the difficult but predictable conditions of the Oklahoma dustbowl to the far more adverse “promised land” of California. Instead of the biblical pretext’s journey from slavery to freedom, this is one from subsistence to severe poverty, though the final scene (in which Rose of Sharon succours a starving stranger) offers a glimmer of hope for humanity.⁶³ East of Eden offers a more mixed treatment of its biblical paradigm, as successive incarnations of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel living in the Salinas Valley in California grapple with the good and evil forces within the human soul.⁶⁴

Borges and the Anticanonical Before touching on the aftermath of the Nazi genocide, there must be a discussion of one of the most significant ‘extreme’ biblical reworkings of modern times. In 1944 Jorge Luis Borges published his ‘Three Versions of Judas’ in the collection of short stories entitled Artifices. It is remarkable for its escalating series of approaches to the figure of Judas, as imagined by the fictive scholar Runeberg. In the first version, Judas, even though he knows that a betrayer is strictly superfluous to the scheme of salvation, nevertheless makes the personal sacrifice of being the betrayer. He does this in response to the mysterious prompting of the ‘Word,’ whose purpose is to encompass in the act of redemption the full range of human life, including its blemishes. In the second version, Runeberg, finding himself condemned by the academic establishment, rewrites the story again. This time he presents Judas’ treachery as an aesthetic act, by means of which Judas deliberately sought hell in order to avoid happiness, which he considers a divine attribute rather than something to which human beings should aspire. In the third and most scandalous version, Runeberg advances the argument that suggests that God’s suffering in the Incarnation could not be restricted to one afternoon on the Cross and should therefore extend to his actually becoming Judas, since sinlessness and being fully human were mutually incompatible conditions. This work has been discussed much more fully elsewhere, but this summary should be enough to

 For a tracing of the biblical themes in this novel, see J.R.C. Perkin: ‘Exodus Imagery in The Grapes of Wrath,’ in David Bevan (ed.): Literature and the Bible (Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993): 79 – 93.  See Michael J. Meyer: ‘Finding a New Jerusalem: The Edenic Myth in John Steinbeck,’ in David Bevan (ibid): 95– 117.

After the Holocaust

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establish Three Versions of Judas as a landmark in this book’s account of the history of extreme rewritings.⁶⁵

After the Holocaust It is important now to return to the watershed of the Holocaust, the historical event which seems to challenge the very foundations of salvation-history enshrined in the Bible. Post-Holocaust Jewish biblical poetry has been the subject of a number of monographs. Faced with the choice between silence and some sort of utterance, poets such as Amir Gilboa and Nathan Zach felt it necessary to engage somehow with some selected biblical tropes, displaced as they might be from the positive ontologies which had once supported them. Four examples must suffice. Amir Gilboa’s ‘Isaac’ performs a similar operation on the Akedah to Wilfred Owen’s poem, reversing its plot. Yet this time the perspective is that of a child and it is in fact Abraham who is slain. He cannot respond to Isaac’s call to the table for lunch: “It’s I who am butchered my son/ my blood’s already on the leaves….”⁶⁶ Nathan Zach’s poem ‘When God first said’ re-imagines God’s voice at creation, with God tragically not foreseeing that saying “Let there be light” was confined in its influence to his own sphere: “He meant it would not be dark for him.”⁶⁷ Both poets found Samson an appropriate subject for rewriting. For Gilboa Samson’s story has changed. Instead of being extinguished by the collapse of the columns of the Philistine temple he has, against his wishes, survived into old age and now is both an eyeless and a sleepless survivor. ⁶⁸ For Zach the tales about Samson are the quaint relics of a storytelling past in which biblical heroes acted out their lives as in a fairy tale. In ‘Samson’s Hair’ the poet is bemused by the imagined phenomenon of the hero’s strength residing in his hair. He better understands the story of Absalom’s hair which, through being caught in a tree, allowed King David’s beloved son to be killed by Joab.⁶⁹ These poems from the period between 1946 and 1960 encapsulate a world in which biblical rewriting is all but

 See Richard G.Walsh: Three Versions of Judas (London: Equinox, 2010) and also Hugh Pyper: An Unsuitable Book, the Bible as Scandalous Text (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2005).The influence of Borges on other literary rewriters of the Bible is examined in Swindell (2015): 258 – 270.  Amir Gilboa: The Light of Lost Suns trans. Shirley Kaufman (London: The Menard Press, 1979): 26.  Nathan Zach: The Static Element trans. Peter Everwine and Shulamit Ysny-Starkman (New York: Atheneum, 1982): 11.  Gilboa: 39.  Zach:18.

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stunned into silence and yet persists, perhaps out of some dogged determination on the part of the authors to make the ancient narratives yield meaning. Or perhaps it is due to the logic that biblical texts are intrinsically meaningful, even if radical forms of manipulation need to be brought to bear.

Elie Wiesel A comparable form of tenacity seems to inform Elie Wiesel’s play The Trial of God (1979) a Purimspiel set in 1649 and held in response to a pogrom which has occurred in the fictive town of Shamgorod. It refers in the first place to massacres of Jews which were occurring in this period in parts of Eastern Europe and then by extension to the Nazi Holocaust. God is challenged in a trial instigated by the innkeeper, Berish, who is a survivor of the pogrom, as Wiesel was of Auschwitz. Despite the sometimes-alluring arguments of God’s attorney, Sam, in favor of a consolatory form of theism, Berish’s grim determination to cling to God while yet holding him to account wins the day.

English Continuities The seismic cognitive and theological upheavals occurring in mainland Europe and beyond in this period appear to find a muted response at first in English literature. Works written either for or within the penumbra of the Religious Drama Society included Dorothy Sayers’ radio play The Man Born to be King (1943), which brought some new realism to the portrayal of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. There was also Norman Nicholson’s play about Elijah, The Old Man of the Mountains (1946), which contained some very lyrical lines and presented Elijah as a rustic figure, driven by a raven to oppose the tyrannical rule of the Baal-worshipping Ahab and to lead his people back to worship of the true God. Throughout the latter play there is thematic contrast between the voice of the babbling stream as a manifestation of the natural order and the divine voice speaking through the raven. The action ends tactfully before the episode of the defenestration of Queen Jezebel. These works are imaginative without being extreme, reminding us that one response to the upheavals of war was simply to seek to revitalize biblical drama as a source of meaning. There is a tendency for radical biblical rewritings to become more quirky or offbeat in the mid to late twentieth-century. The Brazilian writer Murilo Rubião’s collection of short stories The Ex-Magician and Other Stories contains some striking examples. Suffice it here to mention ‘The Edifice,’ a very amusing and quite engrossing version of the building of the Tower of Babel which is partly a deft satire

Extreme Lives of Jesus

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on the institutional momentum which keeps outlandish projects moving forward. ⁷⁰

Extreme Lives of Jesus While mainstream or conventional New Testament study gradually weaned itself off the sense that it was impossible to create a historical reconstruction of the life of Jesus in the long aftermath of Albert Schweizer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, two literary rewritings of the life of Jesus belonging to the mid-twentieth century stand out. These are Robert Graves’s King Jesus (1946) and Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation (1951) Both are, in their very different ways, extreme rewritings. King Jesus is particularly interesting on account of its almost complete neglect in scholarly accounts of the treatment of Jesus in fiction, perhaps because its esoteric concern with mythography has been very much out of fashion. Graves wrote King Jesus almost in tandem with The White Goddess, his great project to reclaim the influence and importance of goddess-worship in western culture. It could be said that Christian patriarchy is the antithesis of that pro-feminist quest and in fact Graves’s novel presents Jesus as the inheritor of the great cultural clash between Judaic patriarchal values and a suppressed tradition of matriarchy. Flying in the face of both academic and doctrinal orthodoxy, Graves deduced from the willingness of Pilate to grant Jesus a private interview and from the inscription on the Cross (“Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews)” that Jesus really was of royal parentage and that he was the offspring of Herod Antipater (rightful heir to the throne of Israel under Roman law) and Miriam (later called Mary by Christians), who was a temple virgin and matrilineal heiress of Michal, wife of King David. In Graves’s account Jesus believes that by rejecting the possibility of marriage to Cleopas and adopting a celibate life he can usher in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, whereas he in fact ends by dying a sacrificial death presided over by the White Goddess in her triple aspect as Miriam, Mary of Cleopas, and Mary Magdalene.⁷¹ King Jesus is extreme not only in its handling of what we may call the overall plot of Jesus’ life and death. It is extreme also in the thoroughness with which it rewrites almost every detail of the narratives contained in the four canonical gospels. One example must suffice. The baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan by John

 For a fuller discussion, see Swindell 2015): 258 – 270 [263 – 265].  See Richard Perceval Graves: Robert Graves and the White Goddess ( London: Phoenix Giant, 1998): 75 – 80.

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the Baptist becomes an investiture ceremony according to an ancient rite and the descent of the dove is the manifestation of the Ka, the hawk-like semblance of kingship which traditionally descended upon the Egyptian pharaoh at his coronation. Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation (1951) is almost the mirrorimage of King Jesus, in terms of its closeness to Christian orthodoxy, despite the fact that it attracted much greater controversy in its time. Here Jesus is the son of a carpenter whose trade includes making crosses for the Roman method of public execution – a very unkinglike background. He spends much of his short life in a Nietzschean moral and spiritual struggle between the spirit and the flesh. The final phase of the struggle comes when he experiences a dream on the Cross of an alternative life of sensuality lived with Mary Magdalene. However, it is only a dream and the story of the Passion is unchanged. It was the film version by Scorsese which drew public attention to the novel and which led to storms of protest in conservative-evangelical circles, the novel itself being placed on the Vatican’s list of prohibited books and the author excommunicated by the Orthodox Church. By way of contrast, an example of a non-extreme novel about Jesus, there is Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son (1997). The novel is remarkable in presenting Jesus himself as the first-person narrator and in attempting to deal with the consciousness of Christianity’s founder by depicting him as having both human and divine thoughts. If it has been read as reflective of its author’s “Manichean vision”, then it arrives at its destination by a thoroughly pedestrian approach to the hypotext, considered here as the four canonical gospels combined in an updated form of harmony.⁷²

Some Late Twentieth-Century Revivals Ruth in the USA We now turn to a selection of disparate biblical tropes which in late twentieth-century rewritings demonstrate the vitality of the form. The first two examples display their “extreme” approach to rewriting in the way they isolate one facet of their respective biblical hypotexts. The story of Ruth is transposed to the USA in a sharply written reworking in which the biblical text is recalled but also problematized. One could say that it is the euphoric ending of the pretext which is the first casualty of this transposition. Dorothy Allison’s novel Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) presents Ruth as the victim

 See Swindell (2010): 197– 199.

Some Late Twentieth-Century Revivals

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of persistent child abuse and rape (by her adoptive father) in the context of the life amongst America’s poorest (“trash.”) The novel’s features include the constant shifts between temporary homes of the Boatright family; Bone (Ruth)’s dreams of an escape road out of her situation; and the temporary solace provided by the Baptist Gospel Church world of Mr and Mrs Pearl. Scenes of horrific violence take place in the family bathroom and find a correspondence in Bone’s night-time raid on the local branch of Woolworths. Although Bone’s life seems to be wrapped in metaphoric night, as is that of her doomed friend Shannon Pearl, there are redemptive qualities in the motherly love of Anne, in the wisdom of Bone’s various aunts and in the rough-necked cheerfulness of her uncle Earle. This novel is an extreme biblical rewriting in the sense that the diegetic content related to contemporary human degradation predominates over the memory of the hypotext.

Doubting Thomas Revisited Violence committed in the historic past is the theme of Atle Neass’s novel Doubting Thomas (1997).⁷³ This work presents itself firstly as a narrative about the life, art, loves and violent death of the painter Caravaggio, which is then followed eight alternative accounts of the circumstances leading up to his death, offered by characters both sympathetic and unsympathetic the painter’s persona. The work is a variation on the biblical hypotext of Jn 20: 24– 29 to the extent that Caravaggio’s famous painting of Christ allowing Thomas to place his finger in the gash in his abdomen is one of the paintings described in the narrative; and also because Caravaggio’s emphasis on carnality, on flesh as opposed to soul, finds a synecdoche in that painting of Doubting Thomas. It could be said that through his life and work, the painter expresses an absorption in physicality which challenges the artistic tradition of applying recognizably ’spiritual’ motifs to the treatment of biblical subjects and also conflicts with the authoritative teaching of the Roman Catholic Church of his day, which emphasized the subjugation of the fleshly to the spiritual. The shocking realism of the painting, ’Doubting Thomas,’ finds a counterpart in the novel’s visceral descriptions of Michel Angelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s encounters with the flesh of female prostitutes and the various male opponents with whom he had a pugilistic relationship. It is widely believed, for example, ’The Death of the Virgin,’ was based on the real, dying, fleshly body of a woman

 Atle Naess: Doubting Thomas: A Novel About Caravaggio trans. Anne Born (London: Peter Owen, 2000 [1997])

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he knew, the wretched and ill-fated Anna Bianchini. ⁷⁴. At the same time, the painter’s unflinching gaze may be inspired by his friendship with contemporary astronomers, such as Galileo, who were also intent in reporting what the eye (particularly with the help of the newly invented telescope) could see. As a Bakhtinian chronotope or as a diegetic space, the juxtaposition of the seething world of the seventeenth-century Italian tavern and the closet in which the new man of science makes his revolutionary discoveries is skillfully presented. There is a similar spatial dichotomy shared by the ordered world of the religious cloister and the rampantly acquisitive world of the more materialistic cardinals of the novel. At the heart of it all is the contested space of Caravaggio’s own body, finally succumbing to the violence of his enemies.

The Massacre of the Innocents The final example in this brief tour of outstanding literary reworkings returns us to the world of the twenty-first century. In Evelio Rosero’s novel Feast of the Innocents/ La Carroza del Bolívar (2012 English trans. 2015) the public festivities in Pasto in Colombia surrounding Holy Innocents Day become the occasion for a catastrophic and farcical attempt by the character Doctor Justo Pastor Processo López to create a carnival float exposing the true story about the national hero Simón Bolívar and his involvement in widespread atrocities against women and children in what amounted to a large-scale reiteration of the Massacre of the Innocents. In the end the doctor’s project fails when the float is seized by the forces of the ruling junta and the doctor himself (in his carnival ape’s suit) is assassinated by the young revolutionaries who idolize Bolívar. An unholy alliance of the military establishment and idealistic youthful insurgents has killed López and his quest to expose historical truth. Meanwhile his young assassin, Puelles, is himself shot dead by those who are ostensibly his comrades, so he in a sense joins the ranks of the innocent victims of power. The float, however, has been rescued by the group who built it and now lies hidden in a cave, awaiting a future moment when it can emerge like some folkloric sleeping hero. It is an apt image for the latency of this biblical trope and its reception.

 Naess: 90 – 95.

Conclusions

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Conclusions This selective journey through the literary reception of the Bible has revealed a huge variety of literary rewritings of biblical tropes. They include not only major amplifications and compressions of the respective hypotexts but also the use of the biblical text or trope as the launchpad for what I have dubbed ‘fantastic excursions’ and for reworkings which hinge upon altering the plot of the base text. What has also been revealed is that certain biblical tropes can remain dormant for centuries until suddenly attracting the attention of a number of authors. In addition, individual writers sometimes seem to be fixated on a particular biblical story or theme, as with Shakespeare and the story of the Prodigal Son. In the course of this survey it was shown the early Jewish midrash supported the intertextual notion of seeing one biblical trope through the prism of another, previously unrelated one. It was also demonstrated how very early Christian apocrypha provided proleptic continuations of the life of Pilate, while the story of Lot became a self-contained epic. I touched on the Cena Cypriani as an exercise in transposing multiple biblical characters into a comic register, while (at the opposite pole) national chronicles such as that of Geoffrey of Monmouth harnessed the stories of the Old Testament for the purposes of dynastic myth-making. The medieval Pirke de R. Eliezer was intent on connecting the story of Jonah to world-mythological themes, while Genesis B amplified the character of Satan far beyond any warrant in the biblical text. Proximization – the adaptation of original biblical stories to contemporary life – was a strong element in the mystery plays, while the story of Judith was assimilated in Old English and Old High German texts to the form of the heroic epic. There was a similar convergence between the Passion story and the style of the Germanic epic in The Dream of the Rood and in Heliand. If Dante’s Divine Comedy is the supreme example of the convergence of biblical material with classical mythology, Dante himself was the first of a number of radical rewriters of Scripture who actually represented their own authorship as divinely inspired and therefore continuous with the sense of biblical texts being divinely dictated. It was pointed out that Shakespeare made use of the theme of the Prodigal Son or of the Book of Life as leitmotifs in his plays and that the story of Jehu could be revived at a time of political stress. The capture of the grand HB/OT narrative by Victor Hugo as the vehicle for a Romantic poetic epic was observed, as well as the treatment of the story of Cain by Byron as the vehicle for a sort of cosmological pessimism. By contrast George Macdonald created a literary fantasy about Lilith, which enhanced biblical supernaturalism, with Adam and Eve surviving in a parallel universe – a proleptic continuation on a grand scale, as well as a structural revolution.

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Chapter One: A Survey of Literary Rewriting of the Bible

The novels of Charles Dickens were seen as providing a sort of urbane counterpoint to the extremes of the Romantic revolt. They were eventually followed by literary rewritings which were less content to leave the status of biblical tropes ambiguous. Among the rationalizers and suppressors of supernaturalism in biblical rewriting discussed were the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis, the Portuguese novelist Deledda and the English playwright Laurence Housman. Subsequently there was mention of Thomas Mann’s trilogy of novels, Joseph and his Brothers, as a vast amplification of its biblical hypotext, and Borges’s Three Versions of Judas as the prototype of the “lost gospel” genre. A variant on this type was Robert Graves’s exotic novel King Jesus, which, far from demythologizing the story of Jesus (as Rudolf Bultmann famously advocated), remythologized it in favor of a suppressed goddess-cult. Wilfred Owen’s poem, ‘The Parable of the Old Men and the Young,’ was mentioned as a work which contradicted the plot of the biblical hypotext in the service of a moral and spiritual protest. Similarly, Nathan Zach’s poems stemming from the Holocaust consigned some biblical stories to the realms of “fairy tale” in a move far more radical than that of the suppressors of biblical supernaturalism. On a different trajectory, Elie Wiesel’s The Trial enlisted the story of Job in a reversal which put God on trial. More recently a feminist version of the story of Ruth, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, used the trope as a vehicle for exploring issues of child rape and abuse, while a Latin American novel, Evilio Rosero’s Feast of the Innocents, turned to supernaturalism (or at least magic realism) in using the story of the Massacre of the Innocents as a vehicle to explore political brutality under a ruthless dictatorship. In contrast with these extreme rewritings, Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son adopted an innovative approach to its biblical hypotext and indeed reached heterodox conclusions by means of an almost deadpan, conventional adaptation of the material. An empirical approach to the great mass of material which has been discussed here might suggest many new categories beyond those which normally feature in critical surveys of reception history. These would include the selective expansion, the epochal revival, the fantastic excursion, and the deliberate concentration on quirky outcrops in the biblical material. Clearly the unspeakable atrocities of WWI and the Holocaust exerted an enormous influence on the rewriting of biblical tropes and it would be possible to undertake a study based purely on the impact of these events on extreme biblical rewritings. This is one of the underlying themes of the rest of this book. At the same time the environmental crisis is a factor which seems certain to gain much more prominence. Elsewhere I have discussed Ben Elton’s comic novel This Other Eden

Conclusions

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(1993) and Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Year of the Flood (2009) as biblical rewritings which confront this challenge. In these cases, extreme rewriting seems to be the only appropriate response to an extreme situation. The great variety of rewritings discussed in this chapter demonstrates the potential of biblical stories to trigger the inventiveness of literary authors, who may in different instances be exploiting the hallowedness of the hypotext as a piece of sacred writing to add gravitas to their writing or, alternatively, seeking to shock or provoke the reader by overturning the received form or tone of the hypotext. Sometimes these diverse motives seem to be combined. The next chapter will consider the outlines of the literary reception of one specific biblical hypotext, the Book of Job, in order to flesh out the sense of extreme rewriting as a recurring phenomenon across the centuries and to examine further the idea of the meaning of biblical tropes as cumulative.

Chapter Two: The Book of Job Across Time The biblical story of Job has been the subject of a great array of literary reworkings, a testament in one way to the fascination of the base text and in another to its intractability. This chapter will trace the contours of a complete literary reception history of this hypotext.⁷⁵ The discussion can scarcely be definitive but is important as an exercise in demonstrating the sheer range of extreme rewritings encountered in a diachronic survey. One of the outstanding features of this literary reception has been that elements of the narrative structure (usually called the “frame story”), such as the prologue in heaven or the final restoration of Job’s family and property, have prevailed in importance over the text’s poetical and theological discourses, even though formal exegesis has usually concentrated on the latter. At the same time, this account will show that the reworkings divide themselves into two broad categories: those evincing ontological optimism and those evincing ontological pessimism. The scale of literary rewritings of the Book of Job or of the story of Job probably eclipses that of all other biblical properties other than those of the Genesis story of Creation and the gospel accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This literary reception history is complicated by the fact that the apocryphon known as the Testament of Job constitutes something resembling a rival hypotext in the pre-modern period. The Job story also occurs in a disguised and Christianized form in the legend of St Eustace which was widely disseminated in the Middle Ages.⁷⁶ The first part of this survey, covering the period up until the Middle English Metrical Life , leans heavily on Laurence Besserman’s The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages. The Book of Job seems to date, in its present form, from the fourth- century BCE and to be the work of one author, drawing possibly on four separate sources for his basic material. Modern scholars generally divide the book into four components: 1. The literary version of a popular folktale (Chapters 1 and 2, plus the closing section, 42:7– 17) 2. The debate between Job and his friends. 3. The speeches of Elihu. 4. God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind. The first two components have analogues in literature outside the Judaic sphere, with the folktale resembling the Hindu legend of King Haraschranda and the debate with the comforters resembling the work known as the Babylonian Theodicy, dated between 1400 and 1000 BCE. But, from the perspective of reception-history, the important thing is that

 Parts of this material appear in my essays on Job in Literature in the forthcoming collections on Job in Reception History edited by Choon leon-Seow in the De Gruyter HBR series.  See Gerould (1904). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-003

The Testament of Job

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the biblical Book of Job was in its present form from around the late fourth-century BCE, gaining a hold on the human imagination which has continued to the present day.

The Testament of Job The beginnings of the literary appropriation of this biblical story are to be found in the Testament of Job, an anonymous work dating from the early part of the firstcentury BCE, where the material is recast in the form of parting words addressed by Job to the ten children born to him after his restoration, rather along the lines of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. The hero recounts how as a king in the land of Ausitis he dared to destroy a popular idol depicting Satan. Although Job had devoted his life to helping the poor and needy, Satan obtained permission from God to persecute Job, destroying his possessions, his children and his health. Yet still Job remained faithful to God. For seven years he sat on a dunghill, while his wife Sitidos became a water-carrier to support him. However, Sitidos was eventually enticed by Satan into losing heart and she tried to persuade her husband in a lengthy plea to curse God and die. Rebuking her, Job challenged Satan to battle, but he refused, conceding Job to be “the great wrestler.” This episode is followed by the arrival of the four royal friends, who come to lament Job’s state, though the hero himself remains steadfast. When they offer the services of physicians, Job refuses, declaring his trust in God, “the Maker of physicians.” Now Sitidos urges Job to ask his friends to bury the bodies of their children, but Job insists they have been taken up westward into heaven, whereupon his wife dies, comforted by this vision. Inspired by Satan, Elihu then condemns Job; and this is why, while Job forgives the other three friends, Elihu is expelled to the underworld. Restored finally to health and prosperity, Job holds a feast of thanksgiving, resumes his charitable works and marries a second wife, Dinah, by whom he has seven sons and three daughters. The latter receive divine girdles from God, enabling them to sing heavenly hymns. As the daughters glorify God, Job’s soul is carried up to heaven in a chariot and his final admonition to his children is, “Do not forsake the Lord. Be charitable towards the poor; do not disregard the weak. Take not unto yourselves wives from strangers.” The biblical story has been worked over in the interests of Hasidic piety to affirm resurrection and eternal life, but also to cast Job himself in the role of Hasidic hero. He is an idol-smasher and stalwart benefactor of the poor. Significantly his wife (now with a name) is conflated with the biblical figure of Eve, tempted by the Evil One and thus is forced to die before his restoration. The three daughters

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Chapter Two: The Book of Job Across Time

seem to have assumed the characteristics of the Three Graces of classical mythology. Although this apocryphon was suppressed in the synagogues of the first-century CE by R.Gamaliel the Elder and in the Church in 496 by Pope Gelasius, it continued to circulate in the Orient as the story of Ayub and appeared in the early Qu’ranic commentaries, though the Qu’ran itself gave only brief notice of the Job story. It is an extreme rewriting both in terms of the changes made to the hypotext and in terms of the weight which it exerts on the early reception of the Job meme as a whole. It could be assigned to the Genettian category of “Supplement”, a rewriting which seeks to erase the original, or which has the effect of doing so.

Further Early Reworkings Also important in the early reception are the fourth-century Apocalypse of Paul, which seems to be one of the foundations of the non-biblical trope of Job as the worm-ridden, uncomplaining, perfectly patient victim of Satan’s malevolence; and of the view of Job as an other-worldly Christian saint, confident of and rewarded in the afterlife. Peter Comestor follows rabbinic tradition (Gen.R. 57.3) in having Job live in the time of Abraham. Gregory’s Moralia, which underlined Job as the saint of Christ-like endurance, was to influence other commentaries such as the Glossa Ordinaria. The Moralia also painted Behemoth and Leviathan as monstrous emanations of the Devil, while Job as the warrior in the battle against evil was the theme of the Psychomachia of Prudentius. The Middle English Pety Job has Job as the penitent appealing to Christ and also intent on literary immortality. It also places Job in an uncertain position at the Harrowing of Hell. The Middle English Paraphrase is an expansion which both incorporates a range of patristic commentary and manages to reduce the theme to one of gloomy submission. The Middle English Life of Job is very didactic and is of interest chiefly for its incorporation of the minstrels at the dunghill and the comic argument between Job and his wife when the scabs with which he pays the musicians turn to gold. The French mystery play La Pacience de Job includes these latter scenes as well as a number of rustic and family interludes which proximatize the story. There is also much attention to the diabolical hierarchy which plans Job’s testing and a whole new excursion into a conflict with the King of Sabea in this major amplification which draws together elements from the biblical pretext, the Testament tradition and the folk tradition. In a further departure Job is represented in heaven by three new characters, the virtues Patience, Faith and Hope, who in turn accompany the archangel Michael when he is sent, along with Gabriel and Raphael,

Further Early Reworkings

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to restore Job. Satan is beaten back and then receives further chastisement from Lucifer for his failure to subvert Job. The comforters return to praise God and share in the delivery of the news of his restoration. Job’s wife is converted and there is a final scene in which Job and his family underline the religious lessons about the fleeting nature of worldly prosperity, about God sending affliction to purge sin, and about how God afflicts those whom He loves. The happy ending of the pretext and of the Testamentum version finds a curious adumbration in the legend of Job’s scabs turned to gold in a poem in The Black Book of Carmarthen (ca 1250) and the same legend is found, albeit slightly tamed, in the English Metrical Life of Job (ca 1470.) Visited by the Devil, disguised as a beggar, Job gives him his scabs, which God then turns into gold. In the Metrical Life Job pays the musicians who entertain him on his dunghill with his scabs, which then turn to gold. When they show them to his wife, she scolds Job for concealing this wealth. In an oral version collected in Ireland in the mid twentieth-century the story becomes an example of the Devil stirring up marital strife.⁷⁷ What begins as a preview of the final divine intervention on Job’s behalf is diverted into a tale of marital woe. We are reminded that in the Metrical Life, Job’s exemplary patience includes the bearing of his wife’s scolding. In the dialectic between the patient Job and Job the rebel, it should be noted that, although patience emerges as the central currency of this version in the Metrical Life, with Satan attempting to tear Job away from his ‘pacience’ (line 79) and Job clinging tenaciously to his patience (lines 91, 137), despite his wife’s scorn for it (line 95), he does have a lapse at one moment cursing his wife (presumably a contamination from her urging him to ‘curse God and die’ in the biblical pretext) for which God rebukes him, in line 115. Overall, though, the text offers an optimistic sapiential lesson in the rewards of patience. It is possible that the Metrical Life was written to accompany a mumming play. Although there are no surviving English mystery plays about Job, the morality plays The Castle of Perseverance and Mankind include numerous citations of the Vulgate text of Job and mimic the structure of the pretext in their story of the Everyman figure abandoned by his friends and beset by all manner of temptations to defy God. Mankind (ca. 1470) in particular has its main protagonist turn himself into a placard for the Jobian theme of Memento Mori before he is assailed by his three ‘comforters,’ Nought, New Gyse and Nowadays. The character Mischief even parodies Job’s lament (lines 412– 414): ‘Alas, alas! That ever I was wrought…!’ Lawrence Besserman observes that the author presents a monochrome Job, the paragon of patience (lines 281– 292), his main modification being to emphasize

 See Sean Ó Suilleabháin: Miraculous Plenty: 104– 105.

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Chapter Two: The Book of Job Across Time

to the audience that Job was ‘of yowr nature and of yowr fragylte.’⁷⁸ It could be said that dramatization here merely reinforces the stereotype of Job the patient. It is possible that Shakespeare’s King Lear is a sort of protesting rejoinder to this view of Job, a problematization of the biblical model. At very least the shadowy presence of Job is used as a foil in this play.

Just Man Jobe Providing a wider context for the tone of King Lear is the English medieval ballad, Just Man Jobe. It presents the stoical soliloquy of Job the man who has just lost everything – his health, his family and his prosperity: Should I for them my god blaspheme and his good giftes despise? That will I not, but take my lot, giuing his name the praise. They were not mine but for a time I know well it is soe; God gaue them me, why should not he again take them me froe?⁷⁹

There is just a passing reference to Job’s restoration by the narrator in the last stanza. This gloomily submissive work owes its inspiration to the influence of Sackville’s Mirror for Magistrates (1559), the model for numerous contemporary musings on the changing fortunes of mankind. It provides a very clear example of the complete assimilation of a biblical story to a Renaissance humanist idea.

Job’s Novella From around 1578 comes the remarkable fantasy known as Job’s Novella by the Jewish writer, Abraham ben Hananiah Yagel, which begins by establishing Job as a real historical figure before making him appear in the author’s dream as the narrator of a tale in which a beautiful girl becomes dependent on a wealthy old man and only escapes deflowering by him when his wife slips in to replace her at the night-time place of assignation. Though borrowed from a branch of a familiar Italian tale, this version intensifies the girl’s trial through making the master of the  Besserman: 109 – 11.  Rollins (1920): 210 – 212.

Paradise Regained

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house intent upon exacting revenge on her. Yet this emboxed story is recontextualized when Job explains that he himself has become the girl’s guardian and has arranged for her to marry the son of the King of Ethiopia. This version is effectively a gender transposition of the story of Job, transferring the theme of patience to the young girl, before finally making Job the agent of a happy upswing in the narrative, itself reminiscent of the restoration of Job in the hypotext.

Paradise Regained In complete contrast with Shakespeare’s King Lear , Milton in Paradise Regained presents Christ as a more successful Job. Although he closely follows the plot of the biblical Job story, at first in presenting Christ as a second Job, Milton goes on to supply a sequel to the pretext’s Prologue, in which Satan is defeated by Christ, who thereby is seen to outrun Job. The rewritten Job here becomes a sort of Christian typological polemic, the very reverse of the morbidly pessimistic vision offered by King Lear. Paradise Regained (1671) is indeed the culmination of the typological treatment of Job. Milton’s Job is the Job of classical Christian exegesis: the wrestler, the sinless, perfect hero, overcoming all temptation. In fact there is a sort of reverse typology, with Christ modelled on Job, rather than the other way around. The Jobian model is apparent from the outset. Just as in Job 1 Satan opens the action by his arrival at the divine assembly, so in Paradise Regained he appears at another “assembly,” Christ’s baptism. As in the Book of Job, so here God provokes Satan’s bid to tempt the hero and ratifies Satan’s plan made by the latter in his own council in mid-air. Christ’s temptations in the wilderness are conflated with Job’s deprivation of wordly goods and comfort, even food. Similarly, there is a second council in heaven to devise further testing of the hero. Satan’s subtle arguments to Christ take the place of Job’s comforters. Satan’s final tactic is to persuade Christ (who is repeatedly given the Jobian epithets “patient,” “calm,” and “unshaken”) that he is no more than an exemplary man like Job. But he has failed to notice or to admit that Christ has already outrun Job, both in not giving vent to any of Job’s despairing outbursts and in declaring his unique, divine mission to defeat satanic violence and death. The fall and destruction of Satan at the end of this “brief epic,” as Milton called it, gives a narrative answer to the ultimate question of the difference between Christ and Job. The enigma of Satan’s fate in the biblical story of Job is harnessed to lend magnitude to the achievement of the Second Job.

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Shifting Approaches The Enlightenment witnessed a bifurcation between the literary reception of Job in England and Germany, with the pretext assuming the role of a political parable in English writing while in German literature it became a paradigm for the sublimity of biblical poetry at the hands of Johann Cube and then Johann Gottfied Herder. (Sheehan, 160 – 170.) Goethe’s Faust is sometimes distinguished from its precursors by the opening prologue, based on the model of the Book of Job, whereas in fact the borrowing of the Jobian Prologue had its own antecedent history in European literature, particularly in rewritten biblical stories. Nevertheless Goethe’s use of this prologue was held to be a major cause of hostility to his work in English literary circles. By the eighteenth-century, the fashion had turned against the Old Testament in English culture, but the Book of Job still held an appeal as the repository of ancient wisdom. This is reflected in James Thomson’s poem The Seasons (1726), where consolation is drawn from the natural cycle. The biblical story of Job is then hi-jacked in Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst (1733), in which the author daringly uses it to attack nascent capitalism.

Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst (1733) is a parody on Job, whom the Devil tests with riches instead of poverty. This Job however is named ‘Sir Balaam,’ the change in the name of the main protagonist signalling an ‘unfaithful’ hypertext, in Genette’s terminology. Although the pre-text is explicitly referred to (the Devil ‘longed to tempt him like good Job of old’), it is distanced both by Job’s name-change and by the statement that Satan has learnt from his previous encounter with Job. The work is, of course, primarily a satire on the financial world of Pope’s time, on insider trading and the South Sea Bubble. Yet, within the scope of its status as a reworking of the biblical pre-text, it would seem that name-changing is about more than distancing the rewriting from the pretext, since for Pope’s world it also signified a change in status. The upwardly mobile Sir Balaam, one of the nation’s false prophets, improves his status by being dubbed ‘Director,’ though this is just another instance of the Devil seizing his soul in this conflation of a contorted Job story with that of Faust. The juxtaposition of Job and Balaam as Job and anti-Job had a strong antecedent history in commentaries, as Wasserman out-

The Vicar of Wakefield

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lines.⁸⁰ Pope develops the inversion by having Satan use a whirlwind not to destroy Sir Balaam’s material prosperity but to increase it, since the whirlwind kills Balaam’s father, leaving him as heir, and also by having Sir Balaam follow his wife’s evil advice, which is here transmuted from ‘curse God and die’ to ‘live like yourself,’ meaning surrender to material craving. Pope at the same time unveils the Jupiter of the Jupiter-Danaë myth as the Prince of the Air, Satan.

The Vicar of Wakefield Something similar seems to lie behind Oliver Goldsmith’s expansive burlesque on Job in his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766.), which seems ultimately about the assertion of traditional communal values over against the strident new commercialism of the author’s time, though the novel also does obeisance to the theme of the Wheel of Fortune as a substitute for divine providence and also plays on the theme of comforting. Here Job himself is the narrator, the eponymous Vicar of Wakefield, a feckless but generous Anglican clergyman, given to pontificating on virtuous behaviour. The fortunes of his family nosedive when it is discovered that his investments have been rifled by the merchant with whom they were entrusted, who has now fled. Because he had covenanted the income from the living of the fictive village of Wakefield to the poor, he is now compelled to take another parish – a much poorer one – and to become a tenant farmer. As the family’s social aspirations greatly exceed their financial means, they are soon led astray by the Squire Thornhill, who has designs on the two daughters. The ensuing misfortunes suffered by the Vicar’s family include the seduction of the first daughter Olivia; being duped out of the proceeds of the sale of two horses; the family home being burnt to the ground; the imprisonment of the Vicar himself and of his son; and the abduction of the second daughter and apparent death in destitution of the first. However, the comedic structure asserts itself and Fortune’s Wheel turns in the closing chapters. The Vicar recovers most of his lost investments, Olivia turns out to be still alive, Sophia is married to her greatest love, Burchell (in reality the virtuous Sir William Thornhill) and Olivia’s marriage to Squire Thornhill turns out not to be the sham he had planned. Amongst the instabilities of the text are the question of the reliability of the first-person narrator and the fact that he is only ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ for the short first part of the narrative. On the first page the narrator professes ‘the verac-

 Wasserman, 1960, pp. 45 – 50.

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Chapter Two: The Book of Job Across Time

ity of the historian’ in asserting the quality of the family’s gooseberry wine in a play upon the fictional nature of the Job tale.⁸¹ The presence of the pretext is regularly signalled, the first occasion being when it is given by the narrator to his eldest son, as part of his meagre patrimony, for reading material on his journey to seek employment in London: ‘it will be your comfort on the way….’⁸² There is a steady escalation in the misfortunes of the Vicar’s family, starting off with such a trivial ‘mortification’ as the failure of the straps on the wife’s pillion. For those disturbed by the pre-text’s apparently nonchalant supply of a second wife for Job, the Job of the novel, now named as ‘Dr Primrose,’ is a strict proponent of the principle of monogamy, which he interprets as marriage to only one partner for ever. He has written treatises on the subject, condemning ‘deuterogamy.’ By contrast, Dr Primrose’s antagonist, Squire Thornhill, is the reverse of a monogamist. If the biblical Job is concerned with the relationship of righteousness to suffering, the novel seems pre-occupied with the battle between prudence and passion. Whilst the biblical Job awaits vindication or rescue by the deity, Dr Primrose, despite his piety, looks forward to the turn of Fortune’s wheel.⁸³ Yet in casuistry he is an absolutist, believing that even a promise made under extreme duress should be honoured.⁸⁴ Although Primrose does eventually exclaim against his situation (though not against God)⁸⁵, he seems for much of the novel to share the complacency of the biblical Elihu), as when he takes ‘every opportunity…to observe how much kinder nature was to us, than we to each other….’⁸⁶ More concerned with the rectitude of human behaviour than with divine action, his guiding principle is that ‘the kindness of heaven is promised to the penitent.’⁸⁷ Even when facing complete humiliation by the Squire, Primrose looks to his own heart to vindicate its dignity.’⁸⁸ Satan makes a late appearance in the narrative when Primrose, in prison for his debts, preaches to his fellow inmates on not ‘seeking comfort from the one who has already betrayed you.’⁸⁹ Here once again the word ‘comfort’ makes its appearance.

        

Goldsmith: 9 Goldsmith: 16. Goldsmith: 92. Goldsmith: 110. 142. The curses he invokes are against the man he takes to be the murderer of his children Goldsmith: 111. Goldsmith: 114. Goldsmith: 121. Goldsmith: 129.

Voltaire

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The ultimate comfort for the virtuous will come with the eternal ‘bliss’ of heaven.⁹⁰ Yet for the narrator and his family it is the restoration of their earthly fortunes which brings palpable comfort. The comedic ending therefore seems to contradict Primrose’s expatiations on other-worldly consolation, as does his remark to his son towards the end of the text to the effect that, while (according to Seneca) the greatest thing in the world is a good man struggling with adversity, there is a still greater one: ‘the good man that comes to relieve it.’⁹¹ The latter observation seems to subjugate this rewritten-Job story to that of the Good Samaritan, here Mr Burchell. The novel’s final sentence seems to reinforce the this-worldly message, as well as the sense that the whole narrative has been the subjective account of the firstperson narrator: ‘It now only remained that my gratitude in good fortune should exceed my former submission in adversity.’⁹²

Voltaire One of Pope’s readers was Voltaire, who had a long fascination with the Book of Job, though one which was overshadowed by his more general “war against the Old Testament,” as Nancy Senior describes it⁹³, and also by his imperviousness to inscriptions of epiphanic experience. Voltaire was unaware of scholarship which treated the Book of Job as a composite work and therefore he regarded the restorative ending as decisive in understanding the work’s tenor. His frivolous treatment of the text in the Dictionnaire philosophique is of a piece with his rejection of what he regarded as the primitivism of the Old Testament and with his opposition to ecclesial pronouncements on the history of Creation (such as those of Bossuet.) The poem on the Lisbon earthquake is a protest against such underserved suffering. The short stories ‘Candide’, ‘Zadig,’ ‘Memnon’ and ‘Scarmentado’ all attempt to respond to the questions posed by the Book of Job, arriving at no satisfactory conclusion and leaving Voltaire only with his programme of social and political reform. The irony is that readers took Zadig’s ironic happy ending as literally as Voltaire himself took the unity of the biblical Book of Job. The story ‘Micromegas,’ though not directly concerned with Jobian themes, mocks the concerns of earthly human life in relation to the scale of the universe in its tale of a visit by gigantic beings from Sirius and Saturn.    

Goldsmith: 147. Goldsmith: 151. Goldsmith: 199. Senior, 1973: 342.

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The drift of Voltaire’s ‘contes philosophiques,’ particularly the spectacularly successful ‘Candide’ (written in the wake of the Lisbon earthquake) is the dismissal of all theodicies and indeed of all theoretical systems, whether theological or scientific-materialist, in favour of a sort of resignation in the face of the ups and downs of human fortune, coupled with a desire to offer tuition in making the most of life as it occurs. In this Voltairean dispensation the biblical Book of Job might take its place as another narrative like ‘Zadig’, whose ostensibly happy ending is little more than the embroidery on an ironic lesson in endurance. ‘Candide’ is a catalogue of human misery caused both by natural disasters and by man’s inhumanity to man. The Lisbon earthquake itself is alluded to but then placed in the context of still worse natural disasters, while the accounts of human cruelty and bestiality threaten to eclipse all these occurrences in this Leibnizian “best of all possible worlds.” Within the world of Francophone literature, Voltaire’s cerebral approach to the problem of Job’s suffering would later be complemented by the affective response of the Romantic writer Victor Hugo in such works as the epic poem La Légende des siècles and the novel Les Travailleurs de la mer. The hero Gilliatt in the latter work is the semi-autobiographical figure of the author, pitted against the ferocious forces of the ocean. For Hugo Job is, above all, an aesthetic cipher for the imponderable vastness and incomprehensibility of the universe.⁹⁴

Shelley and Peter Bell the Third The burlesque treatment of the story of Job, as encountered in Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst , resumes with Percy B. Shelley. Shelley was drawn to the Book of Job as a literary paradigm and even planned a lyrical drama on the subject at one stage, though the material has not survived.⁹⁵ Jobian language infects the long poem ‘Prometheus Unbound’ (1820), especially in Act 1. But it is the satirical poem ‘Peter Bell the Third’, which Shelley published under the pseudonym Miching Mallecho in 1819, which, as a lampoon of Wordsworth and the Lakeland poets, makes the fullest use of the biblical Book of Job as a hypotext, Here the story is mixed intertextually with that of Faust as Peter Bell the Third succumbs to the temptations of the Devil and goes to live in Hell (London) where his Jobian misfortunes are listed. Eventually Peter Bell writes a poem which curses the Devil ( a riff on “Curse God and die….”), but in this case it is the Devil who dies and Peter Bell takes his place. As a hypertext this satire borrows some of the most memorable

 See Bochet: 109 – 118.  Bryan Shelley: 116.

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tropes of the biblical Book of Job (the Comforters, the iron pen, the voice out of the whirlwind) but remixes them to fit the burlesque story of damnation, which from the outset mocks the idea of supernatural machinery. In the poem the Comforters are the friends who intensify Peter’s distress by insisting that, in Calvinist style, he is ‘predestined to damnation.’ Instead of God speaking to Job from the whirlwind, the Devil arrives in a black storm to convey Peter’s soul to hell. The lines from Job 19:23 are changed into an appeal which the Devil takes as a cue to bribe the critics of Peter’s new book: O that mine enemy had written a book— Cried Job: a fatal curse. If to the Arab as the Briton. Twas galling to be critic-bitten The Devil to Peter wished no worse. Lines 457– 462.

William Blake If Milton’s Paradise Regained represented the tradition taken to extremes, then Blake’s approach to the Job story was a deliberate confrontation with tradition. Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job was published as a volume in 1826, though the first sketches date back over more than forty years earlier. Despite the title, the work is less a series of illustrations than (as Northrop Frye observes) an independent art-form.⁹⁶ Comment is made most overtly by quotation, but also, of course, by the selection of scenes for illustration. Basic to Blake’s conception of Job is his belief in the imagination as the key to human liberation and his idea that all the things of this world, including moral good as much as moral evil, are the domain of Satan. Blake’s Job is not perfect and upright, as in the biblical pre-text, but blind enough to think himself so. In the opening scene he appears prosperous and contented, surrounded by his family at prayer. But the reader can see that much is amiss. The sun is setting behind a gothic cathedral. Musical instruments hang unused. The signs of the Zodiac are in the wrong order. In the second illustration, God (created in Job’s image) wearily addresses a youthful, vigorous Satan, “Hast thou considered my servant Job?” Below Job sits with his family, but he looks away from them and it can be seen that they are already estranged by “the letter that killeth.” In the third scene Satan smites Job’s sons, and in the fourth we see Job’s reaction to the news of this tragedy, brought

 See Northrop Frye (1969): 415 – 418.

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Fig. 1: Job and his Family From Illustrations to ’The Book of Job’, Job and his Family. William Blake. 1825 – 8. TATE.Photo: Tate.

by a messenger. Job has altered his posture to cope with the horrors that have come upon him. But he has not yet been forced into radical self-examination. The fifth illustration indicates the nature of Job’s spiritual sickness. It is headed by the quotation from Job 30:25: “Did I not weep for him who was in trouble? Was not my soul afflicted for the poor?” Satan is seen making his second sortie

William Blake

Fig. 2: Satan Going Forth from the Presence of the Lord, and Job’s Charity From Illustrations to ’The Book of Job’, Satan Going Forth from the Presence of the Lord, and Job’s Charity. William Blake. 1825 – 8. TATE Photo: Tate.

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Fig. 3: Job’s Evil Dreams From Illustrations to ’The Book of Job’, Job’s Evil Dreams. William Blake. 1825 – 8. TATE. Photo: Tate.

from heaven even as Job gives alms to the poor, but with his left hand. It is clear that Job’s charity is of a mechanical, Pharisaic kind. This is the reason for his ordeal.

William Blake

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So the trials continue. Satan smites Job with boils (6) and the comforters arrive to express their moral judgement on Job and to “correct” his theology (7– 10.) But then (11) Job is seen in the grip of a horrific nightmare: he perceives that the God he has created in his own image is actually Satan, who is now about to bind him with the chain of the moral law, while the comforters are revealed in their true light as demons. Job is still far from knowing the true God, but his words written in the lower border show that his faith remains intact: “I know that my redeemer liveth.” In the scene (12), the youthful Elihu presents a new and grander concept of God, but Job is paying scant attention and the three friends close their ears. At last the Lord answers Job out of the whirlwind (13). As Wright observes, “The central and dominant position of God indicates the restoration of the relationship with Job. Job’s wondrous response to the appearance of the Lord occurs in part because he acknowledges that he is in God’s image not contrariwise as before.”⁹⁷ The remaining illustrations represent the new and true vision of reality to which Job is brought by his experience. The creation is depicted (14) with God at the center, flanked by Apollo (the sun) and Diana (the moon), the heavenly sources of light. Angels occupy the upper part of the picture, whilst below God we see Job, his wife and the three friends kneeling in prayer. Job is now humbled and set in a right perspective to the grandeur of creation, just as in the next illustration (15) Behemoth and Leviathan are set clearly within the control of God’s providence. Illustration 16 depicts the fall of Satan, for which Blake finds warrant in the words of Elihu in Job 36:17 (“Thou has fulfilled the judgement of the wicked”), though it seems that the underlying influence is Milton’s very different work. Next comes the Vision of God granted to Job and his wife (17), in which Job gains inner vision. Then Job makes his acceptable sacrifice (18), with his arms in a cruciform position, suggesting his willingness to sacrifice himself even for the friends who have proved to be his enemies. Next (19) Job is seen accepting charity in an attitude of humility. Then in the penultimate scene Job tells his three daughters the story of his life (20), sitting in front of set of panels depicting his very story: Job can now see his own experience objectively. Finally, Blake depicts Job’s restoration (21) in a scene which is the direct counterpart of the first illustration. But important differences emphasise the fact that this is not a return to the beginning. Now, instead of praying piously, Job and his family are making music, using their creative imaginations. Now the rising sun behind Job and the setting moon behind his wife symbolize the recreation of human relationships. Now the sheep and dog at their feet are awake instead of asleep,

 Wright (1972):35.

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Fig. 4: Job and His Family Restored to Prosperity From Illustrations to ’The Book of Job’, Job and his Family Restored to Prosperity. William Blake. 1825 – 8. TATE Photo: Tate.

whilst the lamb and bullock of the lower border illustration have exchanged positions and the altar of sacrifice bears a new inscription, “In burnt offering thou hast

Repetition

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no pleasure.” The gothic cathedral has disappeared along with the external piety of the first scene. Job has discovered the inner light of imaginative truth. Blake’s work constitutes an upheaval in the reception-history of the Job story, both in its refusal of conventionally edifying readings and in its use of a hybrid artform to reframe the extracted text. By transferring the drama from the heavenly courts to the inner reaches of Job’s soul, Blake speaks to an age on the verge of both a breakdown in the sense of God as an objective force in the universe and at the same time increasingly alert to the depths and complexities of the human mind.

Repetition Only seventeen years separate the publication of Blake’s Illustrations from the appearance of Soren Kierkegaard’s equally ground-breaking treatment of the Job story in Repetition (1843) which will be treated here as a piece of literature, even though it is usually included in the corpus of Kierkegaard’s philosophical works. Although Kierkegaard was almost certainly unaware of Blake’s work, he also opts for a psychological reading of Job’s predicament, albeit a very different one. In Repetition Kierkegaard handles his own emotional predicament in relation to his fiancée, Regine Olsen. The work poses as a “psychological experiment” conducted by Constantine Constantius, who has sacrificed his own sense of self-identity in pursuit of a beautiful girl. Attracted by the “happy ending” of the biblical story of Job, he hopes that identification with the torments of Job and his lonely quest for vindication will lead to a similarly happy outcome for his own life. But it takes a “thunderstorm” (in Kierkegaard’s personal world it was the news of Regine’s engagement to another man) for him to realise that repetition for him is not the replaying of Job’s restoration but the restitution of his own essential selfhood: “I am myself again, here I have repetition, I understand everything, and existence to me seems more beautiful than ever. It came as a thunderstorm after all, though I owe it to her magnanimity…The discord in my nature is resolved, I am again unified.” For the young man everything is doubly restored, because he has recovered his selfhood “in such a way that I must doubly feel its significance.” This “spiritual” repetition apparently eclipses the repetition experienced by Job, which was merely a restoration of “earthly goods.” Job has acted as the young man’s mentor through his “trial of probation” but the same young man is now ready to set out on a wider quest for meaning. In that sense, the story of Job has become merely the catalyst for a degree of psychological maturation. Compared with the situations handled by twentieth-century reworkings of the Job hypotext, Kierkegaard’s work may seem subjective and fastidious in the ex-

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treme. Yet it is precisely this sort of contrast between Job as the refiner of moral scrupulousness and Job as the expression of devastating angst driven by the experience of anomie which is central to the story’s outworking in the modern period.

Via Moby Dick to Bleak House Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) treats Ahab and Ishmael at various points as Job-figures, while the White Whale, although a proverbial “Job’s whale” for the obsessive Ahab, is more truly the equivalent of the Leviathan of Job 41 for Ishmael and a sign of the otherness of the cosmos. Although the biblical story of Jonah is the principle hypotext for Moby Dick, Job plays a significant part as a source of what Yvonne Sherwood calls “Backwater” material. By this is meant biblical material which belongs essentially to the Wisdom tradition rather than to the hegemonic world of the dominant biblical texts and which is therefore responsive to recalcitrant, anti-authoritarian readings. As she puts it, “Melville explicitly weaves Jonah and Job together as the warp and weft of his anti-canon….”⁹⁸ The Book of Job is subjected superficially in Moby Dick to use as a conventional part of the armoury of scholarly erudition. The parodic sub-librarian’s references in the Preface-Extracts include one to Leviathan in Job: Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to be hoary. Moby Dick: xxv.

Similarly, the novel closes with a very conventional allusion to Job as it describes the survival of Ishmael as author: And I only am escaped to alone to tell thee. Moby Dick: 487.

Yet, at a deeper level, the novel reflects the protest of Job-Jonah against the plight of human beings at the hands of an inscrutable deity, a deity expanded now to encompass the gods of Egyptian, Greek and Hindu mythology. If further clues were needed of the link, one has only to notice that Bildad, one of Job’s comforters, is the name given to the retired whaleman and sea-captain of Moby Dick, a man famed for his rigid and inflexible exercise of discipline. It seems that the choice

 Sherwood: 193.

Toilers of the Sea

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lies between suppressing the impact of a vision of cosmic wildness and acknowledging it. Published in 1853, Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House returns the focus to the sufferings of Job. The entire narrative about the legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce draws on the sense of the Book of Job as a paradigm of prolonged suffering, with no end in sight. As Esther’s guardian remarks: It is a terrible misfortune, little woman, to be ever drawn within the influences of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. I know none greater.⁹⁹

Janet Larson in her study, Dickens and Broken Scripture, suggests that Bleak House plays with Jobian themes at various levels, from the comic subplot turned gothic horror story featuring the characters Jobling and Guppy, to the grander de profundis theme of the whole novel. It is Esther Summerson who participates in a modified version of Job’s restoration, though this pattern is eclipsed by the part played by the Jobian motifs in the broader Bildungsroman which constitutes her story.¹⁰⁰

Toilers of the Sea The French Romantic poet and novelist Victor Hugo (1802– 1885) similarly played with Jobian themes in several of his works, though in a more impassioned way. The novel The Toilers of the Sea/ Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866) in particular is an amplification of two segments within the tradition, the themes of Job on his dunghill and Job the wrestler. Within the framework of an elaborate maritime melodrama in which the character Mess Lethierry (owner of the ship The Durande) is cheated by the captain whom he engages to sail his ship from St Malo to Guernsey and who deliberately wrecks the craft, the novel contains lengthy passages dealing with what one might call the relationship of the sea to Ultimate Reality. Here the character Gilliat, seated upon the rock, the Great Douvre, out at sea, wrestles with the great aquatic monster or octopus in his effort to rescue the engine from the wrecked passenger ship. These actions recapitulate both the static image of the patient Job and the dynamic image of Job the heroic warrior. Progressively the novel presents the sense of the sea as the domain in which the isolated hero may achieve some sort of mystical equality with the forces of nature. A prize is announced for the salvage of the steamship’s engines, with the owner’s daughter offered as wife to the successful man. Gilliat, friend of Mess Lethierry, hopes to  Bleak House, p. 560 (Penguin edition.)  Larson: 142– 176.

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gain the prize and this seems to spur his valiant efforts, up the point where the girl chooses another. Although some have seen Gilliat’s final immersion in the sea at the novel’s close as an act of suicide which debases the plot (making him the victim of spurned love), it can equally well be read as the reworking of Job’s revelatory experience of transcendence: Probably no other novel deals so consistently with the theme of the Romantic sublime in relation to the Book of Job. The Toilers of the Sea is also remarkable for splitting the character of Job himself between the persona of Mess Lethierry (the rich man deprived of his wealth and left with nothing but suffering) and that of Gilliat, the one who battles against nature and achieves a sort of existential triumph. Jean Montier in an article discusses the closing section of this novel in terms of Gilliat’s submersion in the sea as an aesthetic closure device, the use of the sea in Hugo’s literary diction as a synonym for the deity and Hugo’s use of biblical rhythms in the novel.¹⁰¹ Dostoevsky’s novel of 1880, The Brothers Karamazov, reflects the author’s preoccupation with the Book of Job. Father Zosima’s account of the pivotal influence which a reading in church of the Book of Job in his childhood had on his life is itself a turning point in the novel.¹⁰² Father Zosima can be regarded as the mouthpiece of Dostoevsky himself when he concludes that the message of Job is acceptance; that there is no correlation (as both Job and his comforters assume) between human conduct and either reward or punishment.¹⁰³ Father Zosima was much exercised by the individualism of his era and the failure of men and women to understand that what security there was to be had in life stemmed from human solidarity.¹⁰⁴ So it is appropriate that some of the first literary rewritings of Job in the twentieth-century share this concern. As a treatment of the biblical Job story, The Brothers Karamazov is more allusive than transformative. The hypotext is initially sealed off as a sacred text and locus classicus which informs and influences the characters. Yet it also breaks out of this mode when both Alesha and Zosima himself experience their own separate, life-changing epiphanies within the narrative. In effect Job’s experience of

 Montier (2004).  The Brothers Karamazov , Vol I: 298 – 300.  For letter in which Dostoevsky acknowledged the coincidence of his views with those of Zosima, see Gibson: 197– 198.  See The Brothers Karamzov, Vol I: 313 – 314.

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the divine voice in the whirlwind (Job. 38 – 42) becomes the dynamic matrix for the epiphanies which these two characters undergo.¹⁰⁵

Entering the Twentieth-Century The early twentieth-century sees a shift towards associating Job with issues beyond those associated with individual subjectivity. This is first seen in Leonid Andreyev’s Anathema and then with H.G Wells’ The Undying Fire. Before these works, this survey needs to record two other extreme rewritings. The first one is in Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), where in the story ‘Grace’ the tale of Job is invoked as a source of consolatory space in a world for which the biblical master-narrative itself had lost most of its authority. The second is Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy (1938). Samuel Beckett was said by the dramatist Ionesco to be in himself a Job figure.¹⁰⁶ Beckett referred to texts from the biblical book of Job throughout his writings, but Murphy (1938) is probably the most complete assault on the pretext. Here the central conceit is that Murphy is on a quest to find ‘a job,’ after being pressurized to change his life of indolence and apathy by his girlfriend, Celia. If Joyce’s Kernan lived in a world of debased ontologies, Murphy is born into a world from which all the metaphysical signposts have long since been removed and the Cartesian dualism of body and mind is the main target of mockery. Despite this, biblical allusions (especially to the Joban pre-text) are quite plentiful.

Anathema Leonid Andreyev’s Anathema (1909) could be described as a re-mixing of elements of the Job pretext and that of Faust in which Satan, in the guise of ’Anathema,’ harasses a Jewish shopkeeper named David Leizer, who lives in southern Russia. Anathema himself is a dejected diabolical figure, permitted only to speak to the impassive Guardian of the Gates of Heaven. He provokes David by telling him that he is the heir to a fortune and allowing him to embark on a crusade of relieving the poor. This (as Anathema anticipates) stirs up jealousy and resentment, especially when his resources prove unequal to the scale of human deprivation. At length  For a full discussion of the place of the book of Job in this novel, see Gary Rosenshield: ‘Dostoevskii and the Book of Job: Theodicy and Theophany in “The Brothers Karamazov,” The Slavic and Est European Journal, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Winter 2016): 609 – 632.  Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 283.

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David is stoned to death, which seems a triumph for the adversary, until we learn that his soul has been transported to heaven where he enjoys eternal bliss.

The Undying Fire In the twentieth-century, preoccupation with inwardness in the reception of the Job story was to be shattered by political and social events which completely changed the range of discourse. The first major example of this in terms of literary rewritings of the biblical pre-text was H G Wells’s novel of 1919, The Undying Fire. A neglected work by a (now) largely neglected author, the novel begins with a Prologue in Heaven in which God gives Satan leave to test Job’s endurance to the utmost, though not to kill him (“For my Spirit is in him.”). Thereafter the story proper commences in Sundering on Sea and remains on that naturalistic level. Giving the main protagonist ‘Job’ as a first name fits in with the use of Job as a comic forename and is suggestive of the serio-comical register of the novel. Job Huss, the headmaster of Woldingstanton School,is staying with his wife in an inferior boarding-house at the beginning of the vacation, following a series of disasters at the school. Two boys have died in a measles epidemic as a result of negligence by the school-nurse; a master has been killed in an explosion in the chemistry-laboratory; then, on the last night of term, there has been a major fire in which another two boys have died. Finally, on the morning after the fire comes the news of the suicide of Job Huss’s solicitor, following the collapse of his and his client’s investments. Then, after arrival in Sundering, the headmaster and his wife receive the devastating news that their son has been shot down over Germany. Feeling very ill, Huss consults a local doctor and is referred to a surgeon, who diagnoses cancer. He contemplates suicide, thinking of the insurance money which his death would release for his wife. But something in him prevents this course, even though his wife actually eggs him on. Resisting the thought, “Curse God and die”, which enters his mind, he clings to the hope than an operation will cure him. As in the biblical pretext, a great deal of space is devoted to the arguments between Job and his comforters, in this case the school-governors, who are convinced that the root of the problem is to be found in Job Huss’s progressive educational ideas. But Job will not be deflected from his policies (“Woldingstanton was the altar on which I offered myself to God”) nor from his conviction that teachers are capable of redeeming mankind from death and futility. Elihu Barrack, his doctor, sharing Job’s distrust of the blind forces of Nature, tries to get him to share his own submissive view of life. Job refuses, affirming his belief that the purpose of

Kafka’s The Trial

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true education is “to teach men and women of the Battle of God” as it has been waged through history, a struggle “with a hope of victory but no assurance.” Job Huss is conscious of a spirit within him (“this fire which I call God”) which “was lit, I know not how, but as if from outside….” During the ensuing operation, under anaesthetic, the “patient” has a dream in which God corrects his dismissal of the majestic side of the natural order but vindicates his brave defiance, since life is meant to be a struggle against evil. The operation turns out to be a complete success, and the growth is found to be non-malignant. News comes of the Allies’ victory. Job receives a financial windfall and is simultaneously reinstated as headmaster. Finally, news comes that the son of Mr & Mrs Job Huss is alive after all, in a prison-camp. Years later, in 1945, when he heard of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, H G Wells was to describe his response in the title of a memoir as a Mind at the End of its Tether, but his book The Undying Fire is an optimistic work and a rewriting of the Job story which is both remarkably faithful to the structure of the pre-text and pro-theological in its idiosyncratic way. Other rewriters of the Job story were to face greater difficulties in being pro-theological as the twentieth-century wore on.

Kafka’s The Trial Kafka’s The Trial (1925) has been interpreted by Northrop Frye and Harold Fisch as a modern reworking of the Book of Job.¹⁰⁷ Using the intercalated parable, “Before the Law” as a hermeneutical key, Fisch argues that the novel presents the man from the country awaiting access to the Law as a picture of Job waiting to interview God. However, while in the biblical book, God finally addresses Job out of the whirlwind, such a disclosure is absent from The Trial, in which Joseph K., like the reader, is held in perpetual suspense about the identity of the judge or the nature of the Law by which he is to be judged. This is the condition of contemporary humanity, gripped by a stubbornly pro-theological text which it is unable to penetrate. In an article, Stuart Lasine emphasizes the preponderance of legal terminology in both the hypotext and The Trial, arguing that Kafka’s work places the reader in the position of judge and reveals the protagonist K as someone who is finally

 Northrop Frye in The Great Code (1982) suggested that The Trial “read like a midrash on the Book of Job” (Frye: 195). More extensively Harold Fisch in New Stories for Old (1998) set out the case for reading The Trial in the light of the short story, ‘Before the Law’ (Fisch: 89 – 99).

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convicted of “absolute failure to live as a personally responsible, yet social, human being – in Biblical terms, his failure to do justice (Mic.6:8)”.¹⁰⁸ This would make The Trial the antithesis of the biblical Book of Job. Other commentators argue the studied ambiguity of Kafka’s novel, though agreeing that The Trial as a modernist fiction makes the reader the agent of creative interpretation. As one commentator puts it, “The freedom which the fictional protagonist cannot use is still available to the reader.”¹⁰⁹

Job, the Story of a Simple Man Joseph Roth’s Job, the Story of a Simple Man was originally published in Amsterdam in 1930. Although the author was to die before the Holocaust, the novel seems to anticipate the theology of endurance which we associate with the writings of Martin Buber. The plot’s mainspring is the long-delayed miracle of the healing of the invalid child, Menuchim, born to the Russian Jews, Mendel and Deborah Singer. But before the miracle, the family has to endure many trials, not the least of which is the economic necessity of migration to the United States, a Promised Land whose values are quite alien to the spirituality on which they have been raised. News arrives of the death of one son fighting in the Russian army and the other serving as an officer in the US army. The daughter, Miriam, goes mad. Deborah herself dies. Menuchim’s doggedly persistent psalm-singing seems increasingly futile and he comes to wish, in a phrase which so dreadfully anticipates the Holocaust, that he could “burn God.” Finally, the arrival in New York of a brilliant Jewish musician attracts the attention of Mendel Singer and there is a denouement in which “Alex Kossak” turns out to be none other than Menuchim, the invalid child left behind in Russia. News comes that Jonas may still be alive, serving in the White Guard and there may, after all, be a cure for Miriam. The narrative is punctuated by thoughts about Menuchim and about whether God still performs miracles on earth, all of which occurs in a sort of counterpoint to the rigidly traditional Jewish prayers and observances of Mendel Singer. God himself remains consistently silent until the final turning-point, when he “speaks” through the unveiled miracle and the other improved news for this modern Job. The novel’s hidden God seems to occupy a dimension deeply detached from the

 Stuart Lasine: ‘The Trials of Job and Kafka’s Joseph K, The German Quarterly, Spring 1990: 187– 198 (195).  Ritchie Robertson, Introduction to Franz Kafka: The Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): xxv.

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cultural upheavals experienced by the main protagonists, finally intervening in an asymmetric way in response to Mendel’s forlorn spiritual persistence.

The Calm before the Storm Although today Holocaust studies have a prominent place in the academic curriculum, it is very evident that the literature and theology of the post-war period were extremely slow to absorb the full horror of what had happened. This is the problem presented by the next two rewritings of the Job story, Robert Frost’s A Masque of Reason and Archibald MacLeish’s JB. While the former seems preoccupied with a repudiation of the American Puritan inheritance, the latter has as its agenda the translation of the biblical Job-story into existentialist terms. In their own terms, they are both quite interesting treatments of the theme. But, set against the historical background of the Shoa, they can only appear morally and ontologically deficient.

A Masque of Reason Robert Frost’s play A Masque of Reason (1945) tackles the severe challenge of putting God on the modern stage by means of an off-beat, comic start in which God is discovered in the branches of a tree by Job and his wife: WIFE: It’s God. I’d know him by Blake’s picture anywhere….

The time is “a thousand years” after the events reported in the biblical text and so the characters in this “43rd” Chapter” of the Book of Job enjoy a safe distance from the original events. The tone is one of light banter, with Job’s wife, an ardent feminist, quizzing her Maker over such matters as why he is not Lord of Hostesses as well as of Hosts. Job and God converse like old chums, reminiscing about the past. When Job good-humouredly presses God to explain the reason for his testing, he is told at length that it was “a great demonstration” and that the purpose was “to stultify the Deuteronomist,” by releasing God from moral bondage to the human race. Until Job’s testing it seems that only people had free will and God was obliged to mete out rewards and punishments they understood: Unless I like to suffer loss of worship. I had to prosper good and punish evil. You changed all that. You set me free to reign.

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You are the Emancipator of your God, And as such I promote you to a saint.

But Job is not satisfied, which is unfortunate for the play, since this is the best answer that he gets. For, pressed further by Job, God is led to confess that he was “just showing off to the Devil, as is set forth in Chapters One and Two.” Job actually accepts this explanation, but (in a remarkable anticipation of Carl Jung’s Answer to Job) declares that he does not mind: Twas human of you. I expected more Than I could understand and what I get Is almost less than I can understand….

God goes on to explain that he had been sorely provoked by Satan’s refusal to believe in the existence of disinterestedness amongst human beings. He had used Job because he could count on him to behave selflessly. At this, the discussion ceases. After a weakly contrived reunion of Job and his wife with God and Satan, with Job’s wife producing her “Kodak,” the “43rd Chapter” ends. Although mildly amusing as a burlesque on Job and on the American Puritan inheritance, the Frost work seems to be stupendously unaware of the threat to meaning (in the arena of God and suffering and beyond that) posed by the Holocaust in Europe. As an antidote one should read the essays in Strange Fire, one of which describes a very different Job-play by Elie Wiesel, The Trial of God, in which God sides with Job against his comforters but offers no explanation of the truth of the situation. There is no voice from the whirlwind, only a silence. As Wiesel remarks, “sometimes when no words are possible, silence is an alternative language.” Elsewhere in the same volume Stephen Kepnes finds in the writings of Buber the sense that Job continues to believe in justice in spite of an unjust God, a God who is willing to support Job paradoxically in his protest. Job is the model of persistence, in his hope that justice, God and reality will come together in the future.

In the Days of Job H. Leivick’s poetic drama In the Days of Job (1953) addresses the aftermath of the Holocaust through the prism of the aftermath of the Job story. It combines Job’s purgation with the experience of Abraham and Isaac, to offer the testimony of three righteous persons who had faced down annihilation, only to begin again, in the land, as the writer’s generation would in Israel. In a new departure it is

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Satan who finally pleads to be erased from existence after his efforts to rationalize God’s action fails. Before moving on to the next significant literary rewriting of the Job story, Carl Jung’s Answer to Job (1952) must be mentioned, since it is part of a seismic shift in the general reception-history of the Job biblical pre-text. Here the Job-story is read as the account of a psychological crisis in the godhead, brought about by Job’s challenge. It is a crisis only finally resolved when God is reunited with his estranged consort Sophia (represented by the Virgin Mary) and the product is the Incarnation, “God’s birth to self-consciousness.” But even in Christ there is a manifest lack of self-reflection until that despairing cry from the Cross, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” Here at last the true answer is given to Job, as God experiences what it is to be a mortal man and “drinks to the dregs what he has made his faithful servant Job suffer.” In the era of the Paraclete God then has to suffer at the hands of humanity, since this is the only means of reconciliation between the two.” It is probably superfluous to point out the inadequacy of Answer to Job when aligned with the issues discussed in Strange Fire, but in its time it was a daring attempt to rewrite the Job-story to deal with what its author described as something experienced at close quarters in the psyches of his patients. Perhaps it can even be seen as a necessary stage in the albeit disturbingly slow response of western culture to the Shoah.

JB (1956) Our next work, Archibald MacLeish’s play JB (1956), has the merit of moral seriousness within its own cultural setting, which is the affluent society in the USA. Set on a small stage inside a great circus tent, this is a play within a play, in which two broken-down actors decide to act out the parts of God and Satan, following a production of an actual Job play on the same stage earlier in the evening. J B, as his name suggests, is a wealthy banker, living a contented, God-fearing life with his wife and large family. A series of misfortunes reduces him to sorrow and poverty: two children killed in a car crash; a small daughter murdered by a sex-maniac; an older daughter crushed in the collapse of his own bank; and a son killed in war. J B is faced with the horror of senseless injustice. Throughout the play the two actors, Zuss and Nickles, wearing the masks of God and Satan respectively, intervene to comment on events. When JB continues to assert his trust in divine providence, Nickles mocks the idea that suffering teaches; he retorts that it teaches man to wish he had never lived. But Zuss maintains that J B suffers in order to see God. J B’s wife Sarah is a fully-developed character. Not the shrew of the Middle English poem or of Frost’s work, she is a mother

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outraged at God’s injustice. Reducing J B’s belief in Providence to a belief in luck, she castigates the notion of a God who requires human beings to accept guilt for their own atrocities. But J B persists in thinking that he is guilty (“God is unthinkable if we are innocent”) and so Sarah leaves him in despair at his acquiescence. In JB the comforters appear in the guise of a priest, a communist and a psychiatrist. Each has his own nostrum (all men are guilty; guilt is a sociological accident; guilt is a psych-phenomenal matter) which are of no help to this modern Job, who, as Roston observed, insists on his own guilt while his comforters try to assure him of his personal innocence.¹¹⁰ At length J B cries out to God who answers him in the words of the biblical text. Zuss and Nickles argue over the restoration of J B’s family and property. Nickles refuses to believe that J B would be prepared to take his wife back, let alone expose himself further to the vagaries of life by having more children by her. Yet Zuss insists that it is “in the Book” and sure enough Sarah returns and is accepted. It emerges that she had attempted suicide out of total despair. It is this revelation which brings about the play’s conclusion. Sarah had been prevented from committing suicide by the sight of forsythia growing. Now J B and Sarah find new meaning in life, thrown back on their bare love for each other. The problem of suffering remains, but the couple have discovered how to live, in spite of suffering: Blow on the coals of the heart, The candles in the church are out. The lights have gone out in the sky. Blow on the coals of the heart And we’ll see by and by….

If for some critics at the time, the “flame in the heart” seemed a poor substitute for the vision of God as a consolation, the play enjoyed considerable success in the English-speaking world. Like Answer to Job, it may have tapped into a widespread mood. In the case of J B, it could have perhaps been described as the feeling that the malaise in religious thought could be addressed by some form of existentialism or even that simple poetry and drama had more to offer than abstract thought.

Muriel Spark: The First Phase Muriel Spark’s interest in Job occupied much of her writing career. She was at work on a book on Job in 1953, which never came to fruition. Her novel, The Com-

 Roston: 318.

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forters 1957 became the vehicle for the resolution of her own subsequent psychological breakdown, with its inbuilt equivocation over whether the main protagonist, Caroline, was the narrator or whether the narrator was another person, even possibly God. Spark also wrote an article about Jung’s Answer to Job in this period, in which she challenged Jung’s anthropomorphic approach to God as part of the subconscious. Her view was that the biblical text defied such anthropomorphism, insisting on the mystery of the godhead. She interpreted the happy ending of the pretext as something taken ironically by Job himself in his new wisdom. It was precisely the epilogue which Jung had ignored in his interpretation, thereby missing out on the ‘anagogical humour which transcends irony, and which is infinitely mysterious.’¹¹¹ In The Comforters, the chief borrowings from the pretext are the eponymous comforters and the plot-structure. In the novel the sufferings are those of Caroline. The comforters take the shape of Laurence, the Baron and Georgina Hogg, who are all pre-occupied with their own private obsessions: Laurence with the superficial smuggling plot; the Baron with his ideas about black magic/Satanism; and Georgina with her crude notions of guidance by the Virgin Mary. The lesson of this subversive novel is finally delivered by the plot-structure, which ironically suggests that it is surrender to the apparently pre-determined course of events (represented by the phantom typewriter) which brings about liberation. Caroline has to discover that (as Ruth Whittaker puts it) “her faith does not nullify the fact of evil.” (Whittaker, 92.) The Comforters is ontologically optimistic in the sense that it insists ultimately on the Providential ordering of reality. But at the same time, as a novel radically subversive of literary conventions, it defies the folktale ending of the pretext.

Wislawa Szymborska For Wislawa Szymborska, whose poem Synopsis was published in 1962, artistry was the problem. The synopsis in question is one made of the biblical story of Job Here Job suffers (“It is great poetry”) and God arranges a demonstration of his cosmic power (“It is great poetry”), whereupon Job adjusts to the situation by prostrating himself before the Lord and has his health and prosperity restored: And Job goes along with it. Job agrees. Job does not want to ruin a masterpiece.

 Muriel Spark, CEN, 15th April 1955.

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It is precisely the fictiveness of Job which has haunted the story’s standing in biblical reception-history as a whole and in this poem Job himself at last faces the fictionality of his own story.¹¹² .Homero Alidjis’s poem “Images from the Book of Job” (1975) approaches condensation in another way, presenting the unnamed Job here as the victim of powerful human oppressors and one whose only solution is to resort to drink.¹¹³

I.B Singer Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story Job, first published in Yiddish in 1970, is the first-person account of an Eastern European Jew who designates himself ’Job’ in the light of his long experience of adversity as a former Trotskyist, living through the traumas of the régimes of Lenin and then Stalin as a political prisoner. As a supposed contributor to a New York Yiddish newspaper, he proposes to start a movement enjoining mass suicide as the solution to the problems of humanity. When it is pointed out that suicide clubs in America have always been for the rich rather the poor, he toys with the idea that he should become rich “like Job.”

God’s Favorite In Neil Simon’s Broadway play God’s Favorite (1975), the Job-figure is Joe Benjamin. In this farcical version of the pretext, God becomes a ruthless chief executive and the relationships all relate to life in modern, corporate America. Redemption comes through the healing of the jealousy of Joe’s son, David, the lesson in patience which is received by the story’s onlookers, and by the way in which Joe’s wife assumes leadership of the family during the crisis.

The Trial of God Already mentioned in Chapter 1, Elie Wiesel’s play The Trial of God (1979) is a Purimspiel set in 1649 and held in response to a pogrom which has occurred in the fictive town of Shamgorod. It refers in the first place to massacres of Jews which were occurring in this period in parts of Eastern Europe and then by exten-

 Szymborska (1999): 60.  Alidjis (2001): 82– 83.

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sion to the Nazi Holocaust. God is challenged in a trial instigated by the innkeeper, Berish, who is a survivor of the pogrom, as Wiesel was of Auschwitz. Despite the sometimes -alluring arguments of God’s attorney, Sam, in favour of a consolatory form of theism, it is Berish’s grim determination to cling to God while yet holding him to account which wins the day.

Muriel Spark and The Only Problem By the time Muriel Spark wrote her novel The Only Problem (1984), the surfaceworld at least had moved on. Now terrorism was a feature of the European mainland, while at the same time sophisticated Europeans lived both with a sense of ironic detachment from the stories of the Bible and with a sort of ethereal faith in art. Spark brought these things together in her novel about the rich dilettante Harvey Gotham, who is conducting research into the meaning of the painting of Job And His Wife by Georges de La Tour, a painting which is itself at an aesthetic distance from its subject-matter. Harvey Gotham gradually becomes Job; definitively so when, after a terrorist incident in the local town, he discovers that his wife Effie is not only the person in the police morgue but has been a member of the terrorist-group. The novelist herself was much exercised by the question of the “happy ending” to the biblical pretext and this is transmitted in the novel by the ambiguity of the ending. There the millionaire is married now to Effie’s difficult sister, Ruth, and there is no mention of restoration for the anonymous widow of the unfortunate policeman shot in the terrorist raid. The Only Problem treats the biblical story both as an aesthetic object (in the form of the de la Tour painting) and as a dynamic destination. Rather as in The Comforters the story allows itself to be commodified yet nevertheless operates as a transcendent force.

Learning About God In Norman Kotker’s novel Learning About God (1988) God is revealed as a completely amoral being. He has done nothing to help the character Chaim Fogel, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, who has become a successful professor, only to die of a brain tumour. In a reworking of Job’s questioning of God, Fogel’s son questions Providence, only to have God answer, “Do you think that only Fogel is made in my image? Isn’t Hitler made in my image too?”

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More Recent Rewritings Meanwhile in Ireland, in the plays of Tom Murphy, the biblical pretext of Job became the trope of unrelieved gloom, as in (to take one example) Famine (1968), John Connor ends up calling to his family and friends, even though they have nearly all died or emigrated, in a reversal of Job’s restoration. This Job is patient beyond all sense. Waiting for an improvement which never comes, he ends by killing his own starving wife and son to put them out of their misery.¹¹⁴ Here stubbornness has replaced patience. The House (2000) continues this theme. If the English ballad ’Just Man Jobe’ emblematized the view of Job as a trope for gloomy resignation, the work of the Israeli poet Natan Zach goes much further, exposing the reader to the raw indeterminacy of the pretext and, as the poet might urge, of real life. Most recently Marjorie Kemper’s short story ’God’s goodness’ (2002) has treated the Book of Job as the material read by the carer Ling to Mike, a teenager dying of cancer. Set in contrast to rest of the Bible, “the Psalms and the Gospels,” which here represent conventional religion, the text of Job seems to be the necessary medium through which the two express to each other the truth of the situation. The Book of Job offers them a common language, just as it has continued to offer writers a platform for handling the treatment of extreme experiences, individual and communal, throughout its reception. Our survey has shown the rich variety of rewritings of the Job story across two thousand years or more. At times the most powerful reworkings have relied on a combination of large-scale elliptical expansion and proximization (from the medieval French play to Muriel Spark’s The Only Problem). At other times the pithiest of condensations have prevailed (from the ballad Just Man Jobe to the poetry of Nathan Zach). Even more laconic are the approaches of Wislawa Szymborska and Homero Alidjis. The register has run from the extreme pessimism of Shakespeare’s King Lear to the knockabout humour of Pope’s burlesque, The Epistle to Bathhurst. Or, alternatively, from the cheerful gender transposition of the Job Novella to the agonized soul-searching of Elie Wiesel’s The Trial of God. The ontology has run from the high theology of Milton’s Paradise Regained to the tentative existentialist musings of MacLeish’s J.B. or from the philosophical seriousness of Kierkegaard’s Repetition to the jaunty pragmatism of God’s Favorite. At the same time the diegetic content has covered settings as diverse as the English public school of The Undying Fire and the mind of a survivor of the death-camps.  Near the end the character Dan, whose own life has died of starvation, concludes: ‘As Jesus was noble and denied, he has long since been repaying the doors closed to him in Bethlehem!’ (88 S-89.) This passage may echo the strong Irish folkloric interest in the question of the denial of hospitality to the infant Christ and the Virgin Mary.

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Finally, in the hybrid art-form of William Blake’s illustrations, Job’s experience is represented as a psychomachia (or conflict of the soul), the scene selection interlinked with the selection of key passages from the KJV, in a compression of the biblical work’s own verses: a rewriting which does not change the words of the hypotext, but instead adds visual imagery. It might be seen as a variant of Genette’s category, the “minimal pastiche”, the hypertext which keeps the words of the hypotext and yet alters the way it is read by ascribing it to a different author. In this case the new author might be understood to be Blake himself, since it is to that artist’s own whole corpus of paintings, engravings and poetry that the work relates. Appearing just a year before Blake’s death, it could be considered as in some way a summation of his creative output, even though it is not strictly a literary retelling.

Chapter Three: Uriah Transposed and Amplified Hypotext: 2 Sam.11. The discrete story of Uriah in 2 Sam. 11 is clearly a segment of the passage known to tradition as “the David and Bathsheba story”, with its long cultural receptionhistory, including very early on the mention in the genealogy of Jesus in Matt.1:6: “David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife.” Separating out the specific narrative elements concerning Uriah is our interest in this chapter, firstly because the broader tale has already received considerable attention and secondly because the specific fate of Uriah has been the preoccupation of several modern writers, as well as a topic with its own, esoteric niche in reception history. Therefore we shall be examining two principal paradigms: the extraction of a minor character for development and the survival of Uriah beyond the framework provided by the hypotext. If further justification were sought for a focus on this particular biblical character, it is interesting that Jonathan Magonet in his survey Bible Lives (1992) selects Uriah the Hittite as one of thirty HB personae considered of significance from a dramatic point of view. He suggests that the unanswered questions are what Uriah knew about King David’s liaison with his wife and whether his refusal to go home in 2 Sam.11:11 was “turning the screw on the man he knew had betrayed him” (Magonet: 93). The precise term used by Jeremy M. Rosen in an article to describe the phenomenon of concentrating on marginal characters is “minor character elaboration” (Rosen:140) and in the examples he discusses (such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea), the shift is explained not so much by curiosity or inventiveness about such personae on the part of an author downstream of the hypotext as by various forms ideological critique of the hypotext or more broadly the rejection of the oppressive effects of authorial control. “Characterological emancipation” therefore is a radical strategy, the implications of which go far beyond the challenge to any particular hypotext. In the case of Uriah, the seeds are there in the foreign status of Uriah as a Hittite, in the soldier’s inferior position in the military hierarchy, and in the sense of Nathan’s parable as a key to the episode. For Rosen minor character elaboration is a genre. Later on, in Chapter 8, we shall consider a further development of the genre, that of the supernumerary minor character, in the case of the figure of Biff in Charles Moore’s novel, Lamb. Biff is presented fictively as the childhood friend of Jesus. Later in this chapter we shall also note the effects of the excision or suppression of a main biblical character, in this case King David. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-004

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Before examining the medieval and pre-modern literary treatments of the Uriah story, it seems worth recording that Uriah is not uniformly treated as a victim in the early tradition. Emil G. Hirsch and Oscher Schulim in the Jewish Encyclopedia draw attention to rabbinic commentaries in which Uriah is blamed for his failure to obey the royal command to go home (Shab. 56a; Tos. To Kid 43a). A further extenuation of King David’s behaviour is provided by the tradition that “In those days it was customary for warriors to give their wives bills of divorce, which were to have validity only if the soldier husbands did not return at the end of the campaign. Uriah having fallen in battle, Bathsheba was a regular divorced woman” (Ginzberg, Vol. IV: 103). However, some traditions nevertheless treated David as the direct slayer of Uriah, employing “the sword of the children of Ammon” as though it were his sword and even Nathan would have been put to the sword if he had dared to talk about the king’s crime (Ginzberg, Vol.VI: 256, 265). The Christian reception of the hypotext begins with the flat, matter-of-fact allusion in Matt 1:6, mentioned above, ambiguous though it may seem to a modern reader. There is no ambiguity in the handling of the story by Isidore of Seville who goes so far as to characterize Uriah as the Devil in his allegorical treatment of the tale of David and Bathsheba. (Kustevsky: 19). The allegorical schema which relied on the axiom that “David everywhere signifies Christ” (Lubac, quoted by Longsworth:149, n.28) placed Uriah in the position of the devil who clung to the Church in an illegal marriage from which Christ came to rescue her. Against the background of this typologically forced depiction of the episode, the Cornish Ordinalia comes as a complete change. Uriah, far from being is a villain, is the upright, valiant knight whom King David betrays in his lusting after Bathsheba. Bathsheba herself is portrayed as a duplicitous snake, devising the arrangements for Uriah to be sent to his death, while feigning the part of the loving wife. It is a remarkable piece of dramatization, following on the heels of the contrasting scene in which David cures a blind man, a lame man and a deaf man, using the three rods of virtue which have come down to him from Moses. Suddenly David’s virtue is thrown to the wind when he espies Bathsheba washing a garment in the nearby stream and she in turn proves a very willing recipient of his amorous attentions. Alan M Kent’s pithy modern translation captures the earthiness of the original: BATHSHEBA: My dearly beloved Lord, You are king over all of the earth. This would be our reward. I know of your wishes and your worth.

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I’d be with you more, no fuss But I fear that we will be found out. If Uriah know of us, he would kill me without any doubt. KING DAVID: Bathsheba, sweet flower, soft breath. World’s joy. I’ll do it for your sake. Uriah shall be put to death. Loyalty to you, I won’t forsake….. BATHSHEBA: I won’t refuse all your pleas, but Lord, grant everything please that I have asked of you. If Uriah hears of our game he will certainly put me to shame. Kill him first in the queue.

Uriah is the innocent victim of King David’s plan and a courageous knight to boot. When the king explains that he himself is too sick to join the battle, Uriah declared himself ready. URIAH: Sir, Lord, I’ll battle them so. I’m daggin to hit this foe with all my strength and power. And as I am your trusty knight, I’ll not return from the fight until I make the foe cower. Ordinalia trans. A. M. Kent: 83 – 84.

In the event not only is Uriah killed, but also King’s David’s butler, a snobbish figure added by the dramatist, another example of a supernumerary character. Renaissance drama tended to offer a more spacious approach to biblical narratives. In the case of the treatment of the character of Uriah in the story of David and Bathsheba, this is exemplified by Antoine de Montchrestien’s five-act neo-Senecan tragedy, David ou l’adultère (1601), where Uriah as the foil to David’s sinfulness is given much attention and indeed dominates Act II with his suspicions about what is happening (Ewbank: 16 – 17). George Peele’s play The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (1599) is the outstanding biblical play of Tudor England. As Ruth H. Blackburn demonstrates, Peele makes substantial changes to the hypotext, making the siege of Rabbah last around nine years, the whole length of the action, and turning Uriah into a courtly (though

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still courageous) figure.¹¹⁵ His death is recounted by the chorus and Bathsheba is seen mourning him, regretting her infidelity. David’s sin seems to be much more than lust, though his lust is clearly condemned. His most heinous act is the stealing his loyal follower’s “one ewe lamb” in the terms of Nathan’s subsequent parable. The play underscores the contrast between Uriah’s noble dedication to the military task in hand and loyalty to his fellow soldiers and David’s pursuit of luxury. Dickens’s character Uriah Heep in the novel David Copperfield is the locus classicus for the negative portrayal of Uriah. Often seen by critics as a foil for the character of David Copperfield himself, various attempts have been made to sketch the narrative details which make Heep the antithesis of Copperfield. Uriah Heep is introduced in the novel as a law clerk in the employ of Mr Wickstead. David Copperfield meets him when he arrives as a lodger at the home of Wickstead and his daughter. This Uriah is presented as a sinister figure, who manages to inveigle his way into being made a partner in Wickstead’s law firm through blackmail, exploiting his employer’s alcoholism. When he goes on to defraud the firm, he finds himself confronted by the trio of the Mr Micawber, David Copperfield and Tommy Traddles. Uriah Heep is made to resign, on the basis that he returns the stolen funds. Moving to a position elsewhere, Uriah apparently continues his evil machinations and, when David Copperfield visits him in prison, he has received a criminal conviction and is awaiting transportation. Although he feigns repentance, the exchange with Copperfield reveals that he has not changed. Uriah Heep as a literary figure is remembered not only for his criminality but for his creepy, unctuous manner. This late Dickens novel is replete with biblical allusions, many of them the common stock of Christian discourse in the Victorian period. At the point when David Copperfield in a fit of rage strikes Uriah Heep across the face we are reminded of the dominical injunction about offering the other cheek to an enemy. This reference is intensified in Robert Graves’ rewriting of the novel, where Heep invokes the actual biblical text (DC: 620/ TRDC: 326) and actually offers his other cheek: “Copperfield, you have always gone against me. Ever since I knew you, you’ve gone against me. But I won’t quarrel with you. There have to be two parties to a quarrel. I won’t be one. I’ll turn the other cheek as I’m commanded to do. Here it is. Now smite it.” The Real David Copperfield: 326. Adopting the reading strategy of treating the first-person author (David Copperfield himself ) as an unreliable witness would allow Uriah Heep to be seen in a different light, though it would run counter to the overwhelming weight of previous reception.

 Blackburn: 171– 182.

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One of the main themes of David Copperfield is the lesson about false humility, with a long disquisition on the background to this perversion of humility in the poverty of Uriah Heep and his forebears, itself part of the contrast drawn between the differing responses of Coppefield and Heep to their origins in poverty. See David Copperfield: 574– 5. The case for Uriah Heep to be read as a double for David Copperfield is neatly summarized by Alexander Welch (Welch: 132– 133). Uriah sleeps in David’s old room at the home of the Wickfields, which (after Uriah is eliminated), they still think of as David’s room. The two characters are rivals for the same woman, Agnes. Uriah’s practical malevolence is directed against the Wickfields but is also experienced as a personal affront by David, who in fact gains from Uriah’s machinations. While the character of Mr Riah in the late novel Our Mutual Friend has been cited as the author’s balancing of the negative portrayal of the Jewish character Fagin in Great Expectations, (in response to protests), it is possible equally to see Riah as the foil for and antithesis of his dastardly employer, Fledgeby; or indeed he could be seen equally as a corrective to Uriah Heep in the earlier novel, with his employer urging him not be “so devilish meek.”¹¹⁶ Although a minor character by comparison with Uriah Heep, Riah is a prominently virtuous figure, described in the list of characters at the novel’s opening as “a venerable Jew of noble and generous nature.”¹¹⁷ He even attracts the sobriquet of “Good Samaritan” for his dealings with Miss Jenny Wren, which (as Janet Larson remarks) is a curiously complex attribution, even allowing for Dickens’ penchant for biblical cliché: “If Dickens was redressing his earlier error of exploiting a Jewish stereotype in Oliver Twist, turning Fagin the bad Samaritan into Riah the perfectly Good one makes no literary advance (Larson: 291). Claude McKay’s radical reworking of the plot in his short story in the collection Gingertown (1932) is explored further in Chapter Six. In this version Uriah actually shoots dead his royal rival (here the “Prince of Porto Rico”) as punishment for the liaison which the latter arranges with his wife. Just as David Copperfield is generally seen as the most autobiographical of Dickens’s novel, it seems worth noting that Claude McKay was heavily influenced at this stage of his writing by his brother, Uriah Theodore McKay, and so there is at least a playful allusion here to the writer’s own family background and identity.¹¹⁸  Dickens: Our Mutual Friend: 572.  Dickens: Our Mutual Friend: xxv.  For the intellectual influence of Uriah Theodore McKay on his brother, see Jimmy Carnegie, ‘Claude Mc Kay’s Big Brother, U. Theo McKay (1872– 1949), Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 38, No.1 (March 1992): 5 – 9.

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Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Story of Uriah’ (ca. 1893) appropriates the biblical meme to fashion the tale of a British soldier in colonial India, sent without explanation from the pleasant conditions of the hill country to oppressive duties in Quetta, where he dies. Although this diegetic snapshot of military life in India does not directly inscribe a David-figure, the poem’s coda makes the point very clearly about the consequences for the commander responsible for sending the victim to his death. The poem is prefaced by a direct quotation from I Sam. 12.1: ‘Now there were two men in one city; The one rich, and the other poor.’ Jack Barrett went to Quetta Because they told him to. He left his wife at Simla On three-fourths his monthly screw. Jack Barrett died at Quetta. He didn’t understand the reasons of his transfer From the pleasant mountain-land. The season was September, And it killed him out of hand. Jacket Barrett went to Quetta And there gave up the ghost, Attempting two men’s duty In that very healthy post; And Mrs Barrett mourned for him Five lively months at most. Jack Barrett’s bones at Quetta Enjoy profound repose; But I shouldn’t be astonished If now his spirit knows The reason of his transfer From the Himalayan snows. And when the Last Great Bugle Call Adown the Hurnai throbs And the last grim joke is entered In the big black Book of Jobs. And Quetta graveyards give again Their victims to the air, I shouldn’t like to be the man Who sent Jack Barrett there. (Kipling: 10 – 11).

The poem has all the Kipling hallmarks: irony (“that very healthy post”); sharp recall of the world of the military in colonial India; and the sting in the tale. This is

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apart from the triple biblical allusions: obviously to the David and Bathsheba story, but also to popular reception of the Book of Job and to the vision of the general resurrection in Rev.20. Jack Barrett is the unwitting victim of the unseen “David” figure who has posted him without explanation to Quetta. Yet that is not the end of the story. For it is likely that his spirit lives on and is now aware of the way he was manipulated. More than this, the Last Judgment awaits the man who wronged him. In formal terms, Kipling’s poem is the antithesis of those rewritings which introduce a supernumerary minor character, such as Biff, the fictive childhood friend of Jesus in Christopher Moore’s Lamb or indeed the King David’s butler in the Ordinalia’s version of the Uriah story. Here we have an absent main character (or absent culprit), who presumably will only be revealed at the Last Judgment as far as this poem is concerned. Kipling was an important influence on Bertolt Brecht, at least in the early stages of his writing career and it is interesting to speculate on whether this poem fed into Brecht’s abandoned play David (1919 – 1921), considered below. It is certainly the case that his play A Man’s A Man (written between 1924 and 1926) carried parodic references to Kipling’s tales about British Colonial India and included four soldiers who indulge in high jinks, one of them named Uriah Shelley.¹¹⁹ We now turn to a very different treatment of the theme. In T.F. Powys’s short story, Uriah on the Hill (1930) the new Anglican incumbent of Child Madder, the Reverend John David Dibben, arrives and begins to acquaint himself with his parishioners. They include Uriah Topp, a lonely man, who lives on the Hill, a place always shrouded in darkness and associated immediately in the Rector’s mind with the Devil. Uriah grows crops on the hill and lives with his shabby wife, “a woman who was kind to cats” (7). At work in the fields, Uriah’s only companions are his horses. Also there is Betty Brown, an innocent young girl who begins to frequent the hill as an escape from her mother’s influence, just as Uriah is keen to escape his wife’s oppressive behaviour. Betty takes to growing a small garden on the hill and she and Uriah gradually get to know each other. Uriah helps her with her plants and the little house she has built. Soon, however, Betty ceases to turn up and Uriah’s wife is able to taunt him with the news that the girl has been going to the Rectory to learn Scripture. Thee baint the only….stony field (18).

 See Helen M . Whall: ‘The Case is Altered: Brecht’s use of Shakespeare,’ University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Winter 1981/82): 127– 148 (134).

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In fact, Mr Dibben has been excited by the accidental sighting of Betty running naked in a meadow (14, 15) and has been moved to offer her the post of infant schoolteacher. Now under the wing of the Rectory, Betty becomes the Rector’s pupil and will be trained as a teacher, qualifying her for the post of assistant teacher in the school. Betty for her part “had left the loneliness of the field, and worshipped other gods” (19). In an oblique reference to the Temptations in the Wilderness, the narrator reports: That which had led her to the field – led her there no more. She had come down from the mount. Mr Dibben thought he had saved her from the devil. (19).

Betty accompanies the parson on a visit to the hill with Mr Dibben to discover the varieties of flowers there. Uriah asks Mr Dibben “What maid be thee out wi’?” but this is dismissed as mere uncouthness by the clergyman. Betty turns her back on Uriah Topp and he resumes his labours. In this brief portrait of rural social life in England in the 1930s, the young woman at the centre of the story is seduced not sexually but educationally. Uriah’s life is briefly lit up by a young girl who is the opposite of his cantankerous wife until, all too soon, he is returned to his solitary life of work on the hill. He is cast in the role of the Devil by Dibben, but this vilification seems only to be the expression of the social gulf between the middle-class world of the Rectory and the world of the farm labourer. One could say that he is at worst a prospective adulterer. This Uriah dies psychologically rather than physically and the designs of the girl’s actual “seducer” (Mr Dibben) are sublimated into his desire to replace the existing assistant teacher at the school with someone more congenial. Uriah’s wife here remains Uriah’s wife, though only to his detriment. The David of the story is a person of sublimated desires and the outcome for the story’s “Bathsheba” is minor social preferment. Uriah Topp is cheated not of his spouse but instead of a glimmer hope in a lonely life. Quite unlike Uriah Topp is the Uriah of the surviving fragments of Bertolt Brecht’s play about King David, who is no longer a victim but a man embroiled somehow in Absalom’s plot against the monarch. This work has been dated to the years 1919 – 1921. Though hard to decipher in its present form of notes left by the author, the play is clearly a wayside turning point in the twentieth-century reception of the hypotext. The play’s juxtaposition of Uriah, Absalom and Bathsheba in successive scenes in clearly innovative, since these personae are never together in the biblical hypotext. It is significant that Uriah also meets with Absalom in our next example, though in this case not in conspiracy with him.

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The most integrated and self-contained of literary reworkings of the story of Uriah is probably Mosche Shamir’s novel, The Hittite Must Die/ Kivsat ha-rash (1964). Cast as the memoirs of Uriah himself, the work recounts episodes from the life of the military commander, centred inevitably on his relationships with King David and with Bathsheba. The conceit is that, faced with the ultimate crisis in his life, Uriah decides to record his life story, culminating in notes written (on scrolls) on the eve of his death. His friend and fellow Hittite, Ahimelech, has received the scrolls from Joab as part of the meagre surviving effects of the warrior and, having nothing else to do in his old age, begins the laborious task of deciphering them. Being written in an archaic language and hastily scribbled, they would have been opaque to others. What emerges from the narrative is the close dependence of Uriah on the royal power of David. Even his name in its current form was coined by David, who changed it from “Ureah”, which (Uriah explains) meant that Eah the ruler of wisdom and action protected him (Shamir: 64). It is interesting that this initial encounter occurred while David himself was sheltering under the pseudonym of “Elhanan”. These name-changes in themselves could be regarded as signifying a formal upheaval in the reception of the hypotext, remembering Genette’s claim that character name-changes denote what he terms an “unfaithful continuation”. The signal is that the identities of both David and Uriah are in question. Uriah has no resources of his own beyond his military pay and is also totally obsessed with and psychologically dependent on the woman he falls in love with, Bathsheba, who for her part seems to have fallen for King David at an early stage and thereafter to have used Uriah as a means of drawing close to the king. Much of the account is taken up with Uriah’s initial total confidence in David’s prowess and probity as a leader as the prelude to the trauma of the news about his wife’s infidelity. The bad news is imparted by Absalom, who hopes that it will spur Uriah to murder David and so pave his own way to the throne. The probity of David is already challenged, of course by the hypotext in itself. The rewriting bolsters this by presenting further examples of the king’s duplicity. Driven by despair and by his own status as a racial outsider, Uriah comes to the gloomy conclusion that his own death in battle is the lesser of the various evils facing him. It will at least protect his beloved Bathsheba, who could only be rejected by the king if Uriah simply disappeared into obscurity, since (according to Jewish law) she could only remarry as a widow. Moreover, if Uriah had decided to confront the pair in Jerusalem he would almost certainly have been killed. While much of Uriah’s thinking revolves around matters of trust and betrayal, the editor of his memoirs (Ahimelech) has the leisure to philosophize on good and evil and in particular on how God’s plans may be forwarded, willy-nilly, by human crimes.

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Initially Uriah has a deep mistrust of Absalom. The novel’s turning point comes when he realizes that, whatever Absalom’s motivation in informing him of the liaison between David and Bathsheba, the information is accurate. Absalom spoke the truth. I knew, and I wept my tears into my blood like poison, for there was no longer anything to hope for. The two people I loved had become on in their betrayal of me. (Shamir: 191.)

The betrayal sets the seal on the novel’s constant reiteration of the precariousness of Uriah’s position as an ethnic outsider. In the context of the portrait of David and of his progeny which emerges, it also supplies the backdrop for ruminations on the flawed character of all human beings and of their politics. Ahimelech in his editorializing suggests that the story of Uriah demonstrates that God’s will is carried out equally by all conditions of men and women: An idea that Uriah almost summoned upcomes into my mind now: not only does good serve the will of God, but evil also; not only do the righteous carry out the divine purpose, but the unrighteous as well…The sinner does not sin against God, but against his human brothers. (Shamir: 218 – 219).

Uriah dies in Shamir’s novel, but he also leaves behind his testimony. Like any such act of writing, his memoir carries the author’s voice beyond his death and is therefore a form of survival. It contradicts the canonical version of Uriah as unwitting victim and supplies instead the picture of man grappling with overwhelmingly adverse circumstances, and yet determined to meet a dignified and meaningful end. Next ,we find Uriah returned to a minor role in the narrative. In Joseph Heller’s novel God Knows (1984) King David offers his memoirs, very much in the chatty style of a modern western politician, though there is also the sense of a Jew dealing with a hostile world. The Uriah episode occurs very early in the novel, with David as author apparently having difficulty remembering the details: I don’t know whose idea it was to recall her husband, Uriah the Hittite, from the siege of Rabbah-Ammon to legitimize the fruits of my adulterous intercourse with his wife as the appropriate issue of his own. But I know it didn’t work. (10).

Equally the king distances himself from the decision to place Uriah in harm’s way on the battlefield: Again he slept on my floor instead. Did the bastard know something? I felt myself going mad. I don’t know whose idea it was to send him back into battle to be killed. Let’s call that one hers. (10).

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A little further on, David tries to mitigate his behaviour further by suggesting that Nathan (and even perhaps Uriah) knew of his affair with Bathsheba at the time. (46). The final rewriting to be considered here is H.G. Parry’s The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep (2019), a postmodern fantasy in which the eponymous figure of Dickens’s character is revived to join a selection of other fictional characters from western literature who have all mysteriously congregated in Wellington, New Zealand. Significant for our survey is the evidence provided here that even playful contributions to the literary reception (like Parry) may still regurgitate or rely on the negative account of the persona of Uriah which derives from David Copperfield. Parry gives notice of the scapegoat treatment of Uriah in David Copperfield (Uriah as the shadow side of David Copperfield himself and David Copperfield as narrator) but still treats Uriah as a sinister character, who at the end may or may not exit his literary role. This fantasy-novel underlines Dickens’s handling of Uriah as a nodal point in the reception history, while treating the location in Wellington as a sort of touristic venue: proximatizing here takes the form of a sort of exoticizing. The location adds topographical diegetic interest for the reader. While spatial transposition is a common feature of literary rewritings, Parry’s novel posits the idea that characters from a novel can float free from any spatiotemporal setting, although the novel itself is concerned with its own specific spatio-temporal setting, Wellington in New Zealand circa 2018. The central conceit of this novel is the idea that a small number of human beings have the capacity to “read out” characters in works of fiction. They are termed “summoners”.In this case those characters include above all that of Uriah Heep from Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield , but also the works of the character Sherlock Holmes in the detective stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jabberwock from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem in Alice Through the Looking Glass, Millie Radcliffe-Dix from the 1950s girl-detective series, plus at various times Darcy from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey, Sir Lancelot from the Arthurian cycle and Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Most of them live in a special area of Wellington known as The Street. The main function in this novel of Uriah Heep both in his manifestations under his own name and as the legal assistant to Eric Humble, is to act as the agent of the dangerous rogue-reader or “summoner” who is intent on world domination. For most of the novel the identity of this villain is concealed, but it finally turns out to be Charley’s academic colleague, Beth, or “Beth-Moriarty” as she is revealed to be. The novel opens with the narrator’s brother, Charles, declaring: “Uriah Heep’s loose on the fourth floor…And I can’t catch him…” (Parry:3). The depiction of Uriah Heep as a sinister figure, derived directly from the negative portrayal by the first-

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person narrator of Dickens’s David Copperfield, is thus enhanced by the idea that he must be captured or imprisoned for the safety of others. When the villain does appear, he is worse than ever: Uriah Heep came into existence in a flash of light: tall, thin, cadaverous, his shock of hair even wilder than before. (Parry:90).

He is one of those people “who cause unhappiness wherever they go” (Parry 231). Yet the novel is alert to subtleties of modern or postmodern literary analysis. We are reminded of the role of Charles Dickens as “the implied Author” (Parry: 232, 250). Equally we are informed that the Street (the location in Wellington where fictional characters reside in their afterlives) responds to the reader rather than to authors like Dickens (Parry: 233). The reception of Uriah here as a villain is therefore the responsibility of the reader, though this is bound to be exercised in conjunction with the outlook of the motley collection of literary afterlife-characters who feature in the novel. Whatever the status of Dickens himself as a figure with a literary afterlife, what matters is that the nature of Uriah Heep has become fixed. That Uriah Heep was set up to fail is emphasized when Dickens and Uriah Heep finally meet: I’m sorry, but this world was never meant for you. (Parry: 406 – 407).

Subsequently Heep is cast variously as the dark alter-ego of David Copperfield and of the narrator’s brother, the troubled academic Charles Sutherland (Parry: 409, 425). It is hardly surprising that he has all along harboured a deep desire for “revenge on a world that tried to keep him down” (Parry: 246). The ambiguity in this novel over the question of whether Uriah escapes is germane to the issue of the character’s identity. In David Copperfield the final scene depicting Uriah Heep finds the eponymous hero visiting Heep in prison, where he is awaiting transportation after conviction for fraud. Therefore, although facing imminent exclusion from British society, he remains alive. In The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep the character’s fictiveness is underlined by the way in which he simply vanishes. During the course of this survey, we have marked the development in the literary reception of Uriah from being a mere cipher in the narrative of the saga of King David to becoming a full-blown character, whether seen as a villain in the perception of the first-person narrator in David Copperfield (and its own aftermath in H.G. Parry’s fantasy) or as a noble hero in The Hittite Must Die. The episode itself grows in scale and prominence through the Cornish Ordinalia and Montchrestien’s

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David ou l’adultere until in George Peele’s David and Bathsabe the siege of Rabbah itself lasts a full nine years. There have been contrarian versions in which Uriah does not die, but survives into a prolonged earthly life, either in subjugation (T.F. Powys) or in triumph (McKay). He dies defiantly in Shamir’s The Hittite Must Die, while yet ensuring his story’s continuance through the preservation of his memoirs. He dies defiantly also in the outworking of a conspiracy with Absalom in Brecht’s sketches. In Kipling’s poem his story shows the capacity to elevate an obscure soldier in a later age into the limelight through authorial signalling of Barrett as Uriah. Kipling hints at a ghostly afterlife, while Parry’s postmodern fantasy imagines Uriah Heep exerting a powerful malevolent influence in a literary afterlife which has escaped the printed page. King David is a character obviously beyond the reach of a novel concerned with the re-imagining of Dickens’s Uriah Heep, though all kinds of miscellaneous other literary characters do appear in that literary fantasy. We saw how Kipling’s poem, however, conspicuously avoided putting its David figure on stage, whereas the Cornish Ordinalia put not just David but Bathsheba on stage. These rewritings all elevate the minor character of Uriah into a prominent role but only the works by T.F.Powys, McKay and Shamir seek to represent Uriah’s subjectivity. The following schema seeks to represent the phases in mood in those three outstanding twentieth-century versions: ‘Uriah on the Hill’: hope – disappointment – a lonely life continues ‘The Prince of Porto Rico’: anger – resolve – triumph over adversary The Hittite Must Die: disappointment – resolve – death In their very different ways these three reworkings manage to address the hypotext’s silence over the subjectivity of Uriah. They achieve this by recessing the narrative of David’s plotting. By contrast most other literary reworkings have been primarily focused on David’s subjectivity or on its outworking in his control of the narration. Giving a voice to Uriah and access to his personal perspective completely alters the balance of the narrative, even when he continues to be the ostensible loser in the transaction. One could say also that the Uriah story migrates from being a spotlight on the flaws of King David to being a narrative in its own right.

Chapter Four: Lilith and the Reinvented Bible Hypotexts: Gen.2 Is. 34:14 Chapter Ten will show how the figure of Lilith provides José Saramago with a valuable component for his fictive reshaping of biblical history in Cain. In this chapter we will look at the attractiveness of Lilith to feminist and other rewriters and at the possibility that her new-found prominence in the modern period is linked to her peripheral inscription in the Bible.¹²⁰ Until the early nineteenth century, Lilith was an important component of Jewish mystical texts (particularly the Zohar), yet otherwise operated as a sort of subterranean figure in European culture, cropping up ( though renamed) as the monstrous character of Grendel in Beowulf and in paintings as the serpent with a woman’s face and often a woman’s body in scenes depicting the Temptation in the Garden and in mystery plays such as that from Semur in France, where the stage directions just such a figure.¹²¹ Her history is also recounted more or less en passant in a German play of 1485, Jutta, (by Dietrich Scherberg) and she is mentioned in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1651.) Then suddenly she explodes into view as a central topos in Victor Hugo’s epic poem of 1862, La Fin de Satan, then in the paintings and poetry of Gabriel Rossetti in England, then in George Macdonald’s hugely influential fantastic novel, Lilith, then in an extraordinary short story by Rudyard Kipling, then in Isolde Kurz’s ground-breaking epic poem, Die Kinder Lilith. After this, it seems that nothing can hold her back. She is the key to the future of humanity in Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah, in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and in Roberto Pazzi’s La Malattia di Tempo. Her story is retold in Ernest Hemingway’s final and posthumously published novel, The Garden of Eden, where it becomes a metaphor for human loneliness in the modern world. Lilith becomes a central figure in the positive depiction of female identity throughout the rest of the twentieth century. She also becomes central to discourse about a positive future for humanity in general. She becomes the vehicle for a Reinvented Bible.

 An earlier and shorter version of this text was delivered as a paper at the SBL Conference in Vienna in 2012 and appeared as an essay entitled ‘Lilith and the Future of Biblical Humanism’ in the conference papers of the Three Traditions Symposium, In the Arms of Biblical Women ed. John T. Greene and Mishael M .Caspi (New York: Gorgias Press, 2013).  See Muir (2003): 69, 206 note 30. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-005

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The Origins of Lilith If we seek for the biblical basis of Lilith, the answer might be framed in terms of the rather slender reference to a creature called Lilith in Is.34: 14.and the midrashic responses to the Genesis story of the Creation of Adam and Eve and the subsequent events in the Garden of Eden. On this basis we might describe Lilith as a quasi-biblical figure. There, is however, another layer, in terms of biblical scholarship, and that is the presence of antecedent Lilith material in the mythology recovered from Sumerian artefacts of the seventh-century BCE; in a Sumerian king-list dating back to 2400 BCE; and in the more diffuse history-of-religions documentation of the various Primeval Goddess Figures who form the hinterland to the development of either monotheism or patriarchy – whichever way you choose to describe the outcome. The earliest evidence for the idea of Lilith as a female demon comes from the Sumerian king- list of about 2400 BCE, which, in presenting the hero Gilgamesh as the son of Lillu, refers to a quartet of demons which included Lillu himself, the shedemon Lilith, Lilith’s handmaid (Ardat Lili) and her male servant ( Irdu Lili), the latter being responsible respectively for nocturnal visits to men and women which resulted in the birth of ghostly children. Lilith’s beauty is attested both by the epithet “the beautiful maiden” and by her depiction in a Babylonian terracotta relief from the same period, where she is represented as a shapely nude with wings and owl-feet and bearing the horned cap of a goddess. She is later shown, in a tablet from northern Syria dating to the 7th century BCE, as a winged sphinx, with the inscribed incantation: “O flyer in a dark chamber/Go away at once, O Lili,” designed to be used to help women in childbirth ward off her evil depradations. Raphael Patai concludes that this material shows that by the seventh-century BCE Lilith has acquired the essential characteristics with which she is associated two thousand years later in the Kabbala. As a biblical trope, the Lilith story has two basic foundations. There is the slender reference in Is. 34:14 : The wildcat shall meet with jackals And the satyr shall cry to his fellow Yea, Lilith shall repose there And find her a place of rest.

The Vulgate translated the name as Lalia, the Roman goddess and sorceress; the KJV has “screech owl” and the RSV has merely “the night hag.”

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The other biblical pretext is actually commentary. This is the Talmudic interpolation of the Lilith story into the Genesis Eden-narrative, to account for the doublet of references to the creation of woman in Gen.1:27 and 2:22. Since the sages assumed the literal accuracy of the biblical text, the apparent contradiction was resolved by concluding that Adam had two wives, the first created at the same time as him. This first wife, nameless in the biblical text, was Lilith, who saw herself as equal with Adam (since created with him) and this was the cause of the quarrel which led to their separation. The second wife, Eve, formed from Adam’s rib, was content to be subordinate to him. The Kabbala supplied charms to be deployed against Lilith in childbirth and the idea that Lilith tempts men in their dreams. In the Zohar Lilith gave birth to a progeny of demonic children during her one hundred and thirty years of intercourse with Adam, following his separation from Eve in the wake of Cain’s murder of Abel. Lilith develops into a powerful female analogue of Satan, sometimes Satan’s consort and sometimes living an existence quite separately. In one strand of the tradition she becomes God’s consort, the cause of divine suffering and of disastrous events on earth. Important features of the treatment of Lilith in the Talmud were the attribution to her of long hair and wings. Lilith is specifically identified in the Alphabet of Ben Sira as the “first Eve,” created at the same time as Adam, and in this text merged with the demonic harmer of children. Here the excuse for the narration of the tale is Ben Sira’s offer of an amulet to cure the son of Nebuchadnezzar: the amulet bears the images of the angels Snvi, Snsvi and Smnglof, together with those of Adam and Lilith, providing the occasion for Ben Sira to relate the story of Lilith’s creation by God to be Adam’s companion, her revolt against the missionary position and flight from Eden. The angels pursuing Lilith catch up with her at the Red Sea and, when they threaten to drown her in the sea unless she returns to Adam, she only agrees to depart on condition that she can have the power to harm male infants for eight days after birth and female infants for twenty days. At the same time she agrees that one hundred of her demonic children shall perish every day.¹²² Joseph Dan in an article showed how this piece of “narrative gossip” (as he called it) was amplified by Rabbi Isaac ha-Kohen to include the notion that there were two Liliths, The Grand Old Lilith (the mate of Samael) and Younger Lilith (the mate of Asmodeus.) The rivalry between Samael and Asmodeus over the Younger Lilith then became the basis of a dualistic cosmology which addressed Jewish experience of persecution in Europe. One important byproduct of this schema was the emergence of a divided Lilith-figure, or of rivalry

 Stern and Mirsky, 183 – 184.

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within the satanic empire. The power of these demonic forces, with Lilith described as a serpentine analogue of Leviathan, would only be defeated by the Messiah in the apocalyptic future. There is also the strange phenomenon in medieval European art and drama of the portrayal of the serpent of the Garden of Eden as a figure with a woman’s face, something generally attributed to the influence of Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica, itself thought to be dependent on unidentified rabbinic sources. At least one art critic has boldly identified the iconographic female serpent as Lilith.Yet there the argument remains so far speculative. An alternative early source for this development is a section of the Gnostic text, The Hypostasis of the Archons, reproduced by Pagels.¹²³ In the Semur mystery play the serpent is directed to be a figure with a woman’s bust, the feet and tail of a serpent, wearing a skin of red feathers who greets Eve, woman to woman.¹²⁴ Up to this point Lilith remains both remote and confined, a sort of semiotic fossil. It is literature which eventually sets here free and develops her as what we could describe as a “postbiblical” figure. While there is much scholarly uncertainty about the reception of Lilith in the medieval period, it is clear that, in terms of the Jewish mystical texts, including especially the Zohar, Lilith had begun to operate at the level of cosmology. Whether as the demonic consort forced upon God after the catastrophe of the destruction of the Second Temple or as a Demoness predating the Creation, Lilith was definitely present in some sort of upper strata of human consciousness. Such developments in Jewish midrash and folklore help to provide an important part of the background to the ambiguous Lilith, the temptress and femme fatale, of the Romantic poets. If the Walpurgisnacht episode in Goethe’s Faust ¹²⁵ seems to be the channel by which the legend entered the mythological vocabulary of particularly Gabriel Rossetti and then Robert Browning, Sol Liptzin has demonstrated the probable influence on Goethe himself was the work of the anti-Semitic writer Andreas Eisenmenger. The two paintings and two poems by Rossetti can be seen as the watershed by which the largely subterranean or at least folkloric tale of Lilith entered mainstream European culture, addressing the concerns related to women’s emancipation which were so central both to the world of the painter’s patrons and to the specific subjectivity of Rossetti and his wife Elizabeth. Rossetti’s work was to influence both the broader culture of his time and (in the case of his poems) particular writers such as Ernest Hemingway, who quoted ’Eden Bower’ as

 Elaine Pagels, 67 and 163, n.42.  Muir, 206 n.30.  Faust I, II. 4119 – 4123.

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the epigraph to his novel The Garden of Eden. Closer to its own time, it was probably also the influence of that extraordinary outbreak of mythic fantasy which we find in George Macdonald’s Lilith, a novel which was in its own way both an endpoint and a new beginning for Lilith in literature. The widespread use of incantations mentioning Lilith and amulets depicting her, designed to ward off misfortunes in childbirth, indicates also that Lilith functioned also at the level of individual, personal consciousness. Indeed, there were other incantations both to ward Lilith off from provoking male erotic fantasies and (at the opposite pole) to fulfil those fantasies. At the social level, Lilith was present also in terms of what seems to us a diffuse existence in folklore connecting her with the lilies which grew from the tears shed by Eve on being expelled from Eden and eventually in the politically-charged marching song, ’Lillibullero,’ around which an entire social history could be constructed. Still at the social level, there is what one might call the repressed presence of Lilith in European art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. I am referring to the curious depiction of the Edenic snake as a woman in a wide range of paintings and woodcarvings and indeed in that mystery play from Semur in France. More overtly we find Lilith’s actual rabbinic legend being recited in that German play of 1485, Jutta, as an analeptic intercalated story explaining the background to the character of the person who became the First Woman Pope. However, it is only with Goethe’s Faust that Lilith arrives on what one might call the European public stage. She appears as a tempting spectacle and seductress in the Walpurgisnacht episode in the play. Although she can be said to occupy only a marginal social space in the context of Faust’s journey into damnation, her appearance is significant. Perhaps it was the release of an aspect of the repressed Feminine Other, “Das Ewig Weibliche.” Whatever the driving force behind Goethe’s inclusion of Lilith, her appearance in Faust was to have lasting cultural reverberations. Before we reach Gabriel Rossetti, who was hugely influenced not only by Goethe’s Lilith but also by Theodore von Holst’s painting of the scene on the Brocken, we come to another writer fascinated by the rabbinic legends about Lilith.

Victor Hugo In Victor Hugo’s uncompleted narrative poem La Fin de Satan Lilith is depicted as a negative force in humanity’s struggle towards Liberté. The work itself finds its background in Brentano’s epic (also uncompleted), Romanzen vom Rosenkranz (written 1803 – 11, published posthumously 1852) in which the OT as a whole is fig-

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ured as a malign prelude to modernity and more generally in the quest in French epic poetry of the nineteenth-century to construct new myths expressive of the belief in progress and evolution. In Hugo’s epic poem Lilith is part of the ontological reality experienced by human beings in their battle to bring about the triumph of Liberté, her half-sister. She is present at the trial of Christ, influencing the outcome of the proceedings. She attends the arrival of Liberté in Hell, where she is finally defeated like an ice cube in a furnace, once Satan has been induced to fall asleep by Liberté, the bright angel. Hugo’s vision of Lilith has been shown to owe a great deal to the work of the cabbalist Alexandre Weill and it seems that the legend had been expounded in French as early as the early eighteenth-century by Dom Calmet in his commentary on Is.34.¹²⁶ (Lilith was to be to be the subject of a thoroughly misogynist play of 1892 by the French Symbolist poet Remy de Gourmont, entitled Lilith.)¹²⁷

Gabriel Rossetti Gabriel Rossetti’s artistic response to the Lilith trope, refracted through Goethe, and also through other reading, launches Lilith upon the world of English letters and visual art. His work represents the coming-together of so many social strands. Gabriel Rossetti, painter and poet, was exposed to the influence of Goethe from an early age, even producing his own translation of Faust. His marriage, his wife’s place on the fringes of the nascent suffragette movement, her eventual death in childbirth and the strong public demand for art depicting the topic of the femme fatale, all resonate with Rossetti’s own production as a painter and poet, in the shape of two remarkable paintings and indeed two poems on the subject. Rossetti was fascinated by the Walpurgisnacht episode in Goethe’s Faust, but also knew von Holst’s painting and drew on the mention of Lilith in Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1651) and John Kitt’s A Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature (1845), which appeared in a third, enlarged edition in 1864, the year when Rossetti began his painting, Lady Lilith. However, it is only in his ballad, Eden Bower (1869/ 1870) that he develops the idea of Lilith as a serpent, who tells the Edenic snake:

 See Karl. D. Uitti: ’The Vision of Lilith in Hugo’s “La Fin de Satan”,’ The French Review, Vol. 31, No.6 (May, 1958), 479 – 486.  Cf. Sidney D. Braun, ’Lilith: Her Literary Portrait, Symbolism, and Significance’, NineteenthCentury French Studies, Vol. 11, No.1/2 (Fall-Winter 1982): 135–153 (143–144).

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To thee I come when the rest is over; As snake I was when thou wast my lover.

Rossetti’s paintings and poems connect Lilith with a certain public, mercantile form of subjectivity, if one considers the market which these paintings addressed and also more generally what we might call the ’male erotic gaze’ . In the background, in addition, there is the social context of the Woman’s Emancipation Movement with which Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth was associated.

George Macdonald’s Lilith George Macdonald in his novel Lilith (1895) was to reinforce Lilith’s profile in literature. This work was a major influence on C. S. Lewis and was hailed by W. H. Auden as a masterpiece. The novel carries as an epigraph the laconic phrase which it attributes to the Kabbalah: “Off, Lilith!” Perhaps this is not the most profound of quotations from the claimed source, but it does connect the novel, notionally at least, with the antecedent tradition. In terms of diegetic setting, though, Macdonald’s innovation was to locate Lilith in a supernatural, parallel universe to the one lived in by the reader, suggesting the presence of Lilith at a cosmological level. Implicitly it was a level which the reader might access in some kind of dream state, like the character’s chief protagonist, Vane. Lilith was praised by W.H . Auden as ’’equal if not superior to Poe.’¹²⁸ In fact MacDonald had already published a short story featuring a character called Lilith in 1864, ’The Cruel Painter,’ part of the collection entitled Adela Cathcart. In this Hoffmannesque tale, Lilith is the beautiful daughter of the eponymous artist and it is the sight of this elusive girl which draws the student Karl von Wolkenlicht (Lottchen) to become a live-in apprentice at the home of Teufelsbürst, the demonic painter. Significantly the student’s first sight of Lilith is of her seated on a grave and this sets the tone for a story about diabolical art and vampires, in which the love of Lottchen for Lilith finally overcomes the forces of evil. The novel Lilith is vastly more elaborate, pivoting on the journey of the firstperson narrator, Vane, into a parallel universe in which the biblical characters Adam and Eve (and Lilith) continue to live. Vane inherits an old manor house and it is through a meeting with the house’s aged librarian Raven that Vane passes through a mirror into the Otherworld, discovering that Raven has another life there as both Sexton and Adam. In a complex series of adventures in the Other-

 In his introduction to the 1954 reprint, quoted by Prickett (1976), 228.

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world, punctuated unusually for such a narrative by repeated returns to this world, Vane eventually encounters the demonic figure of Lilith in her guise as a spotted leopard. Lilith regards the birth of children as the death of their parents, leading her to kill her own daughter, Lona. However, Lona’s death is not final and she enters a sort of marginal state, awaiting what the novel hints will be a reunion with Vane. There is even hope for Lilith herself, once she has undergone the biblical chastisement of losing an arm, in accordance with Macdonald’s personal version of universalism. Lilith’s main persona in the novel, nevertheless remains that of chief agent of the Shadow (Satan) and even at the end, when confronted with all Vane’s and Adam’s attempts to bring her to the truth, she remains a dessicated figure: “…all that was left her of her conscious being was the dregs of her dead and corrupted life…She was a conscious corpse, whose coffin could never come to pieces, never set her free!” (206.) Relating the novel to the earlier short story, we find the same mother/daughter transition, possibly refracting the dual mythology of Old Lilith/Young Lilith and the Romantic notion of redemption through love. In the novel it is Lona who offers hope, as the resuscitated and revivified daughter of Lilith. In many ways Macdonald seems torn between the idea of fantasy as a freefloating response to subconscious imagery present in the human mind (under the influence of Novalis) and a sterner rectitude drawn from a sort of liberalized Calvinism. From the point of view strictly of the novel as part of the reception history of the Lilith story, one of its most interesting features is the discovery in the Library of the textual fragments which Mr Raven reads out in an unknown language and which Vane receives as a first person lament by Lilith, recounting her life as one of the damned. It ends with a passage reminiscent of the rich man’s appeal to Lazarus in Lk.16: 19 – 31. Ah, the two worlds! so strangely are they one, And yet so measurably wide apart! Oh, had I lived the bodiless alone And from defiling sense held safe my heart, Then had I scaped the canker and the smart, Scaped life-in-death, scaped misery’s endless moan!

If Rossetti’s ’Eden Bower’ was the first modern work to give Lilith a voice, Macdonald’s novel assimilates that voice to a familiar biblical text reconceived as a Romantic fragment in the style of Chateaubriand. The novel itself is curiously ambivalent about literature and the supernatural. Whilst the bookish Vane gains access to the Otherworld literally through the Library, he also discovers there a source of vital relationships with other beings which prompts him to repudiate his scholarly obsessions. Although Lilith is a mon-

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strous figure in the world beyond the Mirror, her true inner feelings are only revealed in the literary fragments preserved (Romantic-style) in the Library and which only the Librarian can decipher.

Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling was a writer very adept at exploiting the public mood and so it is significant that he chose to smuggle Lilith into one of his tales of imperial life. As always with this writer, there is a sort of ambivalence about the writerly perspective. The important thing for us is that Lilith suddenly arrives onstage in what is ostensibly a piece of colonialist discourse. She becomes connected with the Other of imperialism in a story which (it has to be said) is at one point severely anti-Semitic in relation to a different character. ‘On the City Wall’ (1888) describes its central character, Lalun, as a direct descendant of Lilith in its second line. Lalun here is a prominent prostitute and intriguer, who succeeds in securing the escape from captivity of the dissident Sikh leader, Khem Singh, through the unwitting agency of the narrator. As well as connecting Lalun with Lilith, the tale is in part a quirky rewriting of the biblical pretext of Rahab. It carries the quotation from Joshua 2:15 at its head and a turning point in the narrative is when Lalun (102) hoists the disguised Khem Singh up to her room with a ‘long red silk waist-cloth.’ The controlling theme of the story is the ability of the Supreme Government to suppress all forms of subversion, yet, as David Sargeant shows, Kipling as a writer is playfully ambivalent about colonial power.¹²⁹ Whilst ‘On the City Wall’ presents itself a “controlled reinforcement of the imperial status quo,” through assuming that the reader shares the views of its projected hardened Anglo-Indian narrator, and whilst all forms of resistance to the granite-hard grip of the imperial machine are ultimately portrayed as futile, the story does depend on the teasing possibility that subversion may be effective. This is very much the argument of Salman Rushdie, who, describing Kipling as a bigoted yet effective portrait-painter, hails the figure of Lalun in ‘On the City Wall’ as the trickster figure who enlists the narrator in her plot to subvert colonial control. It is interesting that Rushdie selects this one story from amongst Kipling’s prolific output to illustrate the conflicted persona of a writer gifted in bringing multiple voices alive in what is outwardly a colonialist text.¹³⁰

 Sargeant (2009).  Salman Rushdie: Imaginary Homelands (London: Vintage, 2010), 74– 80.

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Kipling’s short story inscribes a colonial world and yet also the tale of an escape from it.

Isolde Kurz It was left to Isolde Kurz to respond to the movement in which western writers brought the hitherto suppressed trope of Lilith to prominence by overhauling the entire Lilith legend in her narrative poem, Die Kinder Lilith. Here at last the foundation-myth is addressed and creatively rewritten. Isolde Kurz’s narrative poem of 1908, Die Kinder Lilith, is remarkable for setting up a contrarian story of Lilith as a being of superior spiritual stature to the lumpen Adam. In this she was intended by God to act as a foil for Adam’s earthiness. It is the Devil who creates Eve to seduce Adam, leaving Lilith to flee and give birth to a child destined to lead Adam’s other children to spiritual perfection. This work is an important turning point in the reception history of Lilith, the precursor of a growing series of rewritings which validate Lilith at the expense of the Eden story, seen as the foundation of the patriarchal myth.

Rossetti’s Influence Lingers In the meantime, Rossetti’s influence was far from spent. The title of his painting crops up as the title of Robert McKenna’s novel of 1920 and lines from his ballad ’’Eden Bower’ influenced Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published novel of personalised space, The Garden of Eden, which deals with the topics of human loneliness and the dynamics of a ménage-à-trois.

Bernard Shaw and Back to Methuselah Resuming the project of the French cultural theorists of the nineteenth-century (like Chateaubriand), Bernard Shaw uses Lilith in the construction of a visionary humanistic future. In Back to Methuselah (1921) Lilith is described by the Voice to the Serpent as the original creature who regenerated herself into Adam and Eve. The primal parent of humanity, she represents the evolutionary movement from matter to spirit. As the originator of the evolving human species, she is given the final monologue in the play, where she conjures up a cosmology in which her own legend is just a stage in the expansion of Life through the universe.

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Shaw’s Lilith is not only given a voice but has in every sense the last word in the play. Thus, in this play Bernard Shaw complements the work of Isolde Kurz in depicting Lilith as the instigator of a new and progressive turn in human history, leaving behind the exploitative world of patriarchy. There is no evidence of any influence of one writer on the other.

James Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake (1939) Finnegan’s Wake has been described as “ a transcription into a miniaturized form of the whole western literary tradition,”¹³¹ and Lilith is abundantly present as a succubus who lures men to their doom. John Bormanis argues that in the novel the Prankquean, ALP and Issy are all types of Lilith, who also draws in a range of women called “Lily,” including Lilly Langtry, the “Jersey Lilly” and mistress of the Prince of Wales. In particular, she is a subversive figure associated with Joyce’s specifically Irish rebellion against British colonialism. As the image of resistance to patriarchy, she “undoes” Earwicker (75) and men are advised to practise coitus interruptus rather than allow her to beget her demonic children by stealing their semen (34.) Lilith as a ’lily of the field’ becomes the basis of a complex pun linking the Garden of Eden with the Song of Solomon and the nationalist usurpation of the oppressor’s code-word, ’Lilliburlero.’ As the Prankquean she is involved in the kidnapping of the male heirs of the Earl of Howth (“Jarl van Hoother”) but also suffers for her defiance in the bloody trenches of the “Nomans Land” of the First World War. She resists Van Hoother’s call to return to Erin, preferring exile (like Lilith) to bondage in the Garden. Like Lilith living with her children by the edge of the Red Sea, the Prankquean runs away to “woman’s land” beyond the control of the colonial power. In this rewritten mythology Joyce valorizes a sort of Irish feminism symbolized in Lilith, set in opposition to the rantings of the thunder-god, Thon. In a reversal of the patriarchal harnessing of the Gen. 3 story, the Prankquean presides over a story in which Eve steals the fruit of language from a patriarchal deity and escapes to a new domain (like Lilith) where she is free of the hegemonic discourse of the oppressor, a freedom which both men and women can enjoy, “all lordy heirs and ladymaidesses of a pretty nice kettle of fruit.” (11.) This pattern-breaking novel offers a version of feminism as well as the rejection of imperialism and much else in the conventional world of the time.

 Seamus Deane, quoted on back cover of Penguin edition.

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Roberto Pazzi Roberto Pazzi’s novel La malattia de tempo is a re-assertion of the cyclical myths associated with Lilith as a corrective or counterblast to the played-out linear patriarchal narrative. The novel takes place significantly on the Isle of St Helena, place of Napoleon’s exile and (two centuries earlier) the site of Halley’s pioneering discoveries about the motions of the planets. This novel significantly rejects the linearity of western historical dogma and offers instead a free-floating text which emphasizes both spatiality and the mythical cycle, with Lilith herself as the Primordial Mother figure challenging western patriarchy. A revolutionary Pope declares the end of Time’s tyranny and the start of a new era (121) and Elizabeth, daughter of Aiku as Lilith (132– 135.) works with Halley, the astronomer, to change the way humans see the cosmos. Here Elizabeth as Lilith is a relatively uncomplicated figure, emblem of the prospects for a human return to the cyclical natural world, once the limits to imperialist expansion and economic growth become starkly manifest in the shape of a great, uncrossable river.

Lilith and Feminist Science Fiction In a fantasy by C L Moore, the feminist vision once again returns us to the cosmic level. In Moore’s short story of 1940, ’The Fruit of Knowledge,’ Lilith modulates between being a demonic supernatural figure and one whose failure to influence Adam to eat of the Tree of Life leads to catastrophic consequences for the human race. Later another science fiction writer, Octavia Butler, makes Lilith the outcast who rescues humanity whilst in exile from an Earth ravaged by nuclear war. By co-operating with alien gene-traders, she plays a part in the development of human life modified beyond the familiar gender divisions. Moore’s other output is more or less entirely associated with the science-fiction genre, giving a particular nuance to this tale of earthly mythological and biblical history. In the story Lilith is a demonic supernatural being who visits Eden, taking on fleshly form, after the creation and meets Adam. Adam falls for this being of superior awareness. It is when Lilith temporarily travels way from Eden, leaving the shell of her body behind, that (as it later emerges) God exploits the opportunity to vivify this shell as Eve. Lilith knew that Adam needed to eat not of the Tree of Knowledge but of the Tree of Life, but the Serpent persuades Eve to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, with the familiar ensuing series of events. Displaced from the biblical story and from her relationship with Adam, Lilith is given a

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choice over her future by the Voice and elects to have her offspring with Adam haunt Eve’s offspring “to their graves.” Her final act in the story is to impel Eve to call her first child “Kayn the spear of my vengeance, for she shall set murder loose among Adam’s sons….”)

Dawn Octavia E Butler’s Dawn (1987) is a science fiction novel which inscribes Lilith as a feminist hero who becomes the intermediary between human survivors of a nuclear war and the extraterrestrials who seek to rescue them for the purpose of genetrading. Distrusted by her own species after she allows herself to be drawn into the biological experiments of her captors, Lilith has to endure the role of ‘Judas-goat’ as she seeks to help her fellow human beings return to what remains of life on Earth. The unfolding of the narrative provides what one reviewer (according to the paperback novel’s back cover) describes as a ‘gene’s eye view of ourselves,’ the human race with all its erotic and violent impulses. At another level. Butler seems to construct a fictional narrative which expresses something of Helen Cixhou’s version of human life beyond the familiar gender divisions – the extraterrestrial “ooloi” forming a third, non-human gender.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) deserves a place here as an important example of Lilith appropriated in an African-American revisionist approach to American history, where it serves as part of the tragic record of black suffering under racial oppression and yet also as the memory of resistance. The figure of Sethe can be read as a version of the child-murdering Lilith in the dysfunctional antiEden of the slave plantation from which the family has emerged.

Faulkner and Lilith In some ways our account of the literary reception of Lilith is becoming a roll call of the most prominent writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This continues with William Faulkner’s treatment of her as a theme in his writing. The race’s splendour lifts her lip, exposes Amid her scarlet smile her little teeth;

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The years are sand the wind plays with; beneath, The prisoned music of her deathless roses. Within frostbitten rock she’s fixed and glassed; Now man may look upon her without fear. But her contemtous eyes back through him stare And shear his fatuous sheep when he has passed. Lilith she is dead and safely tombed And man may plant and prune with nought to brute His heired and ancient lot to which he’s doomed, For quiet drowse the flocks when wolf is mute – Ay, Lilith she is dead, and she is wombed, And breaks his vine, and slowly eats the fruit.¹³²

William Faulkner’s poem of 1924 known as XXXVII treats Lilith as the ultimate challenge to patriarchy, the ancient temptress who castrates male power and belongs to a complex, Orientalist identity which incorporates such figures as Cleopatra and Salome and (in the view of Lucas Tromly) is the entry-point for the author’s participation in the tradition of the Decadent topos of the femme fatale, culminating in in the ironic treatment of the figure of Mrs Bland in The Sound and the Fury (1926), seen as Faulkner’s capture of a cultural cliché, a piece of kitsch, in the service of a proto-postmodernist form of social questioning.

Some Other, Less Progressive Liliths As an interval in what has seemed the progressive trajectory of Lilith in modern literature, we must note four very different works which contradict the tendency. In the first she exits the horizon of longing, in the second she exists uneasily in British high society at the close of the Great War, in the third she is a sexually repressed figure, and in the fourth she becomes an empty cipher, reflective of the male gaze.

Christopher Brennan’s The Forest of Night (1913) The Forest of Night is a long, declamatory cycle of poems in which Lilith plays a central part as the unrealizable object of the male narrator’s desire. She is a combination of all the powerful forces which he cannot control and which find expres William Faulkner: The Marble Faun and A Green Bough (New York: Random House, 1960 [1933]), 60.

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sion in a rich canvas of references to the writings of Milton, Blake, Keats, and Shelley. She is Lamia, the Sphinx, La Belle Dame Sans Merci and the Mystic Rose: All mystery, and all love, beyond our ken, She woos us, mournful till we find her fair: And gods and stars and songs of soulful men Are the sparse jewels of her scatter’d hair.

Lady Lilith Stephen McKenna’s novel Lady Lilith (1920) occupies the uncomfortable position of a rewriting of the Lilith story which draws on the trope of Lilith as a femme fatale in a version of high-society social comedy and at the same time tries to deal with the extinguishing of aristocratic frivolity brought on by the onset of WWI. Are we to focus on the plight of Lady Barbara’s volatile courtship with the doomed Jack… and the implicit transfer of her affections to his friend, Eric Long, or on the fate of the officer-cohort (including Jack) who sacrifice themselves in the trenches? Lilith here exists on the very edge of social acceptability as a wild aristocratic socialite who mixes with the least constrained of her peers, becoming associated with wild parties, the world of the theatre, and adventures into drugs and necromancy. She inadvertently is involved in the death of a chauffeur inveigled into a frivolous adventure. Her situation (despite her family’s wealth) as the member of a Roman Catholic family and prospective wife of a Protestant is described as akin to that “of a black woman” or of one who “wears a ring in one’s nose” in the claustrophobic world of British High Society (142). She has a reputation as a coquette and has indeed lured previous suitors to death or madness. Now trapped in her own psychological machinations, she grieves as she loses Jack to the battlefront and reverts to a children’s story-book dream of fulfilment in love. The femme fatale of male subjectivity comes up against the harsher values of wartime, though the values which lead to war remain unexamined. Lady Barbara herself must survive as a woman on the periphery of this devastation, appropriately consigned to the future arms of a theatre critic and budding playwright. The Bible plays an intermittent role as a source of contrasting gravitas (see comparison with Jephthah, 244) or of clichés which trivialize their pretexts (eg 138, 222.)

Delta of Venus The story ’Lilith’ in Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus (1976) presents a contrarian Lilith, who is sexually repressed and seems imprisoned in her own frigidity in her mar-

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riage to a relatively passionate man. As part of the reception of ’Lilith,’ this story depends completely on the use of the name for the main character.

Bad Girl Llosa’s Bad Girl (2007) is, at the level of the first-person narrator, a self-indulgent male fantasy, projecting Lily as the recurrent Other Woman of his life. At the level of what is reported or can be gleaned about the actual Lily, under her various pseudonymns (if she is one person and not many), she represents the antithesis of a successful, bourgeois upbringing. As Lilith she throws a floodlight on the self-centred consciousness of the male narrator.

Late Hemingway Hemingway’s novel The Garden of Eden (1961) shows the influence of Rossetti’s Lilith poems, evincing what for this author was rare sympathy for the feminine. Here the Lilith figure is the character David’s first wife, Catherine. A major theme of the novel is loneliness and it is Catherine’s loneliness during David’s bouts of writing which prompts her to seek the companionship and soon the erotic love of Marita. When the relationship temporarily becomes a ménage-a-trois with David, strains erupt in the marriage and eventually Marita displaces Catherine as David’s lover. The catalyst for David’s awakened consciousness is the story he is writing about his childhood experience of elephant-hunting with his father in Africa. It is the suppressed horror of the killing of the huge elephant which leads to his estrangement from his father and discovery of the loneliness of human existence: if only he had not discussed the sighting of the elephant with his father and his helper, the animal’s slaughter would have been avoided.

A Summing-Up and A Verdict In this overview we have observed the emergence of Lilith from her submerged, folkloric presence in western culture to her new, revolutionary role in literary gender politics. Transported from the recessive, back-room world of cosmological and folkloric explanation for human misfortune, she begins to occupy a new place on the balcony of the world of hope for a radically different human future. In this her status as a postbiblical figure becomes somehow representative of her potential to represent modernity.

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Ann Stevenson’s Verdict Perhaps the one piece of literature which encompasses the whole range of Lilith as a source of positive, ironic dialectic with the biblical text is Anne Stevenson’s poem, ’At Kilpeck Church’ (1980). Here the Lilith story represents unfinished business for the God who, on the eighth day, “…departed from Lilith/And turned to the emergency/ created by Adam and Eve./Meaning to come back, meaning surely,/ to return to her”¹³³ Stevenson’s poem revisits a primitive site (the Celtic carvings on the lintel of the entrance to Kilpeck Church in Herefordshire) in order to offer an augury of the future.

Further Complications Two further writers supply still further perspectives on Lilith as a cultural property. Marek Halter’s pulp-fiction/ popular-romantic novel Lilah inserts Lilith as a neo-biblical heroine into the Ezra story. Lilah here is the sister of Ezra, living in the same exilic city of Susa, where she becomes the lover of the general, Antinoes. The first half of the novel rehearses the “mysterious East” court scenario. As an amplification of the story of the Restoration of the Temple under Ezra this is an elliptical continuation and revaluation (in a pro-feminist register). In many ways it is also a de/re-motivation, highlighting the repeated atrocities suffered by the returning Hebrews and suggesting that Ezra’s main success was to teach an internalization of the Law. With the death of the main protagonist, there is the suggestion (314) that the authentic future of Judaism lies in Qumran, a truly revisionist rewriting of the Ezra story. There is a doublet of Liliths in Gerald Vizenor’s collection of short stories Wordarrows (2003) and his novel Bearheart (1978), the passages in the novel being a sort of riff on the story ‘Feeding the Reservation Mongrels’ in the former work. The combined Lilith here is an outsider to white patriarchal society who is equally an outcast in the world of the reservation-Indians. She may be taken to encode the irrelevance of the Judaeo-Christian trickster figure to Native American life, which in its subjugated form merely resents such intrusion and in its rebellious form is capable of producing its own carnivalesque tricksters. The battle to “outwit” the hegemonic discourse of colonialism will not be won by introducing a figure displaced from the oppositional narrative generated within the oppressor’s culture.

 Stevenson (2005), 330 – 331.

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Mary Magdalene and Lilith Mary Magdalene is in some ways the NT equivalent of Lilith, a figure from the margins who is demonized in literature before the modern period but who (like Lilith in the Zohar) has a sort of alternative history. In the case of Mary Magdalene, this includes her recognition by the Dominicans as the ’Apostola Apostolorum’ in the middle ages. She gradually emerges in the Renaissance period as the object of the male erotic gaze and then graduates into the feisty Independent Woman of the Victorian novelist and friend of Dickens, Wilkie Collins. In the twentieth-century she surges to prominence in the novel by Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation and in the mass-market thriller of Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code. A more thoroughgoing rehabilitation occurs in Michèle Roberts’ novel, The Wild Girl, where she even writes her own gospel, echoing the actual ’unearthing’ of the gnostic text, The Gospel of Mary. If, as Janet Hoskins argues, Mary Magdalene is dethroned goddess-figure Astarte, then she progressively recovers her status in Reception History as the portrait of the Collective Mary which she represents modulates from emphasis on the Penitent Sinner to emphasis on the figure who is the first to greet and recognize the Risen Christ. The balance shifts from the fallen woman whom the GodMan Jesus rescues to the wholesome woman who humanizes the God-Man. Unlike Lilith she arrives not from exile in the demonic world but from earthly incarceration. While Lilith’s cosmic heritage may still give her the edge in eco-politics, the two figures together illustrate the potency of marginal biblical figures in modern literature. The two figures differ in the strength of the semiotic signal which they send. Lilith has a mythological history which predates the biblical text: she belongs to the world of the Earth Mother which patriarchy supplanted. She also has a powerful theological history in her role as the demonic consort forced upon the deity in Kabbalistic writings and as the figure which the future Messiah will overthrow. She becomes, in the contrarian writings of the Romantic and post-Romantic period a figure who promises to change human civilisation utterly. Mary Magdalene, by contrast, is a noble and purely human figure, who works her way up from being the model of the penitent sinner and reformed fallen woman to being recognized, rather belatedly, as the first witness of the Resurrection. Mary Magdalene has a fuller and more consistent presence in European visual art, but she also serves as a sort of subversive presence in works such as Villon’s Testament. Her allure as a femme fatale was never reinforced by the frissoneffect of association with the demonic. She is more susceptible to ’normalization’ than Lilith, though that does not mean that there is no literature which sets out to domesticate Lilith. We found this, for example, in Marek Halter’s novel, Lilah.

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The paradoxical question arises as to whether a Reinvented Bible is more likely to be reinforced by a figure inscribed as historical in the biblical pretext or one inscribed as mythological. While Mary Magdalene stands for the recovery of the positively subversive side of Jesus’ ministry and teaching (if only as the upholder of women’s ministry), Lilith stands for the overturning of the hegemonic discourse, using the Genesis Eden story as its basis. Mary Magdalene is a sort of victim of patriarchy who has been disencumbered of her victimhood and who has (incidentally) lent a fillip of sexualised humanity to the contemporary portrait of Jesus, whilst Lilith (who was never a victim) is a once-demonic figure who has been rehabilitated as the Returning Goddess. Perhaps both figures will continue to be important. Either way, the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests that a male God is a very incomplete figure. One final curiosity is that, whilst some modern feminist redactors of the reception see the NT representation of Mary Magdalene as a reconfiguration of the figure of Miriam in the Hebrew scriptures¹³⁴, Rivkah Walton has documented the rise of Miriam as a more prevalent role model for feminists than Lilith.¹³⁵ Perhaps it is the quest for historical veracity as a source of validation that drives these two quite disparate academic agendas towards Miriam. But whilst one consciously leaves behind an avowedly mythical figure to seek the solidity of central biblical ’history,’ the other notices the mythological continuity between Miriam in Exodus and Mary Magdalene in the NT. Veracity can take many forms and so can its spatial expression. Whether or not the figure of Lilith will continue to be the vehicle for literary projects which seek to supplement the familiar Bible with new material (or even replace it) clearly remains an open question. Two relatively recent rewritings, Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light (1993) and Colm Tóibin’s The Testament of Mary (2012), explored elsewhere in this book, suggest that there are other possibilities for the Reinvented Bible, the first work projecting the writer herself as an African-American woman in the persona of Lucifer into a dialogue with the patriarchal God of Genesis and the second presenting the suppressed memoirs of the Mother of Jesus.

 Susan Haskins (1993), 47– 48. Miriam was the type of Luke’s Repentant Sinner in the Biblia Pauperum.  Rivkah M.Walton: ’Lilith’s Daughters, Miriam’s Chorus: Two Decades of Feminist Midrash,’ Religion & Literature, Vol.43.2 (Summer 2011), 115 – 127 (121– 124.)

Chapter Five: Angels of Death or Angels of Mercy? The Biblical Archangels Gabriel, Michael and Raphael in Literature Hypotexts: Dan.8: 15 – 26 etc. In this chapter we will survey the treatment of the biblical archangels Gabriel, Michael and Raphael in literature in order to set out the contours of the reception history and to explore the tendency of the cumulative tradition to act as a resource for later writers. Obviously, such a panoptic overview can never be exhaustive, but in what follows we hope to trace a number of intersecting strands in the reception history. These include the trope of the three archangels as negotiators of the boundary between life and death; their role in narratives of political or social legitimation; and as proxies for the inscription of divine activity. We shall also bear in mind the possible light which the contemporary interest in the application of trauma studies to biblical texts might cast on the rewritten archangel stories as the outworking of unresolved catastrophes.¹³⁶ Once again “hypotext” will be the term used to describe the original biblical text (assumed to be stable for our purposes) and the term “hypertext” will refer to any literary rewriting of that original. The incidence of the occurrence of the names of the archangels in the Bible is fairly slight. Gabriel is mentioned in Dan. 8: 15 – 26 and 9:21– 27 in the HB and Lk 1:11– 20 and 1:26 – 38 in the NT. Michael appears in Dan. 10: 13, 21 and 12:1 in the HB and Jude 9 and Rev. 12:7 in the NT. The archangel Raphael makes his first quasi-biblical appearance in the Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha. Later exegetical reflection associated Gabriel with the archangel who would trumpet Christ’s second coming in 1 Thess 4: 16 and Matt. 24:31 and all three archangels with the mysterious visitors to Abraham in the apparition at Mamre in Gen. 18. Nearly all the biblical incidences occur in the context of dreams and visions, the exception being the rather bald reference to Michael’s part in the rabbinic legend about the death of Moses in Jude 9.

 See Cathy Caruth: Unclaimed Experience for the argument that literature can encapsulate unresolved traumatic experiences which find resolution through mythic expression, as in the paradigm of the dream of the burning child discussed by Freud. The language of dreams seems particularly pertinent to biblical and postbiblical discourse about angels. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-006

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Early Hypertexts In the early period we find a number of significant amplifications of the hypotexts. Gabriel is the rescuer of Moses in a trial imposed by Pharaoh involving the ordeal of holding a burning coal.¹³⁷ Among the most interesting are those concerned with the death of Moses .The Midrash Petirat Mosheh in Deverim Rabbah records the legend of Gabriel’s refusal to bring Moses’ soul to God, later used by George Eliot in the poem, ‘The Death of Moses.’¹³⁸ A further tradition recounted the battle between Michael and Satan over Moses’ soul, familiar to Christians through the reference in Jude 9. Attributed to the apocryphal text The Assumption of Moses by the fathers of the Early Church, yet absent from extant manuscripts, it is present in the Palae Historica. ¹³⁹ The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Deut 34:6 recounts the reception of Moses upon a golden couch in heaven after his burial, attended by Michael and Gabriel and other archangels.¹⁴⁰ Amplifications of Christian tropes include the speeches given to Gabriel at the visitations to Elizabeth and Mary in Juvencus’ epic rewriting of the NT.¹⁴¹ Roger Green remarks that Gabriel behaves like a classical deity in this work.¹⁴² Gregory the Great’s Moralia on Job, in its commentary on Job, was one of an array of works which associated angels with military fortitude. A landmark in the literary treatment of biblical archangels was Alcuin’s poem for the Emperor Charlemagne, ‘Michael, Archangel…’ (‘Summi regis archangel/ Michahel…,’ (c. 790 CE) which celebrates Michael as the supreme agent of God, strengthening the arm of the Christian emperor, with Gabriel on hand to defeat ‘our foes’ and Raphael to ‘heal our sick.’ It is the classic expression of the cult of St Michael.¹⁴³ The poem celebrates Michael as “Archangel of the King of Kings” and appeals to him to listen to the supplications of his followers, defeating the enemy as he defeated Satan: Thou with strong hand didst smite the cruel dragon, Emperor, they scholar made these melodies for thee.

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Exodus Rabba 1:26 recorded by Kugel: 298. EBR Gabriel entry. Flusser plus refs in OT Apoc vol. 590, 647. Kugel: 542. Roger Green: 32. Green: 88. See Helen Waddell: Medieval Latin Lyrics (London: Constable & co., 1942): 90 – 93 for Latin text translation.

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The tendency here to subordinate the other archangels to Michael is reflected also in the legends surrounding the Assumption, where again Michael tends to supplant Gabriel as the dominant angelic figure.¹⁴⁴ Alcuin’s poem marks the beginning of the long process by which Michael became central to narratives of political legitimation in Europe.

The Golden Legend Nevertheless, the decisive watershed in the gathering together of legendary material about the three archangels was the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, completed around 1260 CE and published in a large number of editions across Europe. In this work the archangel Michael was accorded the status of a saint and was associated with numerous interventions to rescue both individuals and whole populations. The chapter on Michael contained a major amplification of the account in Rev.7 of the defeat of Satan by Michael and concluded with a didactic lesson about the value of angels in human life.¹⁴⁵ The expansion of the Rev.7 passage became very significant for depictions of St Michael in the visual arts, for example in Anglo-French apocalypses, and forms part of the hinterland to Milton’s epic treatment of the topic in Paradise Lost .¹⁴⁶ Just as important was the recounting of the Gargano legend in which Michael appeared to the people of that mountain in Apulia after a tyrant named Garganus was killed by his own poisoned arrow after attempting to punish a bull which had wandered off. The miracle of the arrow’s return to the bowman caused much consternation among the locals and the bishop of the region commanded a three-day fast which resulted in Michael appearing to him to explain that he was the guardian of the mountain.¹⁴⁷ This appearance was the first of a series connected with holy mountains and which set a pattern for the later legends associated with Mont St Michel in Normandy and St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. The remainder of the chapter treated Michael as representative of the generic angel and went on describe the appearance of other angels at critical moments in biblical history, culminating in the visitations to Tobias and Job.¹⁴⁸ The tone was that of a didactic lesson about the value of angels in human life.

 See Johnson: 77– 82.  Voragine Vol. II: 205.  For the depiction of St Michael as the dragon-slayer in Anglo-French apocalypses, see……in Richard E. Emerson and Bernard McGinn: The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Cornell UP, 1992): 324.  Voragine Vol. II: 201– 202.  Voragine Vol. II: 207– 211.

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The Gospel of Nicodemus and Visio Pauli Other texts which played a decisive part in the cumulative tradition included the Gospel of Nicodemus and the Visio Pauli in their many and varied recensions. The biblical justification in the case of these two works might be identified as Jesus’ parable of Dives and Lazarus in Lk. 16: 19 – 31 with its short visit to the underworld. Michael is the figure in the Gospel of Nicodemus who appears to Seth at the gates of Paradise to tell him that in 5,500 years God’s Son will arrive on earth to anoint all believers with the oil which he is seeking for the healing of his father, Adam.¹⁴⁹ He also appears in the Descent into Hell in the Passion d’Arras, as does Gabriel¹⁵⁰ The same occurs also at Greban (Owen 239, 241.) In the Visio Pauli (in its various versions) the role of the Archangel Michael was to conduct St Paul around the horrors of hell. It was the model for the tour of hell on which Virgil leads Dante in the Inferno. ¹⁵¹ Michael is mentioned in the text when Virgil reminds Platus of the defeat of the rebellious angels by Michael.¹⁵² Later, Dante includes Michael and Gabriel in his list of scriptural figures which allow the human mind to comprehend the mysteries of heaven and hell.¹⁵³ One could argue that the Visio Pauli tradition combines (ecclesiastical) moral warning with a sort of diegetic acknowledgement of the traumas of medieval life, which included the Black Death. Although Michael was the dominant figure in these tours of hell, the other two archangels did sometimes appear instead. Raphael conducts the tour for the Cistercian novice in the Vision of Gunthelm ¹⁵⁴ Gabriel conducts Mahomet on the tour in the French translation of the hadith dealing with the Prophet’s ascension and tour of hell.¹⁵⁵ Gabriel also appears in the French Miracle de un provost que Nostre Dame delivra , dealing with the curbing of ecclesiastical corruption.¹⁵⁶ The Garganus legend was particularly important in giving prominence to Michael in the medieval period when St Michael was adopted as the warrior angel emblematizing successively the Lombard and Carolingian dynasties The developed Christian legend represented by the story of Garganus is recorded in the ms. De Apparatione Sancti Michaelis (BHL 5948.) It is arguable that if the Qumran War

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See D.D. R.Owen: The Vision of Hell :7. Owen: 237. Reynolds: Dante: 105 – 106, 132. Reynolds: 140, 144– 145. Reynolds: 344. Owen:16 – 17. Owen: 150 ff. Owen: 227– 228.

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Scroll had been available to the medieval tradition it might have constituted a further plank in the trajectory of Michael as the belligerent upholder of dynasties. As we saw earlier, the cult of St Michael was particularly prominent in the exaltation of Charlemagne, migrating westward from Italy to become the narrative which underpinned the cultus at Mont St Michael and by extension that at St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. English literary highlights include the legend’s presence in Mirk’s Festial , Piers Plowman, the Life of Wilfrid, the Life of St Christina, the OE text of The Gospel of Nicodemus , the English metrical version of Pseudo-Methodius, the Cursor Mundi, and the Judgement Play of the Chester Cycle. Of particular note are the passage in the Blickling homily 16 for Michaelmas with its graphic vision of hell and Alcuin’s interpolation of the Monte Gargano legend into a reading of Matt. 18: 1– 10 set in the calendar for the third nocturne of Michaelmas as though (Johnson observes) to mitigate the deleterious effects of using apocryphal material.¹⁵⁷

The Song of Roland The Song of Roland (12thc CE) is remarkable for the prominence given to the Archangel Michael (here ‘Saint Michel de Peril’) and to Gabriel (‘Saint Gabriel’) as the protectors of armies. Yet Penn Szittya has shown that the work exhibits a sharp bifurcation between the view of Roland as an impulsive Germanic hero inspired by Michael and Charlemagne as the Christian general inspired by Gabriel. Counter to the tendency of the overall medieval tradition to promote the cult of St Michael at the expense of that of St Gabriel, this great poem sets up a binary contrast which, whilst celebrating Roland’s prowess in battle under the patronage of Michael, transfers the glory ultimately to Charlemagne, the leader sponsored by Gabriel. The crucial moment becomes the Battle of Roncesvalles in which Roland is defeated and killed, albeit finally enjoying the tribute of having his body conveyed to heaven jointly by the two archangels. In writing against the grain of medieval tradition, the author differentiates his work from convention and adds a layer of piquancy to his poem. Indeed, it might be argued that the author implicitly adds a note of Christian triumphalism, to the extent that Gabriel represents a very specifically Christian form of archangel.

 Johnson: 56.

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Irish Versions There are numerous variations on these hypertexts. Within the corpus of Irish biblical apocrypha we find within the texts recounting the Creation and Fall an account of the order issued by the archangel Michael to Gabriel to summon the court of heaven so that God can address the members following Adam’s transgression: “Let the horn and summoning trumpet be sounded, so that they may be heard throughout the seven heavens, and let all of you go to meet your creator.” All the hosts and throngs of angels of the seven heavens arose, and proceeded together to Paradise to their maker….¹⁵⁸

Michael acts as messenger between God and Adam and then Eve appeals to the King of Heaven to send Michael to cleanse Adam’s soul. Soon Michael and his company of angels arrive to take Adam’s soul to heaven. In the Transitus Marae there is a description of Christ arriving through the clouds from heaven accompanied by Michael to address Paul and Peter who are then enjoined to confront the devil together, whom they fight and defeat. It falls to Michael to command his company to raise Mary’s body up into the clouds.¹⁵⁹ Other texts within the corpus include an Irish version of the Visio Pauli, with Michael once again as a guide during the tour of hell and the Vision of Adomnān where Michael and the Angel of the Trinity present souls to God. Finally, Michael is sent to kill Antichrist with a single blow, converting the whole of humanity to catholic Christianity.¹⁶⁰ Within the corpus of Old English biblical verse, we find angels interpolated into key episodes in the rewritten account of the story of Daniel, such as the angel sent into the fiery furnace to rescue the three youths and the angel who calls Nebuchadnezzar.¹⁶¹

The Mystery Plays Gabriel is the dominant archangel of the European mystery plays, making visitations to Elizabeth and Mary, summoning the men of the tribe of David to lay rods on the Temple altar to determine Mary’s husband and guardian, flying to Egypt to recall the Holy Family from their flight, taking part in a plan to deceive Satan about the identity of the Christ-child and later being sent to liberate Joseph

   

Herbert Herbert Herbert Remley:

and McNamara: Irish Biblical Apocrypha: Selected texts in translation: 6. and Mc Namara: 119 – 131. and Mc Namara: 132– 136, 137– 148 and 149 – 150. Old English Biblical Verse: 278 – 280, 283, 326.

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of Arimathea and Nicodemus from Pilate’s prison. More extraordinarily, in the York ‘Annunciation’ play he is the victim of outrageous suggestions by Joseph about his role in Mary’s pregnancy. In the Corish Ordinalia he parts the sea at the Exodus. He also brings Mary the message of her forthcoming assumption and visits the Emperor to authenticate the Vision of the Virgin. Similarly in Middle English lyric poetry the Visitation to Mary is rhapsodized and Mary herself recaps for the Christ-child Gabriel’s visit. Meanwhile, Raphael was given extra prominence by the growth of the youth confraternity dedicated to his name which flourished in Florence, known simply as the Arcangelo Raffaelo. The confraternity not only performed dramatic versions of the story of Tobit and Raphael but sometimes extracted the two characters from the biblical play to exhort the audience or preach lessons about sin and virtue.¹⁶² Overall, we can say that, despite the tendency for Michael to predominate through the cultus rooted in the Garganus legend and despite the counter-tendency noted in The Song of Roland, the conventional archangels in European literature are Gabriel and Michael. This is seen particularly clearly in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberate (1581) where Gabriel is the messenger sent by God at the outset to Godfrey to commission him to free Jerusalem. (1. 11– 17) and Michael is sent by God to drive devils at Jerusalem back to Hell (9.58 – 65.) Michael also appears to Godfrey to tell him that the moment has arrived to march upon Jerusalem and shows him a vision of the heavenly army which will support his forces (18. 92– 96.)

Romeo and Juliet As we enter the modern period, the almost tribal influence of the cultus legends gives way to interpretations which are much more forward-looking. Unsurprisingly this is first evident in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1599), in Act II, Scene I, has lines in which Romeo compares Juliet to an angel. O, speak again, bright angel, for thou art/ As glorious to this night, being o’er my head/ As is a winged messenger of heaven/ Unto the white-upturned wond’ring eyes/ Of mortals that fall back to gaze ofn him,/ When he bestrides the lazy-acing clouds/ And sails upon the bosom of the air. (Lines 28 – 32.)

 Eisenbichler: The Boys of the Confraternity of the Archangel Raphael: 198 – 217.

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It has been pointed out that Shakespeare is broaching new territory in implicitly ascribing female gender to an archangel.¹⁶³ Yet equally interesting is the question of what biblical or other intertext may be at work here. Shaheen has suggested that the passage is influenced by Acts 1: 9 – 11. (“While they beheld, he was taken up out of their sight. And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven, as he went two men stood by them in white apparel, which also said, …Why stand yet gazing into heaven?”)¹⁶⁴ Whether or not this is the source, the text clearly refers to Juliet in a context which praises her as a quasi-biblical heavenly being (soon afterwards Romeo addresses her as “saint”¹⁶⁵) in a play which is very much concerned with the thin boundary between life and death. It is a measure of the state of the English language at this stage that the term “angel” could be used metaphorically of a human character while still retaining strong connotations of the angel as a keeper of the gates of heaven in the metaphysical sense. The other mediator between heaven and earth in the play is Friar Lawrence whose attempt to engineer a solution to the marriage of the star-crossed lovers by dabbling with fatal herbs brings about the tragic dénouement. In this he is a sort of negative shadow of the rescuing archangel.

Vondel’s Dramas In the Vondel’s play Lucifer (1654), Lucifer is cast as the Archangel Lucifer, with Beelzebub, Apollyon and Belial as his rebellious captains. Vondel’s play dramatizes the conflict between Heaven and a subtly drawn Satan, with Gabriel and Michael cast as the negotiators. The Chorus of Angels has its counterpart in the Chorus of Luciferists. W.A.P. Smit argues that Vondel took Sophocles’ Elektra as his model for the tragedy in which the characters are emblems of the postponed punishment imposed by God. In the case of Vondel’s play Lucifer, the archangel Raphael continues to offer Lucifer peace and pardon if he will renounce his wicked plans. Michael and Gabriel are the emblematic good angels as opposed to Beelzebub and his crew as the reverse. Before this there has been an extensive scene in which Gabriel attempts to bring Lucifer round to acquiescence in the will of God.¹⁶⁶ Beelzebub meanwhile seeks to provoke Lucifer’s antagonism to the power of God. Apollyon is enlisted as Lucifer’s answer to the archangel Michael in the forthcoming con Charlotte Clutterbuck: ‘Angels (Literature)’ in The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception Vol. 1, ed. Hans-Josef Klauck et alii (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009): 1199.  Shaheen: 513.  Line 55.  For a translation see Kirkconnell: 374– 377.

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flict.¹⁶⁷ The Chorus warns of the futility of opposing the message uttered by Gabriel.¹⁶⁸ When Beelzebub tries to stall Michael’s intervention, Michael remains patient in listening to his argument. Eventually, however, in Act Four the divine restraint reaches its limit and Gabriel and Michael return as God’s envoys to presage Michael’s arrival to suppress the revolt. But not before Raphael’s last-minute appeal to Lucifer to relent.¹⁶⁹ In Act Five Lucifer’s defeat by the legions of Michael is graphically described by the angel Uriel.¹⁷⁰ It is left to Michael himself to declare the defeat of the Arch-Fiend and for Gabriel to draw the lessons¹⁷¹. In Vondel’s Adam in Ballingschap (1664), the sequel to Lucifer, Gabriel and Raphael and Michael appear on stage to recap the expulsion of Lucifer and to celebrate the glories of Eden.¹⁷² But, after the Fall, it is left to Uriel to describe the consequences of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden. The celestial victory of the first play is succeeded by the human tragedy of the second, as human willpower proves to be weak point.

Milton’s Paradise Lost Vondel stands in many ways on the cusp of modernity with his mixture of heavy didactic allegorizing and yet nuanced approach to the struggle between the archangels and Satan. Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) was written only shortly after Vondel’s plays and yet marks a decisive shift towards modernity in that it famously gives full reign to its portrayal of Satan (often claimed to dominate this epic) and also introduces Raphael as man’s friend (rather than Gabriel) in the Eden story. It has been suggested that Milton was drawn to the depiction of Raphael in the Book of Tobit by the theme of blindness. At the same time there was strong interest in Tobit in Milton’s time, despite its firm rejection from the biblical canon of the Puritans. Beverley Sherry argues that Milton’s selection of Raphael to become such a central figure in Paradise Lost points to the use of the Tobit story as a strong intertext for Milton’s great epic. Beyond this, the archangels Gabriel and Michael also have parts central to the structure of PL. Book IV has Gabriel sent on a mission to fend off Satan from intervening in Eden, where he appoints two angels to protect Adam. In Book V Ra-

     

Kirkconnell: 378 – 380. Kirkconnell: 385 – 390. Kirkconnell: 401– 407. Kirkconnell: 410 – 415. Kirkconnell: 416 – 420. Kirkconnell: 443 – 447.

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phael arrives to declare the glories of Paradise, his address to Eve echoing Gabriel’s salutation to Mary: “Haile, ….” V:386 – 7. In Book VI we find Raphael’s account of the war in heaven between Satan and the archangels Michael and Gabriel. In Book VIIR Raphael at request of Adam relates the story of the Creation of heaven, the expulsion of Satan and his angels from heaven, and God’s decision to create another world. In Book VIII there are further explanations by Raphael, bringing history up to date, and then the repeated admonishments expressed by Raphael before he departs. Book 9 presents an account of the Fall and Michael’s explanation of the events which will ensue after the Fall. Book X sees the guardian angels return to heaven and being exonerated for the Fall. In Book XI Michael is sent to evict the protoplasts from Paradise. Books XI and XII are much taken up with Michael conveying the protoevangelium to Adam and Eve. Michael gives Adam a vision of events leading up to the Flood. In Book XII Michael continues with an account of events from the Flood through the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of the promised Seed of the Woman through to the present day: and describes the state of the church till the Second Coming. In lines 534– 536 the church is found under attack from inside and out, with St Sebastian as an emblem of its sufferings. A tearless Michael leads a tearful Adam and Eve out of Paradise. This Christian version of cathartic tragedy has as its outcome that Adam and Eve are to go “Sorrowing, yet in peace.”¹⁷³ The expulsion of the protoplasts at the end of Paradise Lost also marks the removal of angels from close involvement in the human scene until the Final Battle led by Michael. Human history henceforth will be spun out between Michael’s violent struggle against Satan portrayed in Chapter VI and that Final Battle in which Michael destroys Satan predicted in Chapter XII, but it will proceed without the intervention of archangels in the new Puritan dispensation. If one were to sketch a ‘trauma studies’ perspective on Paradise Lost in in its cultural context, one might say that for Milton the violent revolution of the regicide was over and the purpose of writing the new epic was to educate the new would-be leaders of the citizenry so that they could “create a nation” capable of enjoying political and religious liberty, as Anna Beer puts it.¹⁷⁴

 PL XI: 113.  Anna Beer: Milton: 347.

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The British Israelites Despite this sense that the era of angelic intervention was over, the literary imagination was not content to let the matter rest. Or, one could say, that it was the folkloric imagination which clung to the prospect of angels and archangels rescuing humanity before the salvific events scheduled for the end of history. Amy Hale in a recent article discusses the part played the Archangel Michael in British nationalism, including William Blake’s work, and culminating in such British Israelite-leaning works as C.G Harrison’s collection of essays The Transcendental Universe, Dion Fortune’s Glastonbury and John Michell’s View over Atlantis. But one particular development is of interest in our tracing of the literary trajectory of biblical archangels and this is the legend of the Angel of Mons.

The Angel of Mons The story concerns the reported appearance of an angel or archangel at Mons during the early stages of WW1. Hemmed in by the enemy, the British Expeditionary force was suddenly rescued by an angel who led a counterattack which took the enemy by surprise and resulted in a victory which was of huge morale-raising value at home in Britain. In many ways it was the journalistic reportage which was key in the legend’s dissemination.¹⁷⁵ In literary terms it seems to have been advanced by the short story ‘The Bowmen’ written by Arthur Machen which itself may have been inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s story of 1893, ‘The Lost Legion.’¹⁷⁶ The fact that the story was published a few days after the Feast of St Michael and All Angels added resonance to the tale. It is interesting that in 1930 a German officer, Colonel Friedrich Herzenwirth claimed that the legend grew out of an abortive attempt by his side to project cinematographic images onto the battle-scene to frighten the enemy.¹⁷⁷ Marina Warner was later to argue that literary representations of angels in the 20th century owe much to the lexicography of cinema.¹⁷⁸ The angel itself in the reported retellings was variously identified as St George by British troops or as St Michael by the French. As evidence that the Legend of Mons was still available to the literary imagination in the 21st century, we may cite Dannie Abse’s poem published in 2009, ‘Terrible Angels,’ which takes a steely look at the

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For a very full account of the legend’s dissemination, see Clarke (2002.) See Julia Briggs: Night Visions: 166 – 167, 171, 223. Clarke: 168 – 169. See the discussion in Signs and Wonders: 453 – 455.

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legend of the Angel of Mons from the point of view of a veteran of the British Expeditionary Force, since “war coarsens… even genteel angels.”¹⁷⁹

Mr Weston’s Good Wine T.F. Powys’s novel Mr Weston’s Good Wine (1927) provides a bridge between the receding supernaturalism of the mythology surrounding the Angel of Mons and the postmodern period. The fictions of this writer are noted for presenting a vision of earthy English rusticism punctuated by interventions (allegorical or otherwise) by doom-laden agents of the supernatural. In this case the visit of the mysterious Mr Weston to the village of Folly Down is the occasion of numerous upheavals in the lives of the local people, including the visit of the Archangel Michael to Tamar, the daughter of the publican in charge of the village pub, the Angel Inn. Somehow constant gazing at the painted inn-sign has induced a passion for Archangel Michael in Tamar and she dreams of meeting him under an oak tree in the nearby wood: “No one in Folly Down had ever doubted that the original of the picture upon the Angel Inn signboard must be somewhere and …it was by no means impossible that such an appearance in human form might one day come to Tamar. He would fly down, change his wings into a Sunday coat, go in under the oak tree, and wait for the young girl.”¹⁸⁰ The attachment reaches its gloomy apotheosis when, on her imagined night of marriage with the angel, Tamar’s lifeless body is found beneath the tree which has been struck by lightning. The episode is a microcosm of the bittersweet, heterodox theology which pervades the whole novel.

Birchwood In the more recent postmodern period, the archangels have been revived in more sophisticated and nuanced ways, from John Banville’s novel Birchwood to Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames. The Banville novel inverts the traditional narratives about angelic intervention with Gabriel as the rather passive inheritor of an AngloIrish estate set in the 1840s, although there are strong overtones of the world of De Valera’s Ireland of the 1930s. The novel’s main protagonist, Gabriel Godkin, shares some of the characteristics of an archangel, in that he often seems to be a detached

 Abse: 92.  Powys: 176.

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observer of the human scene and is able to flit quite abruptly at point between two worlds as he escapes the moribund world of the Irish country house and joins a travelling circus. His surname also seems to suggest the overlay of the metanarrative of a hegemonic imperial power. However, the central theme of the novel is the collapse of the metanarrative which has supported British imperialism and the resulting disintegration of the values and attitudes which accompanied it. Significantly the pivotal moment is set on the Feast of St Gabriel the Archangel,¹⁸¹ for this is the day when Gabriel’s father hands over the management of the depleted Birchwood and its estate to him, as he struggles with the advice, Keep a grip, boy, just keep a grip and you’ll be all right. ¹⁸²The point of the narrative is that it is too late to keep a grip on this decaying estate, with the local population increasingly disrespectful and rebellious and Gabriel himself too easy-going and too aware of the social changes underway in Ireland to want to reprise the role of the firm landlord. Increasingly the original, indigenous families will seek to take over, even if their initial attempts are inept. Despite its moments of comedy, the novel memorializes the violence and brutality of life in parts of Ireland in the period and adds to the linkage between the afterlife of the Gabriel hypotext and trauma theory. It combines a subversion of the hegemonic Gabriel narrative with a recuperation of Gabriel as a figure associated with recovery from trauma, or at least the outworking of trauma.

The Satanic Verses If Birchwood deals in a rather sober and cold-eyed way with the aftermath of empire, then Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) adopts a completely different tone even as it deploys the same biblical and Quranic figure as a central character. The novel is generally regarded as a satire of the attitudes of Indians, particularly Indian immigrants into the UK in the postwar period. As Marina Warner observes, the archangel Gabriel in this novel is not the object of the satire. In fact this elaborate lampoon of Indian attitudes to colonialism both at home in the immigrant community in London uses Gabriel (“ Gibreel”) as the name of one of its chief two characters, a Indian film star who has been influenced by his dead mother’s treatment of him as an ‘angel’ and who goes on to lead a life of libertinism which is anything but angelic before developing symptoms of schizophrenia which finally lead him to murder his latest girlfriend in act of jealousy. This magic-realist

 Banville: 89.  Banville: 91.

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novel also has a dream-sequence in which Gabriel induces thousands of followers to attempt to walk across the water to Mecca, resulting in their drowning or (as one account has it) miraculous rescue by the archangel. Part of Gabriel or Gibreel’s function in the novel is to act as a part of the binary, Angel/Gabriel, in which the opposite pole is Saladin/Satan. It is beyond our scope in this paper to evaluate The Satanic Verses as a work of literature, let alone its impact on inter-faith dialogue. Yet it is important to document it as a stage in the literary reception-trajectory.

Miss Garnet’s Angel Sally Vickers’s novel Miss Garnet’s Angel (2000) recuperates the story of Tobit in a modern romance set in Venice. The angel Raphael appears sporadically during Julia Garnet’s touristic stay in the city, where she has arrived to assuage the grief of losing her close friend Harriet. The novel approaches the biblical-apocryphal story of Tobit from a number of angles, including Julia’s initial personal researches into the Tobit story (a useful recapitulation of the hypotext for the general reader), Julia’s discovery of carvings depicting the story in a Venetian church, her meetings with the academic researcher Charles Cutforth and some uncanny reiterations of the story in the shape of the activity of the church restorer Toby and his sister Sarah and memories of both a medieval miracle story in the time of the plague and the escape of a Jewish victim of the city’s fascist era. However, the novel is brought to life by the encounters which Julia Garnett experiences with the actual angel Raphael, transforming her own repressed libido and also reasserting the force of the supernatural in the skeptical world of modernity. Less reassuring perhaps for a bourgeois audience is Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames (2007). Abani’s novel has the Archangel Gabriel make repeated visits to the main protagonist, mostly at critical points in his journey of self-discovery. This aspect of the novel plays off the notion of Los Angeles as “the city of angels” and the diegetic content is largely concerned with the shadowland of the city’s subculture of strip-clubs and mostly deprived citizens. Black, as the main character, represents both the futile quest for meaning in the city’s less salubrious areas and the possibility of a grim persistence in the face of adversity. In his case this adversity includes Black’s struggles with his own sexual identity, struggles which simultaneously seem to highlight the oppressive reach of white-dominated patriarchy in American culture. The visits of the rather puckish Gabriel-figure correspond to the sense that there must be some force which transcends the oppressive conditions of life for the poor in the city. The diegetic links with the genocides in Rwanda, the 9/11 attacks on the USA and the war in Iraq accord with with the idea of this sort of fiction as the outcome of suppressed trauma.

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Lost Paradise Cees Nooteboom’s novel Lost Paradise (2008) inverts the title of Milton’s epic in its English title, though the original Dutch title is Paradijs Verloren. Either title, however, invokes Milton’s work in its recovery of the narrative of the conditions for human flourishing. Recovering from trauma, in this case a rape attack in São Paulo, the character Alma travels with her friend Almut to Australia where they eventually encounter the Angel Project in Perth, an artistic experiment in which actors dressed as angels roam the city and meet the public at random moments. Although a very contrived event, it does have a healing effect on the women and the novel concludes with an epilogue in which Almut draws Alma’s attention the closing scene in Paradise Lost, Book XII. The effect is recontextualize Milton’s epic as the framework for a rite of passage in the jet-travel world of the twentyfirst century. Now the angels are stage-managed by a human production team and Eden takes the form of Australia as visited by tourists who enjoy the encounter and then are exiled again back to their homeland.

Conclusion The three archangels (at various points in the trajectory almost interchangeable) begin as circumlocutions for God, become in the medieval period not just the bridge between human affairs and heavenly but also a means of validating human society, from the military ambitions of Charlemagne to the educationally nurturing culture of Florence. Milton’s Paradise Lost bids farewell to the era of tyrannical kings, as Michael casts Satan from heaven, and looks forward rather optimistically to a new age of republican democracy informed by radical Christian values. In the modern era angelology becomes the resort of the quest for hope amidst the despair of the WWI trenches and later the instrument of revolt against either modern mercantile materialism or the reductionism of modern philosophical positivism. At the same time there develops a specific link between the rewriting of the biblical tropes relating to Gabriel, Michael and Raphael and the handling of trauma. The three figures act as proxies for the divine in the Age of Faith when religious sensibilities demand circumlocutionary ways of inscribing divine activity. Equally in more sceptical times they become ciphers for a more understated form of theology of the sort outlined in Peter Berger’s Rumour of Angels or simply for a rejection of the hegemonic language of modern industrialized culture. The irony, of course, is that even this sort of “alternative” language is open to commodification. Overall, however, the three archangels have a claim to represent the liminal state in human experience.

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Angels in modern literature can appear as dream-like hybrids, half way between earth or heaven, half way between natural and supernatural, or half way between life and death. Just as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a play in which the morbid ending is underlined by the chorus from the very beginning, Romeo sees Juliet as an angel, so the angels in many of the more recent examples we have considered negotiate the boundary between life and death, from the various literary antecedents and expressions of the legend of Mons to the treatment of the angel as a symbol of morbidity in Mr Weston’s Good Wine and those more recent novels which begin with the aftermath of a personal trauma, Miss Garnet’s Angel and Lost Paradise. There are also the memorialized genocidal events which reverberate in The Angel of Flames. Occupying the boundary between life and death, the archangels form part of narratives which promise to open up new perceptions on life on earth, from the medieval Visio Pauli with its stark warnings about Judgement Day to John Banville’s Birchwood, where a colonial way of life is collapsing, or Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames where gender identities are under scrutiny. Whether or not the texts in which they occur are ostensibly dream visions, the presence of Michael, Gabriel and Raphael in these narratives is suggestive of a dream-like state in which ultimate or radically new verities are vouchsafed. This can only be a facet of their roots in those biblical passages where angels appear to individuals in dreams at critical moments in their lives.

Chapter Six: Three Early Twentieth-Century Excursionists: H. Rider Haggard, John Masefield and Claude McKay This chapter and the succeeding chapters will examine some representative literary rewritings of biblical topoi belonging to the modern and postmodern periods. The grouping of three or more major works in each case is for convenience rather than because these works in the aggregate constitute some sort of canon or can be fitted into some ascending scale of radicalism or sophistication. As every student of literature knows, literary history is not a linear journey from simplicity to complexity and can travel from the subtle characterizations of Chaucer in the fourteenth-century to the plain black-and-white Romanticism of Walter Scott in the nineteenth. Nevertheless, it is to be expected that the writers of the three blocks of time covered in the first group of chapters (1910 – 1934 in this chapter; 1964– 1999 in Chapter Seven; 2010 – 2016 in Chapter Eight) share something of the same Zeitgeist. The authors covered in Chapters Nine and Ten are more diverse. The question of the awareness of individual authors in relation to each other’s work and to the cumulative literary reception history of the biblical topos they have chosen to rewrite is not always easily resolved but will be kept in mind. We shall explore each hypertext in terms of three factors: how it works structurally as a reactivation of its hypotext; the diegetic content which is specific to it (for example, this would be the First World War in the case of Robert Graves’s poem ‘Goliath and David’) ; and its capacity to evoke experiences which transport the reader into what James Wood describes as “lifeness”, a reading experience which goes beyond that of perceiving the “lifelike” and engages the reader’s sympathies at a deep level.¹⁸³ In this chapter the works under consideration are two novels by Rider Haggard, The Queen of Sheba’s Ring (1910) and Belshazzar (1924¹⁸⁴), the play by John Masefield, A King’s Daughter (1924) and Claude McKay’s short story, ‘The Prince of Puerto Rico’(1934). They therefore span a significant part of the early twentieth-century. None of these works is a literary landmark in the way of the poetry of T.S. Eliot or Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brethren. Yet each of them is important as a literary rewriting of a biblical story and each of them conveys something about either the human condition or the state of the master narratives which seek to frame human experience.  See James Wood: How Fiction Works (London: Jonathan Cape: 2008): 128 – 136.  Completed just before the author’s death in 1924, though not published until 1930. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-007

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H.Rider Haggard (1856 – 1925) was a Norfolk country estate owner, sometime traveller and soldier in colonial Africa and a very prolific author of adventure novels, who became influential in British government circles as an adviser on new agricultural methods. H. Rider Haggard was one of the pioneers of the adventure novel and is credited with providing the matrix for the highly successful Indiana Jones movies of a later period. Norman Vance has argued that Rider Haggard’s novels are more than thrillers and in fact articulate surprisingly fluently the sense of the sublime which at the turn of the twentieth-century was becoming associated with the comparative study of religion.¹⁸⁵ One of the foremost exponents of such study was Andrew Lang, a close friend of Rider Haggard. Vance discusses four of Rider Haggard’s novels King Solomon’s Mines, She, Allan Quartermain and Child of the Storm. Here we will be concerned with two other works from the author’s prodigious output. The novel The Queen of Sheba’s Ring is one of the numerous examples of Henry Rider Haggard’s popular thrillers, adventure stories tinged with a numinous quest. This particular work followed in the wake of the enormously successful King Solomon’s Mines, using much of the same formula and again exploiting the biblical resonances of its title. The plot concerns the journey of its first-person narrator, Richard Adams, an English doctor living in Egypt, who is persuaded to join an expedition into the depths of Abyssinia to destroy a vast stone idol in order to release the Abati people (Abyssinian Jews) from the threat posed by their enemies, the Fung. Adams has lost his wife to a fever. The Queen of Sheba’s ring is not the object of the quest, since it is already in the possession of Captain Orme, one of the members of the forthcoming expedition, who received it as a token from the Queen of the Abati, together with some gold, to persuade him to help launch the rescue mission. Instead of being motivated by a quest for treasure, Adams and the leader of the adventurers (Professor Higgins, an eminent palaeontologist) are engaged in what amounts to a mythical journey, though represented as a strategic militarystyle intervention, rather like a small Special Operations squad intent on saving the lives of an embattled religious minority whose survival is critical for mysterious divine purposes. The practical motivation of Orme is provided by the information that his son is held captive by the Fung. Here the operational military experience of Rider Haggard himself in Africa and his fascination with history-ofreligions research (including the theories of his friend Andrew Lang) meet in the most unlikely and yet exciting sort of fusion. Haggard’s skill as a writer is to combine action-narrative suspensiveness with the sense that momentous issues are at stake at the level of human consciousness and religion. Later thriller writ-

 Vance: 161– 189.

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ers, such as John Buchan and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, were to exploit the genre further, though leaving the “momentous issues” at the level of the threat to national security from Bolshevism or some other ruthless political system or force. The expedition is a riot of dangerous episodes, exotic biblical allusions and (for us in the twenty-first century) political incorrectness. The small group narrowly escape death caused by sun stroke, hunger or thirst in the desert and then at the hands of the Fung. They are accompanied by a dog named Pharaoh and their caravan is led by a shady character named Shadrach who repeatedly tries to cheat them. When some of the Abati support-group are killed by lions, Adams enjoys a little lion shooting (which seems to go beyond the defensive) and later they secure food through attacking some unfortunate antelopes. In the convoluted plot which follows the party succeed in avoiding the Fung cavalry and manage to mine under their citadel and to topple the dreaded sphinx known as Harmac. This is likened to Joshua’s assault on Jericho, though soon the expeditionary party have to deal with a general called Joshua, who turns out to be a fifth column in the régime of Maqueda, the latter-day Queen of Sheba. After surviving a violent assault on the city of the Abati, Adams and company, having seen off the insurgents, finally bid farewell to Maqueda’s realm and return home. Meanwhile, the narrative has reactivated the religious world of both the Abati (which bears striking resemblances to Ethiopian tradition) and that of their adversaries. It turns out that deeper forces drive human behavior than the pursuit of wealth, as the issue of the possession of the ring at the outset of the novel already signals. The stance of The Queen of Sheba’s Ring in terms of ethnic and racial issues is complex. On the surface there is what we might term the gung-ho colonialism of an adventure story which intrudes itself upon an African canvas. Shorn of the textual niceties of Rider Haggard’s prose, this is the sentiment which drives the very successful Indiana Jones films. Yet there are many nuances in this novel. Sergeant Quick exudes a form of casual, thoughtless anti-Semitism when he describes Maqueda to Captain Orme as “the pleasantest to look at I every clapped eyes on, though a benighted African Jew.”¹⁸⁶ Yet Maqueda is the novel’s most noble character, reminding us of that other heroic Jewish female, the central protagonist of Moon Over Israel. The Queen’s subjects include a rich mixture of personalities, from the scheming Joshua to the rascal Shadrach, though their ethnicity never seems to be a factor. Perhaps most interesting to the twenty-first century reader is the tentative theology, which could be described as a blend of respect for indigenous religions and a workaday form of English pragmatism. Central to the novel’s plot are both the res-

 Queen Sheba’s Ring: 93.

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cue of the Abati people from oppression by the Fung and the rescue of Captain Orme’s son, who is held captive by the Fung. In both cases what is being rescued is something precious to the novel’s horizon of a pluralist world in which people of different religious persuasions rub along peaceably with each other. The Abati represent an esoteric form of Judaism which is under threat from a brutal warlord. The captain’s son embraces a kind of rough and ready English spirituality, represented by his skill in singing “Abide with me.” The narrative’s structural relationship to the biblical trope could be characterized as that of a sequel to the visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon. Here the British expeditionary party represent a sort of quest for understanding which combines the “wisdom” of the colonial outlook with a genuine openness to the presence of the numinous in exotic cultures and yet still manages to pay tribute to a liberalized sense of the Bible as an overarching framework. It is less a case of the pagan world being baptized through the use of biblical tropes than that of the biblical Weltanschauung being expanded. The attractiveness of this formula for popular culture is evident in the success of Haggard’s corpus of thrillers as a whole and their afterlife in the four film versions of King Solomon’s Mines, which in their divergent plots borrow passages from across the writer’s oeuvre. The Indiana Jones movies which followed later owe a great deal to the matrix which these films supplied.

Belshazzar H. Rider Haggard’s final novel Belshazzar ((first published in1930) was completed shortly before his death in 1925 and is an adventure story set in the sixth-century BCE which finds its apotheosis in the biblical episode of Belshazzar’s Feast. The main protagonist and first-person narrator is the fictive Ramose, son of the Pharaoh Apries by a concubine, who becomes a trusted envoy of the Pharaoh and at the same time falls in love with Atyra, widow of the King of Syria, who has come to beg for the Pharaoh’s support against the aggressive Babylonian empire. Atyra has herself fallen in love with Ramose but is murdered by the jealous Syrian high priest, Ninari, who in turn is defenestrated by Ramose who now must vacate the scene, having incurred the wrath of the Syrian gods and compromised his mission as the Pharaoh’s emissary. Indeed, we learn that the Pharaoh plans to have Ramose killed to placate the Syrians. Now the wise Belus is sent to keep an eye on the Egyptian army (with its Greek mercenaries) and takes Ramose with him, disguised as a scribe. The army under General Amasis defeats not just a Syrian force but also the larger Babylonian army itself under Merodach. Amasis decides not to pursue the Babylonians back into their own territory since they have further forces there. In

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the aftermath of the battle a dying Jewish princess, Mysia, entrusts her young daughter, Myra, to the guardianship of Ramose, together with her precious bag of royal jewels. She tells Ramose that a voice has told her to trust him, though she also advises him that she will either call down “the blessing of Jehovah” on him or (alternatively) “His curse” if he fails her.¹⁸⁷ Thereafter Ramose looks after Myra, with Metep as her nurse and Belus the physician and astrologer accompanying them everywhere as friend and confidante. To avoid the jealousy or wrath of Apries, they travel to Cyprus where Ramose trades successfully as a merchant. Later they return to Memphis, the home of Chloe, Ramose’s mother, and eventually it is from here that Myra is abducted on the eve of her wedding to Ramose and taken away to become the bride of the ageing Babylonian king, Nabonidus, who dies before anything further can happen. After a labyrinthine series of plots and counterplots, Myra becomes the chosen bride of the evil King Belshazzar (following the death of Nabonidus) and it is only the Writing on the Wall which saves her and allows Ramose and Myra to be re-united in the novel’s romantic ending. Chapter XXI, ‘The Writing on the Wall,’ is the novel’s final chapter and occupies fifteen pages in the Dodo Press reprint, consisting of about 7000 words, compared with the King James version of Daniel 5: 1– 30, which comprises about 1100 words. If Haggard amplifies the hypotext nearly sevenfold, he does so in order to render the trope of Belshazzar’s Feast the denouement of the novel. Significant changes include the presence of the novel’s main fictive figures in the rewritten episode, the expansive railing against the God of Judah ascribed to Belshazzar, the sense of the Writing on the Wall being accompanied by the eerie presence of Death personified, and finally by the astrologer Belus being inscribed as the slayer of Belshazzar, an act of vengeance or reparation for the previous murder of Belus’ daughter now reported in the novel. Moreover, Belshazzar’s Feast becomes in the novel the would-be wedding feast of Belshazzar and Myra, which Belshazzar views as the seal on the peace which he now expects to ensue between Babylon and Egypt. This is therefore in Genettian terms both a substantial amplification of the hypotext and a re-motivation, to fit the novel’s adventure story and romantic plot. At another level, since the entire novel bears the title Belshazzar, this is an expansion much greater than sevenfold, more like a thousandfold, since the total number of words is around 120,000. On this showing the first twenty chapters recounting the life of Ramose and his family and associates culminate in Chapter XXI and indeed the final words of the novel are:

 Belshazzar: 61.

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Here ends the story of Ramose the Egyptian, son of Apres and of his wife, Myra… of how God saved them out of the hand of Belshazzar, King of Babylon.

In other words, the fictive Ramose and company are not simply off-stage characters in the biblical drama who wander on-stage for the purposes of the novel, like Rosencrantz and Guildernstern in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead. Rather it is the story of Ramose and associates which overhauls the story of Belshazzar. This even extends to Belus becoming the one who kills Belshazzar. A further aspect of this hegemony of the novel’s narrative is that the biblical warning story about evil rulers in Babylon (which is part of the larger and more complex story about Daniel the prophet) is replaced by a sort of travelogue which takes the reader on a sixth-century BCE tour of the world from Egypt to Cyprus to Babylon and back, with some quite sustained immersion in the reconstructed religions of the region. For example, the Egyptian cult of the bull Apis is materialized in the episode of the birth of a calf with the markings associated with that bovine deity on Ramose’s farm at Memphis. The birth prompts a visit from the new Pharaoh who is fully alert to the implications.¹⁸⁸ If the “god of mercy” who is also the God of Judah is finally triumphant (at least as rescuer of the heroes) then he receives vastly less coverage than in the Book of Daniel. The result is a version of salvation history which seems very at ease with world religions and even polytheism as long as they do not try to damage the religion of Judah. We are offered a duality in which Ramose can tell Belus, “Truly the gods have set a snare for us” after Myra has been abducted from the house in Memphis¹⁸⁹ and yet there is space for the Hebrew God to rescue those whom he favors. As in several of Rider Haggard’s other novels, Judaism is most supported when it is represented by a female hero. In Belshazzar, of course, proto-feminist sympathy for Myra is balanced by the firm portrayal of Chloe, mother of Ramose, as an out-and-out villainess who meets an end not dissimilar to that of the biblical Jezebel. Other values evident in the novel are those of the country-estate owner, with Ramose busy restoring a grand residence first in Cyprus and then in Memphis, the ‘Happy House’ to which the family retire at the end, with the prospect of generations of children in the future ready to take on the property, part and parcel of which is this very foundational tale.

 Belshazzar: 92– 109.  Belshazzar: 144.

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Jezebel Rehabilitated John Masefield (1878 – 1967) was an English poet and dramatist. He played a leading part in the movement which eventually led to the removal of the prohibition on biblical drama in Britain, of which his own play Good Friday (1917) was one of the first fruits. It surprised audiences by being mainly about Pontius Pilate. In 1922 he published what he termed an “adaptation” of Racine’s play Esther, which in fact radically altered that work, and in 1923 his play about Queen Jezebel appeared, entitled A King’s Daughter. In 1928 he wrote the pageant The Coming of Christ for the Canterbury Festival, a drama which played up the cosmic dimensions to the story, and in 1930 he became Poet Laureate. John Masefield’s play A King’s Daughter belongs both to the history of the revival of biblical drama in Britain and to the history of radical reworkings of biblical stories. Finding its hypotext in I Kings 16: 29 – 34, 21: 1– 29, and 2 Kings 9: 1– 30, the play makes substantial changes to the plot, partly in order to achieve unity of time and place and partly to exculpate Jezebel and to paint Elijah as a fanatical prophet. This play is important as a radical reworking which reactivates the hypotext by extending moral sympathy to a stereotypical villainess (Queen Jezebel) and does this partly by invoking an intertext previously not associated with its topos. The intertext is provided through chorus’s recital of the story of Helen of Troy, a character not only unassociated hitherto with Jezebel but one with a distinctly positive literary reception history. Elijah, though one of the key characters in the biblical story is named simply ‘the prophet,’ as though to counteract conventional readings of the story, which overwhelmingly valorize Elijah at the expense of his opponent, Jezebel. In addition, Naboth’s position as victim is modified by presenting him as a rather unimaginative religious bigot and most importantly by introducing the idea that his vineyard needs to be requisitioned by Jehu for strategic reasons connected with the strengthening of the defenses of the royal city of Jezreel. In her efforts to persuade Naboth to give up his vineyard, Jezebel appears to be willing to offer him excessively generous forms of compensation, right up to the moment where he definitively rejects all of them. Moreover, Jezebel is pictured as stepping in to promote the royal government’s cause only when King Ahab shows a complete lack of resolution. Seen from the perspective of British respect for the monarchy, Masefield’s play becomes more understandable, especially when Naboth becomes unrestrained in his cursing of Jezebel and the royal court. (Masefield himself could be said to have moved in British royal circles later when he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1930.) It is possible that the spectre of anarchic upheaval which Naboth’s outburst before Jezebel presented outweighed for the play’s London audience in 1923 cultural

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memories of Elijah as the stalwart upholder of divine truth, especially as he was stripped of his name in the drama. Indeed, his main speech evoking this role seems to be completely out of kilter with the play’s poetry and almost robotic and sterile: I am bringer of Truth out of the hidden, I am finder of ways where footing is sure, I am sword and shield against things forbidden. I am brightness to guide, healing to cure; Mine are the words that endure. I, now, about to declare as the Spirit orders, Cry, let women avoid, let children hide, Let none but spearmen be here, the city’s warders. I speak, out of the Truth, words that abide. Men only may hear what might of men must decide. Men only may hear what might of men must decide.

The Prince of Porto Rico Claude McKay (1889 – 1948) was a Jamaican writer who became one of the central figures in the Harlem Renaissance. ¹⁹⁰ Best known for his novels, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933), he was also a prolific poet and essayist. At different times in response to his experience of racism in the USA, McKay was attracted to the Communist Revolution in Russia and the religious skepticism of Walter Jekyll, author of The Untrustworthy Bible. The poem ‘The Lynching’ (1920) was pioneering in describing the Crucifixion in terms of the lynching of a black victim of racism. It preceded Countée Cullen’s better known poem The Black Christ by nine years. In 1944 McKay was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church in Chicago. ‘The Prince of Porto Rico’ is the fifth short story in the collection Gingertown. This short story offers no immediate signals that it is a rewriting of the biblical hypotext. It begins in typical storytelling mode: “There were four customers, varying in complexion from coffee to cream, comfortably settled in four of the elaborate chairs specially designed for tonsorial parlors.”¹⁹¹ The register is jocular and mildly pompous. The owner or manager of the established is named as Manuel and he comes from Porto Rico. The diegetic setting is established as the Belt, a fashionable business area within Harlem. When Manuel answers the telephone, we discov-

 Claude McKay: Gingertown (Harper & Bros: New York 1932. Reprinted Ayer Company, Salem, New Hampshire 1991: 32– 54.  McKay: 32.

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er that he is the “Prince” of the story’s title. The phone call reveals a low life world in which it is arranged for Manuel to sneak in to visit a woman named Tillie at the home of a procuress, Bella, while her normal client Hank is away. Bella’s establishment exists for the entertainment of the area’s bad boys: “…a little gambling, a little music, a little drinking and a little loving.”¹⁹² Next, we learn that Tillie’s surname is Worms and we are introduced to her husband, Uriah Worms, whose work as a bell-boy in a downtown hotel keeps him away from home in the evenings. The resemblance of the revealed name to that of Dickens’s character in David Copperfield, Uriah Heap, and possibly the resonance with the intertext of the biblical Job suffering from worms on his dung heap, at last points to the David and Bathsheba biblical hypotext. We are told that Uriah is a blameless figure who treats his wife well. The background story of Tillie’s loneliness in the evenings and her friendship with Bella is filled in. The relationship with Hank, one of the customers at Bella’s salon is sketched and it seems to have progressed smoothly until the perfidious Tillie caps eyes on another, more glamorous customer, the eponymous Prince, the darling of women in the Belt. Partly because of the jealousy of Hank, the abandoned beau, future trysts between the Prince and Tillie occur in a special bedroom. Tillie has moved up in the world by attaching herself to this smart “Negroid Latin.” However, trouble arises when the spurned Hank suddenly appears at a poker game in Bella’s establishment when he was supposedly in New York (here “Yonkers”). Hank threatens to spill the beans to Uriah, though it seems at first as though he will be deterred by the prospect of the Prince’s influence in gangland. Finally, however, his jealousy and rage get the upper hand and he phones Uriah at the Hotel Martin where he works, telling him (anonymously) to get home to his flat. Uriah rushes home by taxi and pounds on the door which is apparently chained. Tillie finally lets him in, while the Prince exits down the fire-escape. Uriah pursues the fugitive, who by now has cut his bare feet on broken bottles and empty cans. Uriah draws his gun and shoots the man dead. He disappears into the darkness down a side street as a police whistle is heard. Just before this, the narrator reports Uriah’s words over the prone body of the Prince: ‘“Mah own pyjamas, too,” he said.’¹⁹³ The comic register has been restored and the plot of the hypotext reversed in what we might pedantically call an ‘unfaithful continuation’ in Genettian terms. More specifically McKay’s short story draws the reader into a disguised rewriting which reverses the narrative of the hypotext both

 McKay: 34.  McKay: 54.

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by changing the ending and by adopting a comic register. At the same time ‘The Prince of Porto Rico’ as a piece of writing in its own right immerses the reader in a vividly inscribed diegetic world, that of part of Harlem during the 1920s, for which the narrative discourse is a sort of wrapper. The semiotic signal of the whole entity may be that grass-roots black values have the strength to defeat imported colonialist values or that the underdog finally triumphs or that Bathsheba is the dominant agent in what appears to be a series of transactions between males of varying status. That is until it turns out that the marriage relationship has the upper hand. Unlike the situation in the biblical hypotext, there is an external judicial power (the police force), though it is unable to exert any influence except at the margins. Moreover, the murderer in the hypertext has acted on impulse and not through the careful processes of calculation implicit in David’s treatment of the biblical Uriah. The biblical victim has (through the intervention of the first man to commit adultery with his wife) punished and indeed destroyed the hypertext’s King David figure. This King David has no subsequent history and in fact his main claim on posterity is that a short story has been named after him. Uriah lives on below the parapet of history, a latecomer in the narrative and yet a survivor. McKay regarded the short stories in Gingertown as “some of my best material.”¹⁹⁴ ‘The Prince of Puerto Rico’ embodies a diegetic world very familiar to McKay, the Harlem cabarets whose lady entertainers (some of them married) were encouraged to flirt with customers to secure tips and to persuade them to spend more on drinks.¹⁹⁵ McKay recorded that he himself carried a revolver “for self-defense” at the time of heightened racial tensions in New York during World War I.¹⁹⁶ This short story was written after McKay’s lengthy stays in Europe and Russia during the period 1919 – 1923, which may have lent the necessary ‘distance’ for the act of writing, as he found with the memoir, Home to Harlem.¹⁹⁷ As an extreme rewriting, ‘The Prince of Porto Ric’ offers the reading pleasure of a subversive plot, reversing the outcome of a readily recognizable biblical hypotext. The main protagonist’s name, Uriah, is distinctively associated with the central victim of the biblical story of David and Bathsheba and with its troubling, previous reworking in Dickens’s David Copperfield, so that McKay’s short story is in a sense a double reversal, firstly of the victimhood of the character in 2 Samuel and secondly of the sinister underhandedness of the Dickens character. There is a her-

 See Wayne Cooper (ed.): The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Prose and Poetry 1912 – 1948 (New York: Schocken Books 1973): 156, 339 note 3. The quotation is from a letter from Claude McKay to Claire Lennard, dated 31st January 1947.  Cooper: 216.  Cooper: 221– 222.  Cooper: 211.

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meneutical surplus in the comic explosion of a supposedly rigid plot, as well as the satisfaction offered by the defeat of the villain. If we extend the sense of the rigid plot to the diegetic setting in Harlem, it is possible to see the story as the encoding of hope for the dismantling of a still more insidious and pervasive narrative. In the next chapter we will look again at another, quite different rewriting of the story of Uriah, Moshe Shamir’s The Hittite Must Die. Meanwhile, we should observe that each of the examples considered here contains formal features which indicate an upheaval in the reception. In both of the Rider Haggard adventure novels the introduction of supernumerary characters causes a rebalancing of the structure, even to the extent of almost swamping the base text. In Masefield’s play and in McKay’s short story there are significant name changes, signals in the Genettian schema of “an unfaithful continuation.” Thus, in A King’s Daughter Elijah’s name is suppressed and he is called just “the Prophet”. It is as though the rewriting seeks to distance itself from the positive connotations of the biblical name. In ‘The Prince of Porto Rico’ the name of Uriah’s antagonist is a slang name, borrowed from a gangland subculture, indicating at the very least a revaluation of the terms of the narrative. In both cases a character with major biblical resonance is occluded in order to highlight the outcome for another character. Revaluation in Masefield’s play takes the form of an unexpectedly affirmative picture of Queen Jezebel and in McKay’s short story Uriah is uprated from victim to victor through a reversal of the plot. Whereas Rider Haggard’s expansive rewritings confirm the general direction of their biblical hypotexts, while yet luxuriating in huge amplifications of the hypotext, the rewritings of Masefield and McKay contradict the direction of their hypotexts. The Queen of Sheba and Belshazzar’s Feast are fantasies anchored in history-like reality through their association with their biblical hypotexts, while A King’s Daughter and ‘The Prince of Porto Rico’ depend on upsetting or destabilizing their particular biblical hypotexts.

Chapter Seven: Four Later Twentieth-Century Excursionists: A.M. Klein, Moshe Shamir, Michel Tournier and Sylvie Germain This chapter will examine four very significant literary rewritings of biblical stories by, respectively, A.M. Klein, Moshe Shamir, Michel Tournier and Sylvie Germain. Each of them qualifies as an “extreme rewriting” in the sense that they exploit what seem to be the limits of diegetic amplification and innovative adaptation, while yet completely honoring the integrity of the hypotext.

The Second Scroll (1951) Abraham Moses Klein (1909 – 1972) was a celebrated Jewish-Canadian poet, playwright and journalist. Born in Ratno in north-west Ukraine, he emigrated as a child with his parents to Montreal and grew up to become both a practising lawyer and literary critic, as well as creative writer. He was an authority on the works of James Joyce. There is a sense in which all four of the works considered in this chapter are “restitutive,” meaning that they seek to restore meaning or a sense of justice to a situation apparently devoid of those qualities. Yet A.M. Klein’s ambitious novel, The Second Scroll, heads the list not only in terms of the chronology of its publication but because of its ambition to go beyond the silence which understandably characterizes much of the Jewish response to the anomie of the Holocaust. The work begins ominously with the author’s childhood memory of first-hand reports of a pogrom at Ratno sent to his father by their Uncle Melech.¹⁹⁸ A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll sets up the memory of the Holocaust as effectively the Bible, Part Two. The chapters of this novel in their titles correspond to the five books of the Pentateuch, running from ‘Genesis’ to ‘Deuteronomy,’ with the actual diegetic content related to the experience of survivors of the Holocaust and to the relationship of Jewish communities in North America (specifically Canada) to that experience. The Bible itself is treated as “abrogated” by the events of the Shoah and the novel asserts itself as the Bible’s successor, or at least sequel. The novel offers the reader imaginative access to the Shoah and to its aftermath, both in terms of the early days of the establishment of the State of Israel and the gradual assimilation of the truth about the Holocaust by Jewish communities in Cana A.M. Klein: The Second Scroll: 9 – 13. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-008

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da, represented in the novel by a fictive Canadian Jew who arrives to honour his uncle, the scholar Menech, who had been attempting to salvage the traditions of North African Jewish life, bringing a group of Moroccan Jews to Israel. However, it emerges that the uncle has recently been murdered by Arab insurgents. Klein makes use of techniques derived from the novelist James Joyce and at the same time alludes to the general literary tradition, referring to such writers as John Milton. The novel culminates in the resolution that Jewish history must not be brought to an end by the Nazi genocide. Rachel F. Brenner sees the novel as a sophisticated literary project to re-start the Torah, treating the Jewish experience of the Holocaust as a paradigm for new beginnings in the relationship between the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and asserting the preeminent importance of contemporary Hebrew poetry in this endeavor.¹⁹⁹ The final section of The Second Scroll (roughly the final third of the book) consists of poetic, midrashic-style glosses on the major themes of the novel, from ‘Genesis’ onwards, reminding the reader of the great corpus of Klein’s poetry outside this work. The whole work, considered in terms of the Genettian classification scheme, is a revaluation of the Bible (taken as the overall hypotext) on a huge scale.

The Hittite Must Die Moshe Shamir (1921 – 2004) was a prominent Israeli writer and political activist, most famous for his novel The King of Flesh and Blood (1958) and a children’s book about life on the kibbutz, The Fifth Wheel (1961). Moshe Shamir’s novel The Hittite Must Die (1964) has already been discussed in Chapter Three in the context of the general literary reception of the Uriah story. Here a fuller reading will be offered. As we have already seen, the novel is a major expansion of the story of David and Uriah, mostly from Uriah’s viewpoint. It uses the device of the preserved manuscript to represent Uriah’s final thoughts before his death and makes Ahimelech the narrator of the actual death in an epilogue to the main account. This gripping novel exploits the bare bones of the biblical narrative in 2 Sam. 11 and its sequel in 2. Sam. 12, hinging on the questions of Uriah’s awareness of what was happening to him, on the persona of Bathsheba, on the device of the letter and on the critical part which the episode plays in the reputation of David. It

 Rachel F. Brenner, ‘A.M. Klein and The Second Scroll: The Poetics of Post-Holocaust Consciousness,’ in David Bevan (ed.): Literature and the Bible (Amsterdam, Atlanta, 1993): 151– 177.

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amplifies the sense of Uriah as an heroic, isolated figure but grants him the dignity of a glorious end, one which he chooses out of his own free will. The novel accentuates the sense of Uriah as a Hittite and therefore the progeny of a faded empire and places Bathsheba as the opportunist member of a lowly caste who is to become (through the events in the novel) the mother of King Solomon. The human virtues of Uriah as an individual are set against the ruthless power politics of empire. In many ways the discourse is dominated by disillusionment with the Davidic exercise of power. Jacobson in his study Modern Midrash relates this to the novelist’s attitude to Israeli political life.²⁰⁰ Yet there is no need to reduce the significance of the work to one specific political experience. Shamir imaginatively reconstructs Uriah’s loneliness and isolation. Bound by his military discipline, Uriah can only long for reunion with Bathsheba. He begins to see his whole life as a failure. He remembers Bathsheba’s earlier mockery of him and reflects on how she has always been attracted to the powerful. Eaten up from the inside, he knows that his situation is hopeless and yet his final act of self-sacrifice in attacking the Moabites single-handedly is consistent with his military devotion to David’s cause and with his marital devotion to Bathsheba, whom he hopes will benefit from his death. Central to the novel’s story line is the letter sent by David to Joab, based on 2 Sam. 11:14– 15, in which the king explicitly instructs Joab to place Uriah in the front line of the fighting “that he may be struck down and die.”²⁰¹ In the end Joab allows Uriah to know the contents of the letter and it is Uriah’s own free decision to march single-handedly against the enemy, making this a heroic act rather than the act of someone who is simply the victim of a murder plot. As a result, the themes of the novel combine the portrait of David as a ruthless schemer with the sense of Uriah as the valiant warrior and ethnic outsider travelling towards an inexorable fate. It is clear that his marriage to Bathsheba has been the mainspring of his life and that her liaison with King David robs Uriah’s life of purpose. The fact that he has been cuckolded by the very leader whom he serves as a soldier simply emphasizes the betrayal. In amplifying Uriah’s experience of betrayal, the novel speaks to anybody who has been at the receiving end of the unscrupulous use of political power. The emotional and psychological isolation of being the specific, personal target of such abuse is powerfully evoked in the passages in which Uriah is described early on as wandering alone in the darkness along paths through vineyards and gardens

 David c. Jacobson, Modern Midrash (New York, 1987): 161– 173.  RSV translation.

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and as he is, even near the end, tortured by self-doubt and confusion.²⁰² The response of Uriah to his situation demonstrates that the victim who is conscious of being in this situation still has more than one option both in terms of actions which may be taken and in terms of the attitude adopted. Of course the inscription of the story itself in the biblical hypotext is a form of record-keeping which helps to vindicate the victim and condemn the perpetrator and The Hittite Must Die as a rewriting is very much concerned with literary records, from the letter of David to Joab (as a document inscribed in literature) to Uriah’s own memoirs and his final thoughts, preserved on parchment. It may be said also that Uriah himself, though corralled by events beyond his control, does exercise some political choices. Not only does he honourably refuse to go home while the army is still at war, but he maintains this stance even when it is ridiculed by Joab, who points out that King David is not denying himself the pleasures of the flesh: eating, drinking, and lying with his three wives and numerous other women.²⁰³ By maintaining respect for David at this point, he underlines his own integrity as a loyal servant of the king, more concerned with his own conduct than that of the national leader. This is before Joab reveals the contents of the fateful letter. At first Uriah continues to be anxious that he has done nothing to arouse the king’s anger, but slowly he becomes more and more puzzled about David’s behavior, until it is clear that the truth is dawning on him. The important point about the structure of the novel is that Uriah’s bewilderment over David’s scheming is what motivates him to become, effectively, the king’s biographer. Indeed, it is the process of writing this account which helps him to suppress his emotions, sublimating his shock and anger into the composition of the text which fictively forms the body of the novel.²⁰⁴ At various times the anger is directed towards David and Bathsheba separately. We learn from all this that victors do not always write history, as the parable of Nathan already indicated at a very early stage in the reception. In endorsement of Uriah, we have the novel’s final document, which is the coda to the scrolls of Uriah, in which Ahimelech describes the circumstances of Uriah’s death.²⁰⁵ It serves as the novel’s “Epilogue.” Writing in old age as one of the few survivors, Ahimelech describes how Solomon eventually sent him the scrolls containing Uriah’s testimony and he began the laborious task of deciphering them. It has now become his plan to have the scrolls translated into Hebrew and copied at his own expense so that Uriah’s story may be known. He goes on    

The Hittite Must Die: 30, 165. The Hittite Must Die: 41. For the writing of the memoir as sublimation , see The Hittite Must Die: 46 – 47, 196 – 197. The Hittite Must Die: 215 – 220.

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to add his own account of the death of Uriah, who goes out single-handedly to confront the Ammonites, who are at first awe-struck by what he is doing. In confusion they open the gates of the city to Uriah, who is followed by a group of Israel’s army. Soon the Ammonites come to their senses, slamming shut the gates and Uriah is killed in a hail of slingshots. Ahimelech’s afterword is important as a first-person account of the death of Uriah, whose dead face displays “astonishment and infinite sorrow.”²⁰⁶ It also provides the editorializing which observes that Uriah’s account of David’s career does not extend beyond his crowning in Hebron and that the scrolls containing Uriah’s memories were indecipherable to the men who preserved them. Solomon, as a skilled linguist, might have been able to translate them but probably was disinclined to do so. Ahimelech notes that David’s wrongdoing did not end with the murder of Uriah and muses over the question of whether the great and virtuous reign of Solomon might or might not be some sort of moral compensation in history or theology for the evil deeds of his father. He concludes finally that evil is evil, no matter what its motivation or what ensues afterwards. It now remains for others to judge the events recorded by Uriah and, of course, the story has a transnational audience, since it was written by a Hittite and could well be translated into the languages of the Hittite’s neighbors, the Assyrians and others. The Hebrews might even find it of interest. Like this novel itself in the age of Weltliteratur, the story of Uriah is relevant both to the people of one particular ethnicity in terms of their national story and to all humanity. Seen as a response to its hypotext, The Hittite Must Die offers an imaginative reconstruction of the main protagonist’s psychological world in its historical context and a universalizing of the experience in relation to the human response to the abuse of political power.

The Four Wise Men Fr: Gaspar, Melchior, et Balthazar (1980). Michel Tournier (1924 – 2016) was a French novelist whose works explore mythic and theological cultural issues in a postmodern register, with overtones of the situation in Europe during WWII and the postwar period. Apart from The Four Wise Men, his major novels are The Ogre, Friday, and Gemini.

 The Hittite Must Die

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Tournier’s novel is a rewriting of the biblical account of the Journey of the Magi which actually carries the hypotext (Matt.2: 1– 16) as a postscript. This is an ‘ancient dress’ appropriation in that the events are set in the same period as those of the hypotext and it is a large-scale amplification, the main text running to 249 pages in the English translation. Other features include elements of analeptic, elliptical and proleptic expansion as well as some intertexting with world-folklore analogues and some elision with motifs from the common repertoire of world religions. (Colin Davis -see below- describes this as the deletion of some culturalspecific aspects of the hypotext.) In the Postscript, Tournier notes that tradition derived the idea of there being three magian kings from the number of the gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. The names “Gaspar, Melchior and Balthsar “derive from apocryphal legends and writings.”²⁰⁷ The inclusion of a fourth magus (here “Taor, Prince of Mangalore) he states “has been told several times,” though he only mention two sources, the tales by Henry L. Van Dyke and Eduard Schaper.²⁰⁸ Both of these short stories inscribe the fourth magus as a latecomer and both are straightforward moralizing tales. In The Story of the Other Wise Man(1895) the main protagonist is a young Zoroastrian prince who makes the journey led by the star but is delayed by acts of charity along the way, the first of which replicates many of the features of the parable of the Good Samaritan. He arrives in Jerusalem only in time to be among the crowds at Golgotha, but is assured by a divine voice that he has encountered Christ already in his kind acts: “In as much you have done it to one the least of these my brethren, you have done it to me….” (Matt. 20: 40 – 45). In The Legend of the Fourth King (1961) the central figure is a young Russian czar who also is delayed in his journey, this time by enslavement for thirty years as an oarsman, after he volunteers to take the place of another man. Again he finally encounters Christ at the foot of the cross and the only gift he has left to offer is his heart. In fact, the idea of a fourth magus can be traced back in art to at least the twelfthcentury and in festive processions in Italy to at least 1563.²⁰⁹ There are chapters devoted to the five main agents: Gaspar, Balthasar, Melchior, Herod and the fourth magus, here named Taor. In addition, there are two other chapters, one containing an intercalated folktale (‘King Goldbeard’) and one which inscribes the perspectives of the Ox and the Ass in the nativity story. In addition, the novel is adorned with thirteen short footnotes which supply a veneer of academic precision to the narrative.

 The Four Wise Men: 254.  Henry Van Dyke: The Story of the Other Wise Man (1906) and Edzard Schaper: Der Vierte König (1927).  Trexler: 79, 164.

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The Four Wise Men begins with Gaspar’s description of himself (riffing off Song of Solomon/Song of Solomon 1:4): “I am black, but a king.” It heralds the revisionary approach to racial and sexual stereotypes which permeates the text, though, of course (as here) the stereotypes still exert their force. Indeed, the ultimate theme of the novel be may that any transcendence which the Christian story may offer is not of a this-worldly kind and that the secular power structures surrounding the nativity story have changed little in two thousand years. The reader is challenged to decide whether the narrative as a whole supports any form of optimism about the human condition. If this question is read back into the successive sections of the novel, it may result in a different hermeneutical experience from one which simply considers the narrative disclosure in terms of the work’s apparent outcome. Gaspar is presented as the King of Meroë, a country bordering the Nile. While planning to follow the auspicious comet which has been observed in the sky, this pampered king displays his gullibility by buying two white slaves to whom he is attracted. The pair, though posing as brother and sister, turn out to be lovers, mocking the erotic fantasies of their new owner directed at the woman, Biltine. In fact, it is Gaspar’s abject attitude to his own “negritude” which leads him into this foolishness²¹⁰. The long journey towards Jerusalem (to which the “long-tailed star” is pointing) is described in lavish detail and leads up to the accidental rendezvous with Balthasar IV and his retinue near Hebron, who are travelling in the same direction. It is Balthasar who in conversation raises the possibility that both Adam and Eve were black, something which would overturn “our mythology”, though Gaspar persists in thinking that Eve at least must have been white.²¹¹ The novel’s second section concerns Balthasar, King of Nippur whose pursuit of aesthetic ideas and of rare artefacts in Greece and beyond allows his rivals, including the extremist cleric Sheddad, to seize power in his absence and ransack his Balthasereum with its treasures. Thus, his journey in pursuit of the star is motivated by the desire to escape the situation at home. The position of Melchior, Prince of Palmyra, the subject of the third section, is even more parlous. The chapter begins with his declaration, “I am a king, but I am poor,” recalling the medieval tradition of the begging magi. Melchior describes his flight from Palmyra after a coup led by his uncle. The journey to Jerusalem is made in the company of Balthasar and Gaspar, though Melchior decides it is best to conceal his identity in preparation for the meeting with Herod, lest he become the pawn in some power game. He therefore

 The Four Wise Men: 15,23.  The Four Wise Men: 39.

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assumes the guise of a page boy in the service of Balthasar through the good offices of his friend Baktiar. This third section modulates into a description of the encounter of the magi with Herod, who soon (in section five) sees through Melchior’s disguise. We are introduced to the great court of Herod in Jerusalem and to Herod’s own anxieties about the succession to his throne, made explicit at a feast held to welcome the three kings. A court storyteller named Sangali is ordered by Herod to entertain his guests with a tale about an old king worried about the problem of succession. It must be relevant and funny if the storyteller is to avoid mutilation. The story itself forms the novel’s fourth section and is called ‘King Goldbeard, or the Problem of Succession.’ This short folktale-like recital mythologizes the King’s metamorphosis (through the intervention of a mysterious white bird) into a young boy who succeeds him seamlessly, turning the lad Nabu into Nabunassar IV, the successor to Nabunassar III. Tournier was later to extract this tale from the novel as a free-standing tale for children. The enchanting story of King Goldbeard is in turn succeeded by the novel’s fifth section which is a complete contrast both in register and in length. Here we are given Herod’s own account of the intrigues among his family members and his own ruthless and bloody suppression of every challenge to his power, from the judicially endorsed murder of his consort Marianne in Jerusalem to the execution of his two sons Alexander and Aristobulus in Sebaste. The chapter ends with Herod’s wily attempt to entrap the three kings in his plot to eliminate the prophesied Jewish Savior due to be born in Bethlehem, for which purpose he appoints them “plenipotentiaries of the kingdom of Judea”.²¹² The novel’s sixth section returns us to the world of fairy-tale enchantment, though this time the subject is the nativity story seen through the perspective of the Ox and the Ass in the stable at Bethlehem. At the opening there is an immediate bid to link the ox of the manger story with the Bull Apis of Egyptian mythology before the narrative relapses into sentimental projections about the protective aspects of the bull in the nativity story. The longer account of the Ass’s Story intensifies the sugary register (“An ovation rose from the terebinth forests and mingled with the muffled applause of the hoot owls”), before an excursus into a dialogue with Gabriel which dismissively rewrites Abraham’s sacrifice as “a failed revolution” and reduces the story of Cain and Abel to that of Yahweh’s dislike of vegetables and preference for meat. The novel’s dual register reaches its apotheosis in its seventh section, entitled “Taor, Prince of Mangalore.” Taor enters the narrative as the rich and pampered

 The Four Wise Men: 137.

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oriental prince, whose mother rules the kingdom while he indulges his appetite for sugary confections. It is his quest for a rare sweetmeat (pistachio rahat loukoumi) which induces him to embark on a long and hazardous journey with his retinue from his homeland in southwestern India across mountains and oceans towards the region of Elah where he encounters Gaspar, Melchior and Balthsar. It is a journey of self-discovery and maturation for the young price as the hardships and losses mount (encapsulated in the death of his pet elephant). The final sugary phase of the narrative occurs in a dream section in which Taor treats some of the children of Bethlehem to an exotic banquet in which the prince’s palace in Mangalore is replicated in a vast edifice of nougat, marzipan, caramel and candied fruit. The reader can only associate this episode with those pious and uplifting paintings of the souls of the Innocents receiving their reward in heaven. Indeed, the banquet is interrupted by the arrival of Taor’s servant Siri to announce that he has just witnessed the actual massacre by Herod’s soldiers.²¹³ The children in the novel continue to enjoy the feast of sweetmeats while Taor remarks to Siri: “Let them enjoy themselves while their little brothers are dying,” said Taor. “They will learn the horrible truth soon enough. As for me, I don’t know what the future will bring, but I have no doubt that this night of transfiguration and massacre marks the end of an age in my life, the age of sugar.” Even though concentrated on the so-far self-centered consciousness of Taor, these remarks amount to the fulcrum of the novel. Sugary fantasy gives way to bitter reality. For Taor himself, though, the personal journey into reality lies ahead. The second part of the seventh section consists of Taor’s attempt to return home. This final phase of his odyssey turns into thirty-three years of enslavement in the salt mines of Sodom after most of his caravan, led by Siri, is allowed to travel towards the waiting ships at Elath, while Taor himself lingers in the area beside the Dead Sea. Only the minor servant Draoma (a bookkeeper) remains with Taor. Taor now finds the Sodomites maltreating a man who appears to owe money to a merchant. Rather like Antonio in The Merchant of Venice who rashly offers to bail out Bassanio, Taor impulsively offers to redeem the man’s debt, only to discover from his bookkeeper that what he regarded as the paltry sum of thirty-three talents is in fact far beyond his remaining means. Nevertheless, Taor nobly agrees to take the place of the debtor and as a result is himself sentenced to thirty-years as a prisoner in the salt mines, the absolute antithesis of his former life of luxury. Although the fact that the people of Sodom have reacted to life’s harshness by adopting sexual practices which do not favor procreation is something with which the novel’s negative discourse about the relationship be-

 The Four Wise Men: 211.

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tween capitalism and procreation might seem to sympathize, it emerges that their lives are just as lacking in humanity. Indeed, they seem to revel in cruelty. Eventually Taor learns about the teachings of the Nazarene from a fellow prisoner named Demas. They seem to be summarized in the Beatitudes and the prospect of eschatological hope. When finally his sentence comes to its end, Taor is free to travel to the land of Jesus’ ministry, though as a latecomer he fails to actually find either Lazarus or Joseph of Arimathea at home. In the novel’s closing passage, he reaches the room where Jesus shared the Last Supper with his disciples and, finding a few drops of wine in some goblets and some pieces of bread, becomes the first person in history to receive the Eucharist. The ostensible upshot of the plot is that Taor through his pilgrimage from riches to self-sacrifice has become conformed to the image of Christianity’s founder. Yet it is equally true that the portrait of human life which the narrative as a whole presents is a deeply pessimistic one. Or one could say that it is a portrait in which hope is constantly deferred, rather as the novel’s version of the teaching of Jesus himself points to compensation and justice only in an afterlife. Much space is given both to human cruelty (including cruelty to animals²¹⁴) and to the human penchant for self-indulgence and escapism, though there are some magnificent passages celebrating the beauties of the natural world, in particular, the sights witnessed by Taor on his eventful journey from Mangalore to the Holy Land. A different approach might be to regard the novel’s fantastic passages (from the Goldbeard tale to the banquet for the Children of Bethlehem) as existing in a form of dialectic with the bitter narrative of power politics and realpolitik which fills the other pages. If so, the question arises as to the status of the traditional Christmas story in relation to any message which Christianity offers to the political world and indeed what weight that story has in relation to the very limited repertoire of other biblically-derived tropes with which the novel engages. In order to gain a wider perspective on this important example of extreme biblical rewriting, the views of four different critics will now be considered.

Some Critical Views of the Novel Colin Davis (1988) regards the novel as a balancing of the contradictories of power and non-violent softness which find a resolution in which the birth of Christ intervenes in the conflictual cycle of history, which however it does not actually interrupt. “Taor must pay for his final transcendence with his life, since only death

 See The Four Wise Men: 146.

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gives access to the other-worldly domain in which conflict is resolved”²¹⁵. He argues that in practice it is the function of the creative arts (including this novel) to exemplify this other reality. We may agree that this novel itself as an artefact (with an assumed sympathetic readership) stands in as the embodiment of this creativity. It is significant that while Taor’s saga is described by a third-person narrator (suggesting a degree of objectivity), all the other accounts in the novel of the principal personae are in the first-person. William Cloonan (1995) argues that the novel is fundamentally pessimistic in that the four magi as characters are all refugees from the brutal realities of life and it is only in their sublimating fantasies that transcendence occurs. Thus, the reader is asked to consider whether and to what extent the two thousand years of Christian history has been accompanied by the realization of the teachings of its founder.²¹⁶ One response to Cloonan’s argument must be that the perennial question of whether Christianity has made a positive difference to human happiness and wellbeing is addressed in the novel mainly by the reminders of the sheer intractability of the human quest for power. The antidote in the novel to the destructiveness of the power-seekers seems to lie in the resistance of the first three magi to Herod’s plan and above all in Taor’s voluntary self-abnegation in the final chapter. We also gain the impression that this sort of transcendence (or subversion of the power drive) is strengthened rather than weakened when analogues to Christian tropes in other mythologies are invoked. David Gascoigne (1996) sees Taor’s participation in the Eucharist at the end of the novel as the reward for his “absolute renunciation of power”²¹⁷. Similarly, he sees this act of self-sacrifice as the resolution of the novel’s mockery of both the infantile heterosexuality of the “sugar” part of the narrative about Taor and of the cerebral homosexuality of the “salt” phase of the same story.²¹⁸ He notes that ‘Barbador’ was published independently as an illustrated children’s story, demonstrating its independence from the rest of the novel and also suggesting that the idea of eternal life can be expressed in “wholly non-Christian terms” and that the Christian myth itself is supported by the more ancient myth of the dying and rising king.²¹⁹ He goes on (138 – 139) to argue that Taor’s transformation begins with his floating on the Dead Sea where (like Lot’s wife whom the Sodomites worship) he is mineralized, only ultimately to be restored to vitality when     

Davis:128. Cloonan: 154. Gascoigne: 24. Gascoigne: 85. Gascoigne: 116 – 117.

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he receives the supernatural food of the Eucharist and achieves a synthesis of the infernal regions, earth and heaven.²²⁰ In response it could be argued that Taor’s odyssey builds on what has transpired in the novel up to the point where he meets the other magi. To that extent the other three are more than mere foils for Taor. Similarly, Herod’s depressing apologia for his life of ruthless violence is not just the antithesis of Taor’s self-giving but the starkest possible demonstration of what self-absorption and the relentless pursuit of power together entail. Walter Strauss in the course of an article which takes a panoptic view across the full range of Tournier’s novels beginning with Les Météores, sees The Four Wise Men as part of a larger authorial project to re-sacralize the guiding narratives of western civilization. It is a response to the depletion of the sacred in modern Christianity.²²¹ On this showing the key to the novel is the final paragraph, where Taor ascends into heaven, borne away by two angels, having been rewarded for his great act of self-abnegation by becoming the first recipient of the Eucharist. Where some critics see a passage ironizing the impotence of Taor’s approach to finding a new way, Strauss treats it as the culminating and decisive moment in the narrative. In terms of the novel’s allocation of space to biblical tropes, the work as a whole in its English translation amounts to 249 pages, compared with the space of less than two pages occupied by the biblical hypotext of Matt. 2: 1– 16 which is reproduced on pp. 253 – 254. Most of the novel is devoted to the amplification of the hypotext itself, though two pages are devoted to a discussion of the Sacrifice of Isaac and the story of Cain and Abel by Gabriel (153 – 154) and the story of Lot and his wife is recited briefly (241), where it is presented as the basis of the Sodomite cult of Lot’s wife as the Salt Mother. Within the amplification itself, the long section about Herod (presented as a first-person self-justification) fills 27 pages, some of that material stemming from Josephus and possibly Hebbel’s play Herod and Marianne. If the novel’s overall programme is a critique of Christianity as a religion, this highly selective use of biblical texts is part of its armoury. Perhaps in the end The Four Wise Men is about the residue which Christianity leaves in the world: the apparently innocent tale of the magi (which turns out on closer inspection to be less than innocent) and the relics of the Last Supper. Somehow both of these elements in combination are a challenge to the view of history as being about the rise and fall of empires. It is a minimalist vision, rather like the final appeal in Archibald MacLeish’s play about Job, “Blow, blow upon the coals of

 Gascoigne: 138 – 139.  Strauss:75 – 83.

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the heart ….” But for the author this may be all we have. In another way it is important to notice that this residue is, strictly speaking, extra-biblical, in the sense that the traditions about the Magi and even the institution of the Eucharist are extra-biblical, and that this novel in its turn adds to that flow of responses. Reception history can be about both accumulation and reduction. One rewriting adds to the accretion of reception material and yet at the same time censors the cumulative tradition for its own purposes.

The Book of Tobias Sylvie Germain is a French novelist (1954 ‐) famous for her novels with a philosophical leaning, including The Book of Nights; Nights of Amber; and Infinite Possibilities. Sylvie Germain’s novel The Book of Tobias (1999) relocates the Tobit story to rural France in the 1950s, as well as adding in a major folkloric intertext which carries almost the same weight as those folkloric motifs already present, in a submerged form, in the hypotext. The diegetic content relates to France in the aftermath of the German occupation of the WW2 period and to the fate of Jewish emigrants to the USA who were refused entry into that country. That this is a deliberate and specific rewriting is signalled by the title. If further confirmation were required, each of the novel’s ten chapters carries an epigraphic quotation from the biblical Book of Tobit relevant to the proceedings, tying the hypertext unusually closely to the hypotext. As a rewriting, the novel intensifies rather than diminishes the fantastic elements in the hypotext. The fabulation begins with a very conventional stormy night and (indicating the modern setting) a man at the wheel of a car. The driver has already picked up a mysterious hitchhiker. Narrowly avoiding a child on a tricycle (who later turns out to be the young Tobias), the driver drops off the hitchhiker in order that the child can be returned home. The hitchhiker is described as a blend of masculine and feminine and it is quickly apparent that he is the angel Raphael, whose mission at this point seems be to escort the boy back to his father. Here the intertext is introduced, as the child relates the stealing of his mother’s head.²²² It is the tale of the headless rider. In this updated version it becomes the story of a woman horse-rider tragically decapitated by a wire stretched across a road. The woman is the boy’s mother. We later learn that in the horrific circumstances surrounding the discovery of the headless corpse, the boy was thrown out of the house by his grief-

 The Book of Tobias: 14– 15.

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stricken father and was now following in a very literalistic way the injunction to “go to the devil” as his father began a demented search for the missing head in the countryside. The angelic stranger duly restores the boy to his father and we are brought into the central narrative which weaves together the tragic story of Anna the horsewoman whose head was severed by that wire arranged across a woodland path, her grieving husband, and the boy Tobias who in time embarks on a mission which parallels that of his biblical namesake, accompanied by the angel. Further ingredients are the story of the boy’s grandmother, Old Deborah, charged with his upbringing, who was one of those Jewish emigrants refused admission to the USA, after a spell on Ellis Island, and the account of other relatives who eke out a living in the impoverished conditions of the French agricultural world. The imagery mixes Jewish and Hebrew Bible themes alongside specifically Christian ones. The family dog holds a kaddish as it mourns Anna’s death; Leviathan is said to swallow up mother and son; and (in the novel’s flashback) Deborah’s nursing of her son aboard ship resembles a pietà. She has dreams on board ship about Lilith and Ellis Island turns out to be Babel. Much later on in the novel Caravaggio’s painting ‘The Taking of Christ’ becomes important. Perhaps the strongest image of all is of Deborah herself as a person of endurance.²²³ The plot closely follows that of the apocryphal-biblical hypotext, except for the addition of new plot lines. The journey of Tobias to collect the debt owed to his father by someone living in Bordeaux directly mirrors the journey of Tobias in Tobit. Tobias and the angel are again accompanied by the family dog and once again there is the fishing episode. The bedevilled Sara is exorcized when Tobias throws the liver and heart of the fish onto the floor of the fishing hut where they hold their rendezvous. Similarly, the sight of the senior Tobit’s sight is restored through the fumes from the fish when it is cooked. The new plot lines include (most prominently) that of Anna, mother of Tobias as the decapitated horsewoman. This narrative is in turn supplemented by the gothic-horror story of the storage of the severed head in an empty oven by the deranged Arthur, with the restoration of the mummified head to Theodore near the end concluding this trajectory. Other supplementary plots include that of the fortitude of Theodore’s mother, Deborah, in the face of constant adversity, which includes the death of her husband on the frontline of a battlefield, and the even more tragic deaths of her daughter Wioletta and her husband and, earlier on, of her daughter Rosa. Then there is the desperately unhappy marriage of Valentine (Theodore’s sister) and Arthur.

 The Book of Tobias: 31.

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Whereas modern biblical reworkings of early twentieth-century often tended to minimize the supernatural or the fantastical elements of their base story, this postmodern retelling moves in the opposite direction, accentuating and augmenting those elements. It also reinforces the blacker tendencies of the hypotext by greatly adding to the human casualty list. If in the base text the dark story of the deaths of Sara’s suitors acts as a foil for the happy ending, the sunny conclusion to the novel rests on a sort of ontological shrug of the shoulders. If this appears at times to be a fairy tale, it has some bleak observations to make on the course of human life at least in this world. In the end the surviving characters are chastened by their experience, or perhaps relieved of the burden of expecting too much. Tobias’s father has at least learnt to dance away his sorrows, recovering from the madness which had engulfed him in the wake of his wife’s death. All three of the literary rewritings considered above could be said to conduct major amplifications of their biblical hypotexts while yet honouring the integrity of the base text. They extend the meaning and embroider the plot rather than challenge or contradict the biblical text as it has been received in culture. They are “extreme” in the scale of the amplification in each case and in the willingness of the authors to engage in the revitalization of an ancient piece of literature. Of the three novels, two adopt an ‘ancient dress’ approach and only one, Sylvie Germain’s The Book of Tobias, supplies an overtly modern setting. This modern setting in itself highlights the strangeness of the folkloric supernatural episodes in the narrative. If, as we shall argue, extreme rewritings refresh the biblical hypotext by de-familiarizing it, the combination of ‘modern dress’ updating and augmentation of the supernatural, is a highly potent and original contribution to the repertoire of rewriting.

Chapter Eight: Escaping the Straitjacket: Philip Pullman, Richard Beard, Amos Oz, Christopher Moore and Colm Toíbín This chapter is concerned with the radical biblical rewritings of five authors: Phillip Pullman, Richard Beard, Amos Oz, Christopher Moore and Colm Toíbín. We will examine Pullman’s novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Beard’s two novels Lazarus is Dead and The Book of Assassins, and Amos Oz’s short story ‘Upon This Evil Earth.’ and novel Judas. The first three works are fairly cavalier in their treatment of their respective biblical hypotexts and light in tone, if not in their polemical stance. The two works by Oz are more serious in register and have a broadly political agenda, something which cannot be said of the works by Pullman and Beard. Philip Pullman (1946 ‐) is a prominent English author, best known for the fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials. He has declared himself at various times as a “Church of England atheist” and as an agnostic. Pullman’s novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010) plays off the scholarly dichotomizing of the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith, though in a popular style. Imagining Jesus and Judas (or ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’) as twin brothers is both an original ploy and offbeat. The plot changes made to the biblical hypotext (the canonical gospels) are rooted in the posited dichotomy. The novel is written in a mixture of free indirect style and what appear to be direct quotations of pretextual pericopes. As a conspiracy-theory rewriting of the gospel story it has precedents in such works as William Rayner’s The Knifeman. The author’s polemical stance as a humanist is well known to readers of his earlier fiction. The novel is told in basic, plain English style, with few dependent clauses, and something of the register of the Good News Bible. The first lines are “This is a story…” and that phrase is printed in bold block capitals on the back cover of the original edition, as though to deflect hostility to or offence caused by what turns out to be a radically confrontational rewriting of the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Or perhaps it is to compensate for the provocative style of the title. In the opening pages, concerned with Jesus’ nativity and infancy, we find a flurry of references to the Bible as a whole. Joseph’s rod bursts into flower as a sign that he is the chosen husband of Mary, echoing Numbers 17:8 where Aaron’s rod flowers and, in keeping with this allusion, Zacharias warns him not to rebel like Korah.²²⁴ Worried about the Virgin Birth, Joseph compares his situation to  The Good Man Jesus: 2. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-009

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that of Adam, who left Eve on her own, only for the serpent to seduce her.²²⁵ The novel mentions the attractiveness of Mary to the young men in Bethlehem and records that the Angel of the Visitation resembled one of the men who spoke to her by the well, leaving that innuendo as it stands.²²⁶ The novel’s radical innovation is to make the birth of Jesus into the birth of twins, “Jesus” and “Christ” (12– 13), with Jesus as lively infant and Christ initially a sick one.²²⁷ It is as though the author wants to dramatize the conventional scholarly split between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith, though in fact he puts the conceit to other uses beyond this. As the narrative develops, “Christ” is drawn into becoming the equivalent of the Judas of the gospels, betraying his brother to Caiaphas and to the high priest’s soldiers as well as to Pilate for a sum of money which he ends up giving away. In all of this he is tutored by a “stranger” who teasingly appears in the semblance of an angel, leading the reader to think that this is the fallen angel, Satan, though in the end the character is demoted to the status of a successful merchant who has calculated what Christ needs to do to pave the way for the institutional church. The plan involves sacrificing the high-minded but unrealistic Jesus in order to establish a cult based on his death and resurrection. Christ’s role is to record the actions and sayings of Jesus during his earthly ministry before secretly betraying him and then appearing at the Empty Tomb in the guise of the Risen Lord. Later he appears to the disciples on the road to Emmaus and finally in the Upper Room before settling down to life as a net-repairer, married to Martha of the Lazarus episode. Christ now has his final meeting with the mysterious stranger who has orchestrated the events leading to the foundation of the Church and who now retires from the scene. The novel can be seen in the light of the succession of Judas novels which have appeared from the late 1960s onwards, beginning with William Rayner’s The Knifeman (1969) and running through to Amos Oz’s Judas (discussed below.) Rather like John Beard’s Lazarus is Dead it differentiates itself from many of these rewritings by devoting space to the childhood of Jesus (and here his fictive twin, ‘Christ’), exploiting the phenomenon of the “hidden years” and riffing off some of the extravagant miracles stories of the apocryphal Infancy Gospels. By introducing the figure of the twin as onlooker and recorder of events in the life of Jesus, the author is able to oscillate between what appears as straightforward reportage and accounts which are deliberately and consciously embellished by “Christ.” Thus the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist occurs as a simple event but it is “Christ” who imagines

 The Good Man Jesus:8.  The Good Man Jesus: 7.  The Good Man Jesus: 12– 13.

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the dove and the Vox Dei ²²⁸, whereas the Miracle at Cana and the cleansing of the leper are reported without any input by Christ.²²⁹ Similarly, what scholars call the Messianic Secret is described simply as Jesus becoming uneasy about his fame .²³⁰ Beard in Lazarus is Dead is more suspicious. During the episode of the Temptation in the Wilderness, in which “Christ” assumes the role of the Tempter, the figure of Jesus contemplates with horror a vision of the institutional church run by priests, whereas the whole project planned by “Christ” and his adviser, the mysterious stranger, is aimed at establishing that church. Part of this project includes the encouragement which the stranger gives to Christ’s record-keeping.²³¹ While the novel’s immediate account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand amounts to a naturalistic example of sharing, it is “Christ” who records it as a miracle.²³² In time “Christ” recruits one of the disciples to supply him with information about the actions and sayings of Jesus, though at the same time he begins to invent sayings material tout court, as in the case of the logion about Peter as the rock and recipient of the keys of heaven.²³³ Not only is “Christ” inclined to embellish the stock of logia, he also would have preferred to suppress some of Jesus’ harsh words about family but is deterred by the fact that too many witnesses had heard them. We are thus invited to treat parts of the novel’s reportage as a verbatim record of Jesus’ teaching. The treatment of the parable of the Prodigal Son extends from a reported episode in which Jesus himself is welcomed back as the prodigal to the utterance of the parable by Jesus himself which embarrasses Christ because it is implicitly casts him as the stay-at-home brother.²³⁴ The Good Samaritan parable is reported, together with its context (the debate with the lawyer), though Christ thinks it unfair. Christ’s role as editor becomes even more disconcerting when we find the story of Mary and Martha revised to make Jesus side with Martha and then the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins revised to validate all ten virgins, whom the bridegroom finally decides to admit to the wedding-feast en masse. Still more confusingly, we are told after the latter episode that “Christ” wrote down every word, but he resolved to improve the story later”.²³⁵

       

The The The The The The The The

Good Good Good Good Good Good Good Good

Man Man Man Man Man Man Man Man

Jesus: 35 – 36. Jesus: 61– 63. Jesus: 102. Jesus: 74. Jesus: 90. Jesus: 103. Jesus: 47– 49, 112. Jesus: 142.

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The stranger becomes a direct exegetical agent when he suggests that the story of Abraham and Isaac (Gen. 22) should govern Christ’s dealings with his brother, with Christ himself choosing finally to rely on the passage’s happy ending to reassure himself that sacrificing his brother will not result in his death .²³⁶ This is after the stranger or (as he appears) angel orders Christ in a very direct way to betray Jesus. He conjures up the prospect of the full-blown church offering an image of the Kingdom of Heaven without actually embodying its values. The action moves on to a rather dismal episode in which Christ exchanges views with a cripple at the Pool of Bethesda but fails to help him before going on to accept a bribe from Caiaphas to betray Jesus. Meanwhile Jesus is in Gethsemane, confronting God’s silence and mocking the sophistry of theologians who talk about God’s absence as his presence. He continues to be revolted by the idea of the Church. Instead, he revels in the simple joys of life while it lasts. After this Christ betrays Jesus to the arresting soldiers. The familiar events of the Passion story ensue, including Jesus’ trial before Caiaphas and Peter’s denial. A departure is that Jesus then appears before a brutal Pilate, who is egged on by Caiaphas. Pilate moreover tilts the offer to the crowd to release one of the prisoners awaiting crucifixion by naming Barabbas as the one they might choose²³⁷ Christ witnesses the Crucifixion but keeps himself hidden. The events which follow occupy only twenty-four pages of the novel. Joseph of Arimathea secures permission to bury Jesus’ body from a curmudgeonly Pilate. Christ uses some of the thirty pieces of silver prosaically to pay his landlord and out of shame gives the rest to a beggar. Near the garden tomb he meets the stranger who reassures him that much good will ensue. In the dim light three or four human figures are seen carrying away the body of Jesus and the substitution of Christ for Jesus completes the narrative, with Christ submitting with some ambivalence to the stranger’s insistence that what he calls “truth” overrides history.²³⁸ Pullman’s exploitation of the academic, historical-critical binary of the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith moves the narrative beyond the sympathetic world of Christian theology into the adversarial realm of the hermeneutics of suspicion.

 The Good Man Jesus: 143 – 147, 175.  The Good Man Jesus: 211– 215.  The Good Man Jesus: 224.

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Two biblical rewritings by Richard Beard Richard Beard (1967) is an English author, noted for his experimental novels, X20: A Novel of Not Smoking (1996) and Damascus (1998). and for his non-fiction memoir of 2017, describing his recollection of his brother’s childhood drowning, The Day That Went Missing. We now turn to two biblical rewritings by the English writer Richard Beard, both experimental in their different ways. If Pullman is content to offer one radically reworked account of the life and death of Christianity’s founder based on a conceit which is in a sense internal to Christian discourse (the Jesus/Christ duality), Beard brings to bear on the Lazarus story not only a luxuriant amplification of the motivation of the main characters but a catalogue of alternative literary takes on the story. When it comes to the lives of the Apostles, he unifies their diverse narratives through the conceit – completely external to religious discourse – of an investigation by a gumshoe-detective.

Lazarus is Dead Richard Beard’s Lazarus is Dead (2011) is unique among our examples in depending upon a patchwork of direct references to the literary reception history of the Lazarus story. This means that the novel’s own plot weaves in and out between other versions of the story, sometimes endorsing, sometimes disagreeing with other hypertexts, and sometimes just recording the variety which they present. This rewriting of the Lazarus story begins with a very brief summary of the critical consensus over the Synoptic Problem and then mentions that “for structural reasons” the gospel-writer John uses seven of Jesus’ best miracles as the backbone of his narrative.²³⁹ The novel then falls back into a naturalistic account of the life of Lazarus and his business interests before moving rapidly to the onset of Lazarus’ illness, punctuated by two direct quotations from the gospel, Jn 11:1– 2 and Jn 11: 11. There are some general references to the afterlife of the Lazarus story in literature and the visual arts after discussion of the absence of any mention in John’s gospel of how the friendship between Jesus and Lazarus began. By implication the story’s afterlife is richer than its beginnings. The author now suggests that Saramago’s novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ may hold part of the answer to the enigma of the friendship though he is not very specific, mentioning only the moral flaw which Saramago identifies in the nativity story –

 Lazarus is Dead: 1.

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whereby Joseph rescues only Jesus from Herod’s massacre of the innocents – and then rewriting the nativity story to include Joseph’s rescue of a friend (Eliakim) and his pregnant wife from the scene of the impending massacre.²⁴⁰ Beard develops from slender hints in the Johannine hypotext the idea that Lazarus is a rich man and that the families of Lazarus and of Jesus were neighbors in Bethlehem.²⁴¹ It was the move of Lazarus’ family from Bethlehem to Nazareth ahead of Herod’s massacre of the innocents which saved Lazarus’ life as an infant. Indeed, Lazarus in later life regarded the knowledge of this escape as the psychological pivot which led him to feel special and set apart.²⁴² As playmates Jesus and Lazarus re-enact the story of David and Goliath.²⁴³At the times the novel tends towards the encyclopedic, giving us a summary of scholarly accounts of the life of Jesus, references to and quotations from novels by Thomas Hardy, Scholem Asch, Nikos Kazantzakis and Pär Lagerkvist and others, and details about the Roman system of administration, as well as an account of modern tourist sites related to Lazarus. As a guide to gospel events, Lazarus turns out to be rather cynical, dismissing the miracle at the Wedding of Cana as the result of drunkenness and associating himself with the narrator’s view that Feeding of the Five Thousand had a naturalistic explanation.²⁴⁴ Despite being a survivor of Herod’s massacre, the general trajectory of Lazarus’ life is downwards in both in medical terms and in terms of the Romans’ project to enlist him as a dupe in their plot against Jesus. These two strands of the narrative tend to dominate the novel, amounting to a major remotivation of the story (in our version of the Genettian schema) and the cause of large tracts of elliptical continuation material, amplifying Lazarus’ medical deterioration and the progress of the machinations by the Roman consul Sejanus in relation to the fate of Jesus. Often the rise of Jesus and the decline of Lazarus are inscribed as occurring in tandem, as when Lazarus becomes ill just at the time when Jesus walks on water, or when it emerges that the resurrection of Lazarus is one of a series of experiments by Jesus in raising the dead. Finally, after a spell in the role of the projected puppet-messiah of the Romans, Lazarus drifts off into exile as a variant of the Wandering Jew, the final allusion to literary depictions of him being to the figure in the science-fiction novel Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jnr, where he wanders the earth as the survivor of a nuclear holocaust. Lazarus’ destiny as a wanderer across the globe is another     

Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus

is is is is is

Dead: 13 – 14. Dead: 14– 15, 18. Dead: 19,29. Dead: 28. Dead: 15 – 16, 98.

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facet of his relationship with Jesus, since they are both cast in the role of time-travellers. Lazarus is Dead breaks new ground as a hypertext in that it alludes profusely to the literary reception of the figure of Lazarus. This mosaic of references provides the upholstery to the framework narrative of Lazarus as the friend and shadow of Jesus. Beard’s account does not seek to eliminate the contradictions which are evident between the plots constructed by previous novelists and short-story writers, treating them as evidence that multiple readings of the base text can co-exist. For example, literary portraits of Lazarus after his resurrection lurch from those of him as silent (Pirandello) to garrulous (Yeats). Indeed, the author seems to offer this abundance of material as a tonic to the “point of stagnation” which he discerns in the current state of biblical scholarship.²⁴⁵ At other times the narrator sides with the interpretation of a particular literary rewriter, as when Kazantzakis is praised for his closeness as a Greek novelist to the Greek of the New Testament.²⁴⁶ Some of the novel’s trajectories nevertheless seem to contradict this endorsement of the value of the literary afterlife of biblical material. When an unspecified medieval text suggests that Lazarus emerged from the tomb reeking of decomposition and Robert Browning, on the other hand, states that the resurrected Lazarus was supremely healthy, they are both corrected on the grounds that, if either possibility were the case, “…the bible might have said so.”²⁴⁷ It is strange to read near the end, in relation to the Romans’ treatment of the disciples that Joseph of Arimathea is “never heard from again,” when he clearly has a vast literary afterlife, not least in relation to the aftermath of the imposition of the Roman civic cultus in Britain.²⁴⁸ The novel also suggests eerily that nobody died between the raising of Lazarus and the Crucifixion of Jesus, an idea that clearly warrants further development.²⁴⁹ At times the novelist tends to go with the surface narrative of the hypotext rather than with recent critical commentary, as when we are told of the disciples, “…they were incredibly slow.”²⁵⁰ This flies in the face of that long line of modern scholarship which has seen the dimwittedness of the disciples as a literary device in the Synoptics designed to reinforce the teaching of Jesus. Lazarus is Dead is at its strongest when it amplifies the hypotext on its own account, supplying details of the death of Lazarus’ father from pneumonia after

     

Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus Lazarus

is is is is is is

Dead: 246. Dead: 145. Dead: 146. Dead: 252 Dead: 217. Dead: 28.

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a fall while working on the new Roman theatre or adding plausible extra characters such as Isaiah the Temple priest, Yanav the informant of the Roman authorities, Lydia the prostitute, and Saloma the girlfriend of Lazarus. The allusions to the great array of previous literary hypertexts are often informative and entertaining, while yet collectively raising the question of why the reader should prefer this particular fiction. This is the problem of mixed genres, which arises from combining the writing of a new literary hypertext with the compilation of a potted receptionhistory. As we shall see, Beard’s more recent novel Acts of the Assassins deploys the mode of transmodalization to turn the whole story of the deaths of the early Christian martyrs bizarrely into the plot of a gumshoe detective story. In a way Lazarus is Dead does something similar (though less provocative) by allowing the genre of the literary reception history to control much of the plot. In effect the two alternative procedures on offer are a monolithic transmodalization and a multi-faceted transmotivation. As alternatives to the “point of stagnation” in conventional biblical studies, conceived of presumably as the endless pursuit of atomistic research into supposed historical origins, these procedures are certainly refreshing. It only remains to be seen whether they draw attention to or distract attention from different approaches to literary rewriting. To list such different writers as Dostoevsky and Robert Graves in a parade of previous contributors to the literary reception of the Lazarus story is not necessarily to notice what they say in any meaningful way and, as we have argued, the mixing of the genres of amplifying hypertext and summarizing literary reception history is itself confusing. Beard’s novel Acts of the Assassins is in one way a sequel to Lazarus is Dead, in that the agent Cassius Gallio survives from the earlier novel, though it is discontinuous in terms of genre.

Acts of the Assassins At one level this 2015 novel is a burlesque on martyrologies in that it seeks to see accounts of the deaths of Christian martyrs in the early period through the lens of a modern gumshoe detective, in this case one acting as an operative of the security services of a Roman Empire which has survived into the twenty-first century. In Genettian terms it is also a transmodalization of the narratives, overturning the tenor or the register of the underlying hypotexts by causing them to be read through a defamiliarizing (and unlikely) lens. It is also a travesty, in that it converts a serious narrative into the register of a farce and deploys values which are base compared to those of the hypotext. The hypotext here can be defined as a combi-

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nation of the four canonical gospels, the Book of Acts, and selections from the early Christian martyrologies. The transmodalization goes far beyond re-labelling, however, since the full apparatus of the modern detective thriller is deployed. The style is both offbeat and comic, the humour generated by the great disparity between the world of the investigating detective, Cassius Marcellus Gallo, and that of the first-century martyrs and also between modern Christian pieties and the world of modern skepticism. The worlds are brought together temporally by locating the events in the present day, with the State of Israel (rather provocatively) a client state of a modern Roman empire. Along the way the novel plays with such areas of debate as the part played by Paul of Tarsus in the shaping of the gospel message and the confusing relationship of the various Johns to the Gospel of John and to each other. Among many starkly incongruous anachronisms is the use of Renaissance paintings to identify Jesus. At the heart of the discursive plot are the violent deaths of the disciples of Jesus, each of which is investigated by Cassius Gallio and his colleagues as a murder case. Each time Gallio seems to come close to explaining the identity and motivation of the murderer, something happens to upset the diagnosis. Eventually he comes to believe that Jesus is the perpetrator, on the basis of the theory that the Crucifixion involved a switch of victims which had to be covered up. However, in the end it becomes apparent that the murders have been organized by the Roman security service itself as a means of discrediting the Christian movement. In this they seem to have been outwitted, since Paul, on whom they relied as a double agent to modify the Christian message so that it encouraged passive acceptance of the status quo, emerges as a triple agent. He becomes the twelfth martyr in the series of assassinations described in the narrative, leaving the ageing and nearly blind John of Patmos to write the Fourth Gospel and the Book of Revelation, with Cassius Gallio now in the role of amanuensis until he finally expires on the last page of the novel. The rewriting provides a gloss on numerous conundrums in New Testament studies. The death of Judas combines hanging on a tree and falling with his bowels bursting.²⁵¹ The substitutionary theory of the Atonement is parodied in the conspiracy-theories entertained by Gallio.²⁵² Veronica becomes a component in the plot, as well as the cause of the souvenir shop which is a location in the investigative drama.²⁵³ The Ascension is treated as an “interference strategy” to throw those

 Acts of the Assassins: 34.  Acts of the Assassins: 75.  Acts of the Assassins: 76, 175.

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pursuing Jesus off their track.²⁵⁴ The Fire of Rome is treated for much of the plot as a terrorist act carried out by the Christian movement, a sort of modernization of the plotting associated with Nero. Similarly, Jesus and his followers are said to live “outside the grid” for surveillance purposes, eschewing the use of credit cards in a delightful anachronism.²⁵⁵ When the plot shifts to England, as Gallio and his colleague Claudia pursue Bartholomew to Caistor in Lincolnshire in the hope of finding Jesus, the incongruities include not just anachronisms (the broadband speed is low) but the staid life of a small English market-town as the backdrop to a thriller. More killings follow, with James bludgeoned to death, Thomas stoned and speared, Bartholomew skinned alive, and so on. We learn that Paul is a mastermind, very skilled at manipulating the postal service, in a corny reference to the corpus of the Pauline epistles.²⁵⁶ Yet the greatest incongruity of the entire narrative, of course, is the application of security-services investigative stratagems and techniques to the quest of the figure of Jesus. Cassius Gallio, who has maintained a thoroughgoing scepticism towards Christian belief throughout the story, remains an unbeliever right through to the last line, though by this time he has become fully aware of the machinations of the state security apparatus, known as “the CCU,” and realizes that all the murders can be attributed to his employers. Like many detectives, his own personal life is unsatisfactory and sometimes sordid, yet there is a kind of redemption in his final evolution into the helper of John of Patmos, a conclusion which neatly dovetails the outcome of the fictive Cassius Gallio’s life with that of the production of the biblical document most associated with the literary configuration of the sufferings of the early Christian martyrs.

Two works by Amos Oz Amos Oz (1939 – 2018) was a prominent Israeli novelist and intellectual. Where the Jackals Howl (1965) and A Perfect Peace (1982) are among the most famous works from his prodigious output. He was the recipient of numerous global literary awards.

 Acts of the Assassins: 95.  Acts of the Assassins: 130.  Acts of the Assassins: 205.

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Our final two literary rewritings are by the Israeli writer, Amos Oz. They are a short story about Jephthah and his daughter and a novel which deals in a circuitous way with the historical life and cultural afterlife of Judas Iscariot.

‘Upon this Evil Earth’ This short story, published in the collection Where the Jackals Howl (1976), is a retelling of the story of Jephthah and his daughter. Although it is not a modernization of the hypotext, it has been read by David Jacobson as part of a group of works by Oz and others which reverberate with the situation of members of the Israeli armed forces in 1970s Israel, especially those who were immigrants from Europe.²⁵⁷ In particular, the character of the fictive King Gatel of Ammon may be a caricature of the young King Hussein of Jordan. More profoundly, Jacobson interprets the inner conflict in Oz’s Jephthah as representative of the divided outlook of the ‘sabra’ generation of immigrant European Jews within the Israeli population. That said, Oz’s account of the psychology of Jephthah has its own fascination, presenting a very distinctive character-type, a warrior withdrawn from the ordinary social world around him in a way which suggests shades of autism. The whole story is also a vivid depiction of the mind of a man living life not only on the edges of human society but also of the natural environment. This reworking makes repeated reference to other biblical hypotexts, notably Abel and Cain, Jacob and Esau, Gen.22 and the story of Joseph and his brothers. These biblical intertexts influence the way the Jephthah story is seen and in turn the Jephthah story becomes a sort of key to the biblical worldview. David Jacobson points out that Jephthah’s flight to Ammon in Oz’s story has no basis in the biblical hypotext (though his flight to the land of Tob is present in the hypotext) and that this provides the opportunity in the rewriting to suggest that Jephthah was torn between his loyalty to the stern God of Israel and his fascination with the desert god Milcom.²⁵⁸ Again, though the reader may be informed by Jacobson’s reading of this as indicative of the divided sympathies of immigrant groups within the Israeli population in the 1960s or 1970s, such a reading of ‘Upon this Evil Earth’ as a roman-à-clef is not exhaustive of the hypertext’s possible meanings, since such dividedness is a universal experience in nations whose members are of diverse origin.

 Jacobson: 173 – 181.  Jacobson: 175.

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For a rewriting specifically of the Jephthah story, the interest here surely lies in the outworking of conflicting social and psychological forces in Jephthah’s unnatural action in sacrificing his daughter. Oz uses a double structure for this rewriting. The opening paragraphs provide a condensation of the forthcoming story, including the suggestion that Jephthah believed that there would be a last-minute divine reprieve for his daughter, after the pattern of the Akedah in Gen. 22. There follows a major amplification of the life of Jephthah, from his conception and birth through to his death. The chief features of this account are Jephthah’s position as an outsider. The son of Gibeon by a prostitute, he is excluded from the inner circle of the family until it becomes politically expedient to enlist his skills as a warrior and leader. As a lone wolf, he displays the grit and courage of someone totally reliant on his own resources, even as a youth demonstrating his toughness to his father as he holds his arm in a flame. As the son of an Ammonite woman who was captured by the Hebrews, he belongs to another ethnicity and yet seems not to belong essentially to any tribe. He is also a man used to living on the edge of the desert, with all its threat to normal human flourishing. When he becomes the father of a girl, Pitdah (named after Jephthah’s own mother), he is jealous to the point of obsession when she even dreams of a husband and so the trance-like state in which he eventually fulfils his vow to sacrifice her appears to be merely a continuation of that possessive drive. We are told that, as related subsequently by wandering tribesmen, it became the story of “a bride on her marriage couch and he a youthful lover stretching out his fingers to the first touch.”²⁵⁹ There are several allusions to other biblical tropes, setting the Jephthah narrative in implied antithesis to the positive outcomes of those examples. Apart from the two main allusions to Gen.22 (in the prologue-condensation and in one of Jephthah’s adolescent dreams²⁶⁰), there is the issue over the legitimacy of Jephthah and there is the moment when Jephthah has his father thrown into a pit in order to sideline him (echoing the treatment of Joseph by his brothers.)²⁶¹ Less of an antithesis perhaps is the resemblance of the sorcery of Jephthah’s mother to that of the Witch of Endor in I Sam. 28: 3 – 25, with its similarly baleful effects. Finally, the short story extends the lyricism of Jephthah’s daughter lament upon the mountains to the entire concluding episode, while at the same time painting a disturbing picture of Jephthah himself as a man unhinged by memories of his

 ‘Upon this Evil Earth’: 216 – 217.  ‘Upon this Evil Earth’: 170, 205.  ‘Upon this Evil Earth,’ 175, 210.

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mother’s witchcraft and by the dreams and nightmares which constantly affect his waking life.

Judas Amos Oz’s novel Judas (2014) belongs to that genre of retellings in which the hypotext is recessed within a research project. The opening words introduce very precisely the ‘present day’ of the main narrative: “Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960. It is a story of error and desire, of unrequited love, and of a religious truth that remains unresolved….”²⁶² They also indicate the ambitious scale of a novel which is set mostly in a very confined space, the lodgings rented by the main protagonist, Shmuel Ash in the attic of a house occupied by an old man and his carer in Jerusalem. The chronotope provides a diegetic setting which both acts as a foil for the historically distant figure of Judas Iscariot and as a suitably pivotal moment in the early years of the modern State of Israel, a state which is in some ways the product of the cultural reception of the New Testament story of Judas. Shmuel Ash is a postgraduate student who has dropped out of university and abandoned his thesis on Jewish views of Jesus but remains very interested in the figure of Judas. Life in his new digs brings him into contact with two people who have been closely involved in events in recent Israeli history, the aged scholar Gershom Wald (long-time friend of the fictive controversial politician Shealtiel Abravnel) and his daughter-in-law and carer, Atalia Abravnel, widow of a soldier killed in the Six Day War. Shmuel is to be given board and lodge in exchange for providing companionship for the argumentative Wald. Shmuel develops a strong longing for the attractive Atalia, who for most of the narrative resists his advances. At the same time his conversations with the old man reveal more and more about the life and works of the mysterious Shealtiel Abravnel and the outlines of the alternative political future for Israel which he advocated and for which he was shunned. Alongside these diegetic developments in the novel’s present and the retrospective diegetic content related to Abravnel the political thinker are the ideas about the figure of Judas which occur to Shmuel and which resonate with the treatment of Abravnel as a traitor.²⁶³ Near the end of the novel we are given disclosures about the historical Judas Iscariot in the

 Judas: 1.  Judas: 154, 169, 183 – 184, 199, 201, 204.

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

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form of his vouchsafed ipsissima verba in a stark flashback or analeptic continuation. During his discussions with Wald, Shmuel explains his view that Judas was the most loyal and devoted of the disciples of Jesus, the one who enabled the central events of the Christian faith to take place.²⁶⁴ Indeed Shmuel had experienced a dream, while at university and involved in student politics, in which Stalin called him “Judas.”²⁶⁵ The position of Judas as a cipher in the relationship between Jews and Gentiles is well expressed by the observation that in the Christian folk imagination the only Jew among Jesus and the Apostles was Judas.²⁶⁶ Equally apposite is the comparison in which Jesus and Judas are both defined as people who achieved more after their deaths than in their lifetime, though in the case of Judas this seems to relate to his long cultural afterlife as the shadow of the Christian Savior.²⁶⁷ If the fictive figure of Shealtiel Abravnel represents the abandoned or neglected political trajectory in which Israel adopts a more reconciliatory path with the Palestinians (perhaps in the image of Amos Oz’s own version of the Two State solution), then his treatment as a Judas-figure by his rightwing opponents in the novel’s hinterland can only be the inverted outworking of that complex dynamic by which Jewish identity has historically been constructed in the west on the basis of a particular interpretation of the role of Judas. As the elderly Wald remarks at the novel’s outset, “We are all Judas. Even eighty generations later we are still Judas.”²⁶⁸ By the same token if the picture of Judas’s role is revised, then so might be that of Shealtiel Abravnel. Shmuel knows that he is only a bystander in the great sweep of history and the novel ends with him escaping on a bus to Beersheba. Yet somehow the prospect remains that Abravnel’s vision will be revived in the future.

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal Christopher Moore’s adventurous and amusing novel Lamb (2002) is, in Genettian terminology, a ‘fictitious pastiche.’ It purports to provide the story of the “missing years” of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, between the story of his birth and that of his adult ministry, though it also extends into a version of the events covered by the

    

Judas: 102. Judas: 7. Judas: 171. Judas: 172. Judas: 34.

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canonical gospels, involving some quirky changes. For example, in this account Biff himself strangles Judas after the betrayal. In part an elliptical continuation of the apocryphal Infancy Gospels, with their flamboyant tales of the miracles performed by the child Jesus, the novel amounts to 506 pages of text (including an afterword of 8 pages), making this a large-scale amplification. In the afterword, the author foreswears replicating some of the more unacceptable childhood miracles of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas as “frankly, just plain creepy.”²⁶⁹ Nevertheless, the young Joshua (the name for Jesus in the novel) embarks on an escalating series of miraculous resuscitations, beginning with the experiments on a lizard. The excuse for the journey which forms the central part of the plot is a returnvisit to the three magi in their countries of origin. This allows for encounters with the very world religions which (to the modern mind) seem conspicuously absent from the Bible: Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism. It also makes the novel a sequel to the gospel story of the Visit of the Magi, becoming here a journey lasting a number of years. The excuse for the writing of Biff ’s gospel is that, two thousand years after the writing of the traditional gospels, it has been decided to commission a new one from Jesus’ boyhood friend, who is resurrected for the purpose by the angel Razael, send down from heaven. The pair share a hotel room while Biff writes his account of the life and death of Jesus, with the modern setting providing some hilarious cultural incongruities. In terms of genre, this is a comic rewriting. The final reunion between Biff and Mary Magdalene (who turns out to have been his adolescent amour) seals the comedy. As an ‘allographic continuation’ this rewriting is framed as the first-person narrative of Jesus’ fictitious childhood friend, Biff. When the boys begin their improbable journey, they are accompanied intermittently by the angel Razael, in a convergence with the biblical-apocryphal story of Tobit. Jesus himself is given the name ‘Joshua,’ ostensibly for reasons of historical accuracy or verisimilitude (“Jesus is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Yeshua, which is Joshua”²⁷⁰), though the effect conforms with the tendency of the species of rewritings which Genette terms in a neutral way, ‘unfaithful continuations.’ (A different example would be Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, where the change of John the Baptist’s name to Iokonnen similarly allowed a certain distancing from the biblical hypotext.) The most significant feature of this colourful romp through an alternative version of the origins of Christianity is that, in the course of the travels of Jesus and his companions, various teachings from (particularly) Hinduism and Buddhism be-

 Lamb: 503.  Lamb: 8.

Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary

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come absorbed within Jesus’ evolving message. To add to the comprehensiveness of the coverage, we learn at the end that Mary Magdalene has just completed her own version of the gospel story.

Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary There is a great gulf in mood between the rewriting just discussed and Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (2011), though the two works share the claim made by their first-person narrators that they, more than the gospel writers, “know what happened.” This novella presents itself as the memoirs of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and is cast in a stream-of-consciousness mode. We learn about Mary’s memories of the childhood of Jesus and then about the darkening atmosphere which accompanied the growth of his reputation as a miracle-worker. The central episode is the Miracle at Cana which, entwined with the macabre account of the death of and raising of Lazarus, is a time when the natural order is suspended. As during an eclipse, birdsong ceases and the very plants cease to grow. A cousin informs Mary that Jesus is to be crucified and that nothing can stop this. From this point the narrative becomes the account of a mind in shock, as the full horror of what is in store descends. The remorseless sequence of events now is reported from Mary’s unique viewpoint as she deals with all the mental repercussions, ranging from dreams that Jesus may be rescued to a terrible feeling of doom. It is clear that the judicial process is a total sham and that the dominant force in the drama is the bloodlust of the crowds. As she describes it, “Something is being played out for the sake of the future.” It is as though a state religion is in the making and Jesus has become the convenient vehicle. When finally she and Mary of Bethany have been taken into a sort of protective custody by the nascent Christian movement, Mary refuses to accept the doctrine that Jesus died to redeem the world. As far as she is concerned, she simply wants to go back in time. She wants it all not to have happened. The disciples of Jesus during the time of the miracles had been awkward social misfits. The new leaders of the movement, including those charged with compiling the official gospels, are completely different. These are people who know how the world works. They even try to coach Mary in imagining herself nursing the body of the messiah, taken down from the cross, to enact a ‘pietà’ which simply never took place. For her part, Mary finds consolation in the cult of the goddess Artemis, as she nurses not her dead son but her agonizing memories of what has unfolded.

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Some Conclusions These major rewritings each admit the reader into a distinctive cognitive and experiential world and in all five cases the reader is invited to experience alienation from an established religious worldview. Pullman’s novel alienates through its provocative conceit of splitting the Founder of Christianity into two, antithetical personae. Beard’s Lazarus is Dead alienates through its self-conscious reference to multiple versions of the same story. The same writer’s Acts of the Assassins estranges itself from conventional accounts of the deaths of the apostles by the egregious choice of the genre of the detective story in what is technically a travesty in relation to the hypotext. Oz’s ‘Upon this Evil Earth’ is alienating in the sense it probes the disturbing psychology of the character Jephthah, who turns out to be outside the normal range of human empathies. Oz’s Judas probes one of the great unspoken assumptions about the relationship between two of the world’s main monotheistic faiths. Moore’s Lamb disrupts the conventional story of Christian origins by inserting the odyssey into the world of far-east religions. Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary disrupts the normal post-Crucifixion account of the beginnings of the Church by placing the grief of Mary centre-stage. The structural relationship of these rewritings to their hypotexts is quite varied. Pullman produces a selective condensation and devaluation of the hypotext. Beard offers an elliptical amplification of the Lazarus story and then an ‘unfaithful’ (in Genettian terms) transmodalization of the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles into a gum-shoe detective story. Of Oz’s two reworkings, the first unearths a foundational story from Israel’s early history (that of Jephthah and his daughter) to demonstrate transvaluations which emphasize the manic side of Jephthah and yet also the astonishing courage of his daughter. The second transposes the story of Judas into an intercalated historical recess which finds a strange reenactment in a near-contemporary political situation. Moore, as shown above, changes the register of the gospel infancy-story into that of a comic memoir, at the same time inserting a very substantial analeptic continuation. Tóibín produces a proleptic continuation of the gospel story, focused on the grief of Jesus’ mother. By revealing some of the potentialities of the respective underlying hypotexts, these radical rewritings keep the tropes which they handle in circulation as components in the construction of a worldview which may not be pious but is certainly informed by biblical paradigms. The works by Pullman and Beard in particular play with some of the axioms of modern critical study of the Bible to de-familiarize their base texts. This is a form of de-familiarization which shuts down rather than re-activates any sense of transcendental meaning. The works by Oz, Moore and Toíbín are more open-ended, suggesting modes of engagement with their respective hypotexts which draw in modern concerns about

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human psychology, interest in the interaction of world religions and a taste for the recovery of suppressed voices, all of which are in conversation with traditional ideas about transcendence. The next chapter will explore some literary rewritings which take the conversation in still further directions.

Chapter Nine: The Hidden Truth: Seven More Rewritings (Louis Levy, Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Leopoldo Marechal, Derek Walcott, Jeanette Winterson, and Hugo Loetscher) The seven literary rewritings reviewed in this chapter all contain engrossing diegetic material. They make for impressive reading, even when they cannot in every case be described as positive in any simplistic way. Rather than positive, many of them are what S.G. Sebald termed “restitutive.”²⁷¹ They belong to a form of literature which seeks to compensate for the ills of the past by setting the record straight. In terms of the dates of their publication, they span nearly the whole of the twentieth-century.

Kzradock the Onion Man Louis Nicolai Levy (1875 – 1940) was a Danish playwright and theatre critic, responsible for the screenplays of several unconventional early films. Louis Levy’s experimental novel Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah (1910), concerns Dr Renard de Montpensier, a mental asylum physician, who treats a patient named Methuselah Kzradock, who may or not be an avatar of the doctor himself. In the many twists of this farcical yet menacing detective story, Kzradock seems to keep renewing himself as the “spring fresh Methuselah”, while the author (who may or may not be Dr Renard) is drawn to a mystical path which he calls the Gospel of Doubt. Although exhibiting only a tangential connection with the biblical hypotext surrounding the figure of Methuselah, who in Gen. 5:31 is reported as living for seven hundred and seventy-seven years, the novel extracts Methuselah from the patriarchal narrative in which his main significance is that he is identified as the father of Noah. Instead, rather like the figures of Rosencrantz and Guildernstern extracted from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Tom Stoppard’s play of 1966, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he takes on a new life, independent of the hypotext. Unlike the characters in Stoppard’s play, though, Methuselah already had a considerable afterlife as a proverbial figure. Levy’s novel confronts

 W.G. Sebald: Campo Santo: 215. “There are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts and over and above scholarship.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-010

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us with the fact that the density of this afterlife does not make Methuselah less shadowy and he therefore becomes the emblem of the Gospel of Doubt, a mystical path comically akin perhaps to the sacerdotal heritage associated with the equally shadowy figure of Melchizedek, another elusive personage drawn from the Book of Genesis. The thrust of the work is to make Methuselah the engine of a discourse about the relationship between madness and reality.

Thomas Mann’s Joseph Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955) was one of the major European writers of the twentiethcentury, famous for his novella Death in Venice (1912) and the novels Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (1924), Dr Faustus (1947) and the work considered below. In chronological order, we continue with Thomas Mann’s enormous novel, Joseph and His Brothers (1933 – 43), simply because it is not a rewriting in the same way that the others are. This three-volume work will be considered here purely in terms of the key features of its reworking of the hypotext, drawing on T.R. Wright’s examination of the structure of the novel and his diagnosis of what he terms its ‘montage technique.’²⁷² We can only provide a few samples here. The novel borrows its portrait of Joseph from a number of intertexts, depicting him as good-looking, based on material from Jubilees and The Twelve Patriarchs. It adds further material from Joseph and Aseneth in the versions available to the author. There is extensive amplification of the character of Potiphar’s wife (here named Mut) and motivation for her willed unfaithfulness is provided by the information that Potiphar himself had become a eunuch, after being castrated on the orders of the Pharaoh, precisely as a punishment for his having procured Joseph for sexual purposes. The important episode of the women and the orange-knives (in which at a banquet Mut’s women friends absent-mindedly cut their hands at the sight of Joseph) is derived from the Quran. The character of Joseph is anything but flawless. Mann invents episodes in which Joseph falsely accuses his brothers of eating the limbs of living animals, providing a remotivation for their animosity towards him, which in the hypotext is not fully explained. In addition Mann makes major plot changes based on his reading of the collections of Jewish midrashic material edited by Bin Gorion, He adds an episode in which young women shower Joseph with gold coins from the rooftops

 Wright: 147.

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in a futile effort to make him look up, though he excises the story of Joseph’s brothers caught in the red-light district. What becomes clear from Wright’s analysis is that Mann’s hypotext is effectively multi-textual. It is a combination of the biblical text of Genesis, the two anthologies of rabbinic material in Bin Gorion’s Joseph und seine Brüder and Die Sagen der Juden, plus material gathered from other sources of Jewish midrash and material derived from the Quran and Quranic commentaries. Where Mann finds episodes involving angels in his sources, he tends to downplay the supernatural element. On the other hand, he adds layers of intertext derived from the writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. Perhaps most significant for our purposes is the sense which Mann’s novel provides of the biblical topos as capable of almost infinite expansion and also of the biblical hypotext itself as an arbitrary starting point.²⁷³ To this extent Joseph and his Brothers stands as a challenge to most of the assumptions which guide not only our schema of hypotext-and-hypertext but also to the distinction implicit in most of the other rewritings covered in this book between a biblical base text and what they present.

Robert Walser’s ‘The Prodigal Son’ Robert Walser (1878 – 1956) was a Swiss avant-garde writer, sometimes compared to Kafka and best known for his works Speaking to the Rose and Berlin Stories. Robert Walser’s ‘The Prodigal Son’ (1917) is a retrospective revision of the parable of Lk 15:11– 32, from the point of view of the elder brother. It is one of the author’s ‘microscripts,’ pithy short stories and retellings written in an extraordinary small script, often crisscrossing the page. Here the story signals itself from the outset as a didactic lesson. However, there is a shift in expectation as we are told that this “instructive story” depends for its existence on the fortuitous fact that a certain country squire had two sons who differed sharply from one another. Progressively we are shown the events from the perspective of the elder son, who, we are told, would have relished the joys of homecoming, were it not for the fact that his assiduous clinging to home life prevented him. He could have “made his escape” but never did. A long paragraph describes the homecoming of the prodigal, who attracts such sympathy that he approaches saintliness. Next we are told that “a certain other person” now discovered that he wished that he had not led such an exemplary

 “At the time when our story begins, an arbitrary beginning…” Joseph and his Brethren: 12.

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life, since he was now denied the pleasure of being welcomed back. In the midst of so much celebration he turned out to be the only person who was disgruntled and angry. This passage not only marks him out from the rest of the characters in the story, but, by being foregrounded, changes the tone of the story itself. We now hear that the story is being narrated by someone who has just met the elder son. The narrator concludes from his interview that the story of the prodigal son cannot, after all, be considered an edifying one, since it generated such peevishness. This ingenious rewriting allows the conventional lines of the hypotext to unfold while simultaneously giving new weight to the subjective experience of the elder son. Although the account begins even-handedly, describing the different lives of the two sons, it allows what turns out to be the version told by the elder son to gain the ascendancy simply by becoming the normative eye-witness version vouchsafed to the narrator. Whereas in the Lucan parable the elder son is merely a foil for the story of the prodigal’s adventure, here he becomes exalted as the shadow side of the projected moral lesson. More than that, his bitterness is represented as outlasting the joy of all the other personae in the tale. The narrator thus emerges as the arbiter of the validity of the hypotext in a wry twist near the end. The irony is underlined by the shift of emphasis from the profligacy and recklessness of the prodigal (and the joy at his turning back) to the elder son’s regrets about his lost opportunity to rebel and reform. He has rejected his role in the narrative and now steps out from the page to protest.

Adam Buenosares (1948) Leopoldo Marechal (1900 – 1970) was a prominent Argentinian writer, dedicated to establishing a bold new literary tradition for his nation and region. Apart from the work considered here, he wrote two other major novels and numerous poems and plays. Leopoldo Marechal’s vast novel Adam Buenosares has waited until 2014 to receive an English translation and is generally still little known outside Argentina and certainly in the realms of Weltliteratur. Running to 618 pages in Norman Cheadle’s translation (which also carries another 90 pages of notes), this could be considered, in Genettian terms, a massive amplification of the hypotext of the life of Adam in Gen. 1– 5. In fact, of course, it is, as a novel about Buenos Aires in the 1920s, both an imitation, in part, of James Joyce’s novel about Dublin (and about Bloom), Ulysses, and an ambitious project to forge a new path for Latin American literature. Yet the designation of the central protagonist as Adam is far from being a casual choice, since the novel constantly alludes to this and other biblical tropes,

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alongside some of the other planks of western literature which form the springboard for this new venture. The other constituents range from classical mythology to Cervantes’s Don Quixote and in the end one can only describe the final work as a re-mixing of the received canon of western literature in conversation with Argentinian folklore, with the contemporary speech-patterns and life experiences of ordinary citizens of Buenos Aires, and with the banter and argot of the cultural and artistic coterie to which the author belonged. There are some prolixities in this at times rambling excursion into the varied diegetic material of human life in this city bordering the River Plata and it is also slightly disconcerting to find that the final 226 pages which comprise Book 7 of the novel take the form of a descent into hell, loosely in imitation of Dante’s Inferno. These factors apart, the work nevertheless coheres and indeed overrides its own structural ungainliness. At the same time what is delivered is, in ontological terms, more optimistic and open-ended than is the case with James Joyce’s great work, reflecting perhaps the temper of the Latin American milieu. Ambrose Gordon notes that, while Ulysses takes place against the background of Ireland as a monoculture, Marechal’s novel has to deal with the multiplicity that is the New World.²⁷⁴ The novel’s plot involves two return journeys across the city by foot conducted by the eponymous Adam (‘Adán’) over two days on Thursday and Friday, 28th and 29th April of 192-. (The specific year in the 1920s is withheld). A wide range of diegetic situations is presented, with Adam encountering a primary school, an area run by the mafioso, a funeral procession, a library and a number of bars, as well as visiting a brothel. This might resemble the journal of a flaneur, were it not for the extended passages of fantasy which punctuate the journey and for the inebriated philosophical debates with Adam’s friends. The framework narrative culminating in ‘The Journey to the Dark City of Cacodelphia,’ reminds us, moreover, that the register is not that of an objective observer travelling through the city but rather that of a fallen Adam living in a fallen city. To that extent this fallen Adam is as much the “First Adam” of Rom. 5: 12– 21 as the character of the Genesis narrative. Some of the mythographic forces encountered in the novel belong to what we might call indigenous culture. An example is the legend of Glyptodon, a monster of the pampas which in one of the novel’s fantastic episodes is interrogated by the character Bernini.²⁷⁵ Others appear to be localizations of western legends, for example that of St Martin of Tours who somehow metamorphosed into General José

 Gordon: 210.  Adam Buenosayres: 167– 8.

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de St Martin.²⁷⁶ This is part of a dialectic between New World culture and the culture borrowed from Europe which also shades off into a dialectic between AngloSaxon and Latin attitudes or between Argentinian pragmatism (or at times materialism) and western religious idealism.²⁷⁷ The question posed is whether western religious ideas are more than mere costume jewelry. The novel creates extensive riffs on the legend of Lilith and also slightly some eccentric riffs on the trope of Christ, who variously appears as the Black Christ and the Christ of the Broken Hand, the latter title deriving from a damaged statue. As part of an assertion of Latin American values, the legend of Atlantis becomes a source of validation.²⁷⁸ Leaving behind the Golden Age which motivated Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the novel imagines a farewell-tour of Europe, the Old World, ending in Madeira.²⁷⁹ Thereafter it is a case of Buenos Ayres and Argentina working out their own salvation through the descent into hell which constitutes the rest of the text. Out of this maelstrom there emerges a sense of identity which is intimately linked both to the natural and the political history of the region. The final words of the novel are anticlimactic, in a sort of mockery of the loftiness of western imperial pretensions, and this lightness stands in stark contrast to the sheer bulk of the diegetic material which has been presented about life in the city beside the River Plate. Among the biblical tropes used by the novel, the idea of Creation is prominent, together with the fairly conventional notion of the human creation as being positioned between that of animals and angels.²⁸⁰ The group of artists and intellectuals surrounding Adam are also given to discussing the conventional problems of Genesis versus Science.²⁸¹ The character Samuel Tesler, as the group’s Jewish thinker, delivers the largest number of biblical allusions, ranging from his elaborate view of the status of the “sacred liquor” invented by Noah after the flood²⁸² to his parodic reference to himself as climbing Mount Carmel to contemplate the truth face to face, with the resultant mystical radiance imparted to his cranium.²⁸³ If the Adam of Genesis underwent the Fall which led in turn to the production of western civilization, the Adam of this novel seems, through his journeys across the city of Buenos Aires, to be the precursor of a new civilization, one of whose

       

Adam Adam Adam Adam 25 100. 55 576.

Buenosayres: 180. Buenosayres: 160. Buenosayres: 171– 2. Buenosayres: 315 – 323.

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creative writers is able to manipulate the dominant tropes of the Old World ironically and yet also with that sense of anticipation which is missing from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Of course, while Adam Buenosayres is ground-breaking in its extensive use of vernacular language and of popular rhythms of speech, it cannot escape the elitism of its constructedness as an art-form. As Samuel observes at one point in the novel, there are two million souls in Buenos Aires: “…caught up, most them unawares, in a terrible supernatural fight.”²⁸⁴ One sentiment which the novel seems to expect many of those inhabitants to share is the command of Gen. 1:28 to “Multiply and fill the earth.” This is what Adam himself preaches to the members of his vestibule.²⁸⁵ It is the very antithesis of the governing mood of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which we will soon examine.

Ti-Jean and his Brothers (1958) Derek Walcott (1930 – 2017) was a St Lucian poet and playwright and one of the best known Caribbean writers. He is one of the major voices of post-colonialist creative writing. Derek Walcott’s play Ti-Jean and his Brothers also belongs to the divergent corpus of Latin American biblical rewriting, though the West Indian context is completely different from that of Argentina. Walcott himself was very conscious of beginning from a western canon and then moving away from it: I saw myself legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Milton, of Marlowe, but my sense of inheritance was stronger because it came from estrangement. I would learn that every tribe hoards its culture as fiercely as its prejudices, that English literature, even in the theatre, was hallowed ground and trespass…²⁸⁶.

Ti-Jean and his Brothers does indeed trespass upon a received literary culture in that it rewrites at least three conventional western literary tropes, two of them biblical or quasi-biblical. The non-biblical hypotext is that of the triadic folktale in which the hero defeats a monster or a giant after two earlier champions have fallen victim. This effectively forms the play’s frame-story. Into this mould is placed a reworking of the story of David and Goliath (which the play explicitly alludes to) and an insistent refrain linking the play’s villain (the Devil) to the legend of

 159.  286.  Walcott: Dream on Monkey Mountain: 31.

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Cain as the man in the moon bearing thistles. The style resembles perhaps that of Shakespeare’s enigmatic plays, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (there are talking animals), or perhaps it is closer to the darker world of The Tempest. The first two brothers, Gros Jean and Mi-Jean, in turn are defeated and indeed crucified by the Devil in his various guises as the Old Man and the Planter before the more resourceful young Ti-Jean outwits his opponent and finally not only destroys his cash crops but sets fire to his house in a portrait of colonialism overthrown. We are introduced to the Cain legend from the very outset: FROG If you look in the moon, Though no moon is here tonight, There is a man, no, a boy, Bent by a weight of faggots, He carried on his shoulder, A small dog trotting with him. That is Ti-Jeans the hunter….

In this proleptic summary of the plot, Ti-Jean has defeated the Devil and his victory is there for all to see, displayed on the moon’s surface, in a startling adaptation of the Cain legend. As Jana Leigh Karika has pointed out in an essay, the play modifies orthodox Christian doctrine by treating Christ’s death on the cross as tragic and final.²⁸⁷ In the play the mother of the brothers contemplates Ti-Jean’s death in a resigned way, urging the cosmic deity to have mercy on her son and allow him to die, “Even as your Own Son/Fought the Devil and died.”²⁸⁸ Similarly Ti-Jean himself seems to have reached the conclusion that God exists but has been so far eclipsed in the human world by the activity of the Devil. As an indictment in dramatic terms of the crushing weight of colonial exploitation of the population of the West Indies these contradictions of religious orthodoxy make a powerful statement. The play retains the optimistic outcome of the David-and-Goliath hypotext by having Ti-Jean overcome the Devil but there is a bitter twist in which the Devil shows Ti-Jean’s brothers still in agony in the afterlife, one turning a millwheel in agony and the other blind as a bat and “shrieking in doubt.”²⁸⁹ The play

 See Jana Leigh Karika: ‘Go Bring Down Goliath Biblical Discourse and Counter-Discourse in Derk Walcott’s Ti-Jeans and His Brothers,’ in Sedial Frank H. Deena and Karlone Szatek, From Around the Globe: Secular Authors and Biblical Perspectives (Lanham, Maryland 2007: 299 – 305.  Walcott: 158.  Walcott: 166.

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seems to assert here that the history of oppression cannot simply be erased by a new turn in history, though Ti-Jean himself gracefully helps Bolom, the Devil’s illegitimate son, make the transition into mortal life before the end, as a sort of Caliban set free. The play then ends with a renewed picture of Ti-Jean as the Man in the Moon, “lightening the doubt of all travelers through the wood of life,” rather in the style of the conclusion to a Shakespearean romance. In fact, of course, to make the lunar Cain-figure into the equivalent of David triumphant over Goliath is a supreme example of extreme rewriting, just as much as is the commandeering of the David and Goliath story itself (one of the most decorative myths of western patriarchy) to illustrate the defeat of colonialism.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985) Jeanette Winterson (1959‐) is an English writer, celebrated as a campaigner for inclusiveness. The recipient of many literary rewards, she is the author of numerous works which riff off the stories associated with western patriarchal hegemony. Jeanette Winterson’s novel is a very moving account in the first person of a young woman’s journey of self-discovery as a Lesbian as she leaves behind a revivalist family background in the North West of England. Central to the novel is the main protagonist’s painful relationship with her mother and the use of biblical tropes to illustrate events, mostly in a comic way. The eight chapter-titles correspond to the titles of biblical books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth. The narrative combines very amusing comic moments with moments of great pathos, the author dismissively describing her own life as a tragedy: Everyone thinks their own situation tragic. I am no exception.²⁹⁰

Before exploring the novel’s use of biblical material (which significantly includes the treatment of the Nativity story as part of its frame narrative), it is important to recognize that the work places a high degree of reliance on storytelling per se as a source of recuperative strength and that the Grail legend is given considerable weight as a source of meaning in the second half of the text. Given that the Bible is experienced as the totemic force behind the fundamentalist religion which oppresses the author, the reader is left to wonder what a more liberal experience of biblical exegesis might have contributed, though that may be akin to ask-

 Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit: 206.

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ing what the Stock Exchange crash of 2008 would have been like without subprime mortgages. The Nativity story features prominently in the novel’s overarching narrative on account of the sense which Jeanette’s adoptive mother has of Jeanette being set apart as “chosen” from the moment of her visit to the orphanage to select a child for adoption. This version of the Virgin Birth is also associated with Mrs Winterson’s abhorrence of physical sexuality. The nativity story of Matt.2 with its star is parodied in the opening chapter, entitled ‘Genesis’, as Constance Winterson is led by a star to the orphanage and then Jeanette is set apart for a life as a Pentecostalist missionary.²⁹¹ In her essay on the novel, Anita Gnagnatti argues that the chapter-headings and the chapters themselves amount to more than casual allusions to the biblical themes which they signal. By aligning her story with the books of the Pentateuch, Winterson seeks “to promote a view of lesbianism and lesbians as somehow ‘special, in some way chosen’….”²⁹² The Hebrew for ‘holy’, qadosh’ connotes, as Gnagnatti points out, separation, withdrawal and dedication and informs the recurring dialectic in the novel between Constance Winterson’s idea of what is holy and her daughter’s sense. Other dichotomies with which the novel plays are those between prophet and priest and fiction and truth. Both of these dualisms are linked directly to the exegesis of the Bible, as Jeanette, in abandoning her mapped-out role as agent of the revivalist church, chooses to follow the path of prophet rather than priest. “The priest has a book with the words set out…The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness…”²⁹³ The literalist reading of scripture which the revivalist church propounds (which turns out to be highly selective in its choice of passages) is set in direct opposition to the main protagonist’s reliance on fairy stories and on the Grail legend for sustenance at moments of crisis in her early life. The word ‘demon’ becomes a crux when Jeanette discovers that the demon which the pastor wishes to expel from her is the very core of her identity as a person.²⁹⁴ Elsewhere the use of biblical tropes tends to be more comic, as when, in the chapter entitled ‘Joshua,’ the main protagonist discovers the necessity of “blowing your own trumpet” and or more lyrical, as when she considers that emulating Lot’s wife and turning back to her old life would entail imitating a pillar which “holds things up” and salt “which keeps things clean” yet losing one’s identity.²⁹⁵ In the     

Oranges: 14, 23, 38, 95. Gnagnatti: 122. Oranges: 205. Oranges: 137– 139. Oranges: 143, 204.

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end Jeanette, after leaving home, does return to visit her mother, who remains a fervent believer in her church’s mission to bring salvation to the masses, despite the disappointments surrounding the behaviour of its leadership. Even Jeanette herself finds that she misses God, though not his servants. By now her mother has modernized her worldview to the extent of buying a digital piano and embracing CB radio to communicate with other believers, yet the distance between them seems unbridgeable. Significantly this final chapter is entitled ‘Ruth’, marking a departure from the patriarchal universe of the first seven chapter-titles into something more suggestive of feminine power.

Noah. A Novel of the Boom Times (1995/2012) Hugo Loetscher (1929 – 2009) was a Swiss writer and critic, working for periods as a journalist in Latin America and South East Asia. He received numerous literary awards, including the Schiller Prize in 1985. Hugo Loetscher’s novel is, in Genettian terms, a proximization of the Noah of Genesis 6 to the conditions of late capitalism. Noah himself seems to have acted intuitively in setting out on his project to his build the Ark, making him the sort of speculative entrepreneur who strikes out into new territory against the conventional wisdom of the commercial world. Thus, he is a mixture of prophet and astute businessman in a context which is a blend of the archaic world of Genesis and the contemporary finance-driven world of real estate deals. Here Noah rescues the economic world of Mesopotamia from the recession which has gripped it by commissioning the building of the Ark. For a long time the building operation stimulates the national economy of the area, drawing in guest-workers from Upper Turkey and generally leading to affluence among the population. Thanks to the employment opportunities created by the building of the Ark, property prices soar and funds flow into the creative arts. Religion operates only at the margins of this world, in the shape of the institutional church which tries to exploit fears of the Flood for the furtherance of its own interests and the rival Noah figure (styling himself “the true Noah”) who leads his besotted New Age followers in orgies involving whips and boots until the police intervene. The prospect of the Deluge itself is for the general population a sort of unwelcome accompaniment to the project, exploited by the Church as a moral warning for the community but otherwise ignored by everyone else, except in their insurance policies. When the port of Yegerom is destroyed by a localized flood, Noah’s project for a time gains in credibility, but soon the effect fades and the ruins of the town become a tourist site. Eventually temperatures soar and the problem becomes one of drought, with the Ark condemned for using more water than a me-

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dium-sized village.²⁹⁶ Meanwhile Noah has begun to populate the ark with selected species of animal and is forced to face up to the increasingly pressing problems of sanitation. Gradually the leaders of the community lose faith in the project, concluding that Noah is actually mad. As the project nears completion, the wider economy starts to slow down, though this is relieved to a degree by the return home of the Turkish workers and the general stimulus which has been given to trade. In a narrative swerve near the end Noah almost walks away from his own project, offering it to the camel-herder Erim in exchange for a suitcase. But the deal falls through and Noah returns to the Ark with his wife appealing for help with feeding the animals and the dismissive comment of onlookers ringing in his ears: “Only the Flood can save him now.”²⁹⁷This must be one of the best final lines of all literary biblical rewritings. It seems particularly appropriate that the Flood itself is an offstage prospect in this novel, since it runs counter to all the pre-occupations and fixations with material betterment and self-interest which concern the population of Mesopotamia. Loetscher’s Noah is a satire on the opportunistic world of modern capitalism which is at the same time an effective comic amplification of Noah’s construction project. Driven apparently more by business instinct than by any religious sense, this Noah is able to face down public ridicule and opprobrium as he pursues his manic project to build the Ark with the help of his long-suffering wife and wayward family. If he temporarily falters near the end, he is compelled to continue in his role. The reader, who knows the hypotext, has to assume that the great project will be vindicated on a grand scale when the great Flood finally does occur, though in the narrative itself the Ark itself dominates the cognitive horizon. In this chapter we have been able to examine some of the most extreme and imaginative biblical restitutive rewritings of the twentieth-century. In Chapter Ten we will consider a further selection of rewritings which are reformist in other ways.

 Noah: 153.  Noah: 183.

Chapter Ten: The Great Disrupters: D.H. Lawrence, C.J. Jung, Alan Sillitoe, Christa Wolf, Lucille Clifton and José Saramago If, as Eric Hobshawn described it, the whole of the twentieth century could be characterized as the Age of Extremity, the six further rewritings we shall consider in this chapter support that sense. They can be described as “reformist” in the broadest sense of that word and range from works which seek ambitiously to re-activate a sense of transcendence to one (at least) which seeks to shut down that sense. These six hypertexts are completely unrelated to each other and yet in the aggregate provide a composite picture of some of the seismic cognitive and cultural shifts of the period. They are also all provocatively contrarian in their very different ways and they all purport to offer some sort of panoptic view of biblical history in relation to post-biblical human experience. D.H Lawrence (1885 – 1930) was an essayist and one of the leading English novelists and poets of his time, braving censorship to write in a very direct and innovative way about human sexual relationships. His novels and short stories embody rich forms of symbolism and run counter to the ethos of industrialism. D.H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse was published posthumously in 1931, though actually written in 1929. It is a concentrated attack on the role of the Book of Revelation for its part in underpinning a bigoted, priggish version of Christianity in place of the ‘religion of tenderness’ associated with Jesus in the rest of the New Testament. Drawing indirectly on the scholarship of R.H. Charles who had attempted to set out the different stages in the text’s production, Lawrence unearths a suppressed sun-religion at the heart of the Apocalypse’s visions of sun and moon and stars, the dragon and Andromeda. Successively subverted by a scribal Jewish redactor and a perverted Christian writer, the biblical book was turned by a final editor into the textual equivalent of Judas. Now the time had arrived to recover the organic wholeness between man and the cosmos which the suppressed original visions of the Book of Revelation herald. Lawrence’s remarkable work seeks to salvage the wholesome archetypes which the biblical hypotext embodies and yet distorts. It is an oppositional reading, rather than a rejection of the text, in that it seeks to restore that text’s lost vitality and indeed (as T.R Wright notes) multivocality. Influenced by the ideas of Nietzsche and Frederick Carter and the commentaries not only of R.H. Charles but John Oman and Alfred Loisy, D.H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse is a paradigm of the hetero-

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-011

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doxy which believed that fresh life could be brought to the biblical text despite the efforts of its final redactors. Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) was a famous Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of the school of analytic psychology, renowned for his writings on the collective unconscious and on archetypes. Carl Jung’s Answer to Job (1952) shares similarly heady ambitions, though in relation to a different biblical hypotext. Once again, an author acclaimed in a field well outside conventional biblical studies, feels moved to address a specific biblical text as the vehicle for a prophetic statement about civilization. The logic, it could be argued, is that the Bible is the totem of western culture and it must therefore be addressed head-on if reforms are to be made. Common to both Lawrence and Jung is the aftermath of a Zeitgeist of progressive optimism, either side of the Second World War. For Jung, delivering his original addresses in Los Angeles in 1952 and 1953, disaster had struck on an unimaginable scale, making the reformist message desperately urgent. For Jung the Book of Job is a highly important archetype in the psychic history of mankind and one with specific relevance to today. Therefore the affective response which it produces in the individual, far from being of private significance to that person alone, has universal ramifications. We know from Jung’s own spiritual autobiography the influence of this and other biblical stories during his childhood and adolescence, a time when he began to dwell on the images of his subjective imagination, finding this material far more meaningful than the arid theological learning of his clergyman-father, whom he suspected of inward atheism and who died while Jung was an undergraduate. Answer to Job is then an intensely personal work. Jung describes how, before writing it, he had to “overcome the greatest inner resistance”, the problem of Job having been foreshadowed to him in a dream. The work takes the form of a selective commentary on the Book of Job, concentrating on Job’s revolt. Starting out from the false premise that God can be met on the basis of justice and morality, he is forced to admit that no one except God is doing him injustice and violence. So, holding firmly to a belief in God’s unity (which Jung asserts is perhaps the greatest thing about Job), Job comes to see that God is at odds with himself. In fact, “so totally at odds that he, Job, is quite certain of finding in God a helper and an advocate against God.” This is where Yahweh differs from a human being, in that he is both a persecutor and a helper in one, the one aspect being as real as the other, which could never happen in a human being. Yahweh is not split, but an antinomy, a totality of inner opposites, and this is “the indispensable condition for his intense dynamism.” The ancient world was accustomed to divine inconsistencies, but in the case of Yahweh there had grown up a personal and moral tie in the religious re-

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lationship, so that any breach of contract was liable to result in not only personal but moral injury. It is Job’s fidelity to the contract which brings the issue of theodicy to a head. Yahweh had in this instance allowed himself to be influenced by “a doubting thought about Job”, whereas, if he had consulted his own omniscience, he would have confirmed Job’s faithfulness and constancy without subjecting him to underserved suffering. It seems that Yahweh has been so taken up with his own dynamism that he has neglected the other aspects of his being. However, Job, by insisting on bringing his case before God, even without the hope of a hearing, has stood his ground and has thereby created “the very obstacle that forced God to reveal his true nature.” As a result, Yahweh breaks off his “cruel game of cat and mouse.” At this point Yahweh might have brought his mischief-making son, Satan, to account. Instead he rants and raves against Job: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without insight?” In fact, Job’s only lack of insight has been his incurable optimism in believing that he can appeal to divine justice. The reality is that God “does not want to be just; he merely flaunts might over right.” In this situation, Job finds that he has no alternative but formally to revoke his demand for justice. In effect, he is humouring God, for in his final reply to God, “Job has not so much answered as reacted in an adjusted way.” Nevertheless, the victory is Job’s ultimately, for Job has the moral satisfaction of knowing that God is nothing more than an amoral force of Nature. With the tables turned, it is no longer a case of God testing Job but of Job being set up as a judge over God himself. Whether or not humankind was properly aware of what had taken place, human consciousness had taken part in revealing the divine antinomy and this was bound to have wide repercussions. The outcome is that Yahweh seeks a reunion with his estranged consort, Sophia, since he now covets the human power of reasoning. He and Sophia (the Virgin Mary) together spawn the Incarnation (“God’s birth to consciousness”), though even in Christ there is a lack of self-reflection until the despairing cry from the Cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” At last God drinks to the dregs what he has made his servant Job suffer and in the ensuing era of the Paraclete God now has to suffer for man, for this is the only way to achieve reconciliation between the two parties. It seems fair to treat Answer to Job as an extreme literary rewriting, even if its author’s reputation is that of one of the two most prominent psychologists of the twentieth century. Unsurprisingly the work earned the author no plaudits from the ecclesiastical establishment, though it did influence a number of writers, including (as we have seen) Muriel Spark, and it remains a landmark in the reception of the Book of Job. Alan Sillitoe (1928 – 2010) was an English writer best known for his novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and his short story, The Loneliness of the

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Long Distance Runner (1959), both made into successful films. His output included many more novels and short stories, various plays and numerous collections of poems. Our next work is that of a poet, Alan Sillitoe. In one respect, Snow on the North Side of Lucifer (1979) begins where Answer to Job leaves off, since the fate of Satan was one of the loose ends of that work. Satan in the new work is called Lucifer, in a salute to an important strand in the literary tradition. Through a series of interconnected poems, we discover how Lucifer continues to work against God’s plans until there comes about a final reconciliation. The first poem of the collection depicts Lucifer as a frozen mountain, probably recapitulating the legend of Pilate incarnated on Mount Pilatus, to which we alluded earlier. Irrespective of this, the frozen “north side of Lucifer” is an apt image for the leading angel, fallen to earth. In the succeeding sections, Lucifer is given an astronomy lesson, before we are given “the Official Version of his Fall,” which is that he defied Cosmogony and paid the price. Though expelled from heaven, Lucifer does not simply disappear. He and the Moon fall in love which each other. Lucifer becomes an island, worshipped by marine life, though he soon comes to its limits. God for his part named the icy morning star after him. In the collection’s second section, ‘Lucifer Reborn,’ God begins to think again about Lucifer. Lucifer has a triumph in the Garden of Eden, where in the form of the snake he succeeds in making Adam and Even join his fall. Strengthened by this success, Lucifer plans his revenge on God and this is recorded in the Book of Lucifer. Nimrod becomes Lucifer’s protégé and attempts to fire arrows at God from the Tower of Babel, but when the arrows fall to earth, it is Lucifer who is injured. The work on the Tower continues, though the builders fall out with each other. Lucifer himself works as a surveyor and mechanic and manages to make all human work demonic. The outcome is the sinking of the Titanic, World War One, the Russian Revolution, and finally the Atom Bomb, Lucifer’s ultimate attempt to wipe out God and replace him. He fails and God sends him a message to the effect that it is futile to try to kill him, since he dies every day. Lucifer now has other problems. Human beings no longer believe in him and this is captured by the fact that they have given up using matches, known as “lucifers” in the vernacular. Lucifer finds new employment as the captain of an airliner and is able to taunt his passengers with some very disconcerting announcements. Fortunately, he is able to parachute out of the plane before it crashes in the Himalayas. Lucifer now has a series of encounters with figures from the Bible: Job, Noah, Daniel before (in a sequence of poems) he is purged in Sinai. It is Elijah who finally persuades him to be reconciled with God and to give up his attempts to usurp divinity. Clearly a summary cannot do justice to the poetic content of Sillitoe’s work and equally clearly the register is that of a lampoon. What perhaps is most interesting

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about Snow on the North Side of Lucifer is that it provides allusions to some fairly esoteric biblical legends surrounding the Tower of Babel, alongside a comically brief sketch of world history. At the same time, it apes the genre of biblical retellings designed to allow a behind-the-scenes glimpse into celestial events. Compared with Answer to Job, it is theologically conservative and yet there is more than just a hint that the biblical menu is an á-la-carte one. Readers in the southern hemisphere would probably find the view of world history rather lop-sided. Christa Wolf (1929 – 2011) was an important German literary critic and novelist, much of whose life was spent in the GDR or East Germany. She is best known for her novel The Quest for Christa T (1968) and her memoir of life in the GDR, What Remains (1990.) Our next hypertext is much more grave in tone. Christa Wolf ’s novel Accident, News of a Day (1987) uses the matrix of the Genesis account of the Fall to articulate a response to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, seen as the moment when human rapacity threatens in a terrible climax to destroy all life on earth, not just human life. Again, as with our previous examples in this chapter, what is at stake is European civilisation, though the implications go far beyond Europe. What scientists claimed could only happen once in ten thousand years has happened within a few years of the start of the Soviet nuclear program and the journalistic recalling of this projected timescale itself lends a sort of biblical perspective to the catastrophe. The novel’s original title in German, Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages, carries connotations of the German for Fall in the theological sense, Sūndenfall, and the opening scene is that of fruit trees in bloom, actually here cherry trees. The Genesis account is in fact neutral about the type of fruit tree at the centre of the story of Eden. Quickly we learn that the expected explosion of fruit has been replaced by a different sort of explosion and that everything in nature, from the birds to the water supply, is being tested for levels of radiation. The narrator, who is relaying all this to her brother who is undergoing surgery for a brain tumor, has suddenly had to learn a whole new language, featuring terms such as ‘nucleids.’ Life has reverted to being a series of days, recalling the opening sections of Genesis, as the narrator relishes such simple things as boiling an egg, knowing that (for the moment) the eggs in the fridge pre-date the contamination of chickens. In a neighboring cottage, the grandfather figure (“our father”) has warned his wife to remain at home, in a parody of traditional patriarchy. Somehow the thought of more sophisticated products of culture like Shakespeare and Greek tragedy offers little solace in comparison with children’s stories in a world reduced to the basics of survival. The narrator reflects that even the scientists who created the nuclear power stage were reported to find their own solace in simple gardening and she herself still finds enjoyment in weeding, consigning the worst specimens to the devil. Yet, though the sky is blue, it is a sinister, malignant sky. The old, in-

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nocent sky has disappeared. Meanwhile, everything in technology that until recently artificially stimulated human emotions (for example, motorcycles) seems like dross compared with just living and breathing. People ask whether the human race was created and endured all the drudgery of its own development, only to exterminate itself finally. The radio offers pious Bible readings: “…They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them….” The narrator is led to thoughts about the evolutionary process and the development of the pituitary gland, something highly relevant to her brother’s condition. As she thinks about the operation, the words “Where is thy brother Abel?” come into her mind and she rejects the idea that anybody could answer, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” She asks whether Cain can really just carry on as before. The news on the telephone about the operation is slightly encouraging. She returns to thoughts about Cain and the idea that connection between murder and invention has existed alongside the history of agriculture. Then she recalls being in a cinema watching a Star Wars sequel in which a young black woman urged the use of a nuclear weapon against an evil, black monster with the words, “Kill him! Kill him!” Meanwhile in his first sleep after his operation, the brother dreams of falling, falling unstoppably. It is the relic of the ancient fear of falling from trees. When the head surgeon visits his bed, he reports that the medical team believe that they have removed everything harmful. His sister remembers a fairy tale in which a sister tells her brother not to drink from a spring, lest he turn into a wild beast and devour her. Yet thirst gets the better of him and she is forced to let him drink of the dangerous water. He merely turns into a deer but thereafter enquiries whether she is the false sister of the fairy tale. She offers to drop dead if this is the case, to prove what should never need proving, illustrating our early fear of our own dark sides. She learns that in Kiev families were beginning to leave in a superstitious attempt to keep the count low, reminding her that human beings cannot bear to be the victims of chance. She remembers opening an envelope containing texts relating Hiroshima to other texts connected with the story of the destruction of the Tower of Babel, denoting that God is very sensitive over matters relating to hubris. But the theme of brotherliness resumes. It is the only antidote to the darkness in human behavior. She watches the television pictures of the disabled reactor and men in suits trying to offer reassurance. She and her sister-in-law exchange corresponding reassurances to each other about the state of health of the patient yet when she goes to bed she dreams of the death of her mother, reminding her of the fragility of life. This stream-of-consciousness novel belongs to a chronotope which relates not just to Chernobyl but to the author’s own life as a journalist in East Germany. Yet as an evocation of an individual human experience of the disaster it is highly effec-

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tive and the repeated references to the Book of Genesis add depth to the reflections on the place of human greed in the chain of events leading to what seemed then (and may still turn out to be) an apocalyptic moment.²⁹⁸ Lucille Clifton (1936 – 2010) was an African-American poet, the holder of many awards, and most famous for her collections Two-Headed Woman (1980) and Blessing the Boats (2000). Our fifth work is Lucille Clifton’s collection of poems, The Book of Light (1993) which projects the authorial African-American voice as that of Lucifer in dialogue with God. This Lucifer imagined as the Satan of the Garden of Eden, enabled to challenge the patriarchal God of the traditional reception of the Gen. 3 narrative on behalf of all those excluded from the grand narrative: the victims of colonial power, the racially oppressed, women as autonomous subjects. The poem within the cycle entitled ‘how great Thou art’ is representative: Listen, You are beyond even your own understanding. that rib and rain and clay in all its pride, its unsteady dominion, is not what You believed You were, but is what You are In Your own image as some lexicographer supposed. the face, both he and she, the odd ambition, the desire, to reach beyond the stars is You. all You, all You the loneliness, the perfect imperfection

The Book of Light is a contrarian reworking of the Gen.3 hypotext and also a Genettian ‘murderous continuation’, in that it seeks to replace the hypotext. In this version of the project which we can call “The Rewritten Bible”, the narrative voice rejects the use of the biblical hypotext as an instrument of cultural and racial subjugation. José Saramago (1947 – 2010) was a prominent Portuguese writer, celebrated for his novels Baltasar & Blimunda and Blindness. He best known biblical reworking

 For a critical study of the ideological background to this novel, see Kate Rigby: ‘Tragedy, Modernity and Terra Mater: Christa Wolf Recounts the Fall,’ New German Critique, No. 101 (Summer 2007): 115 – 141. Rigby does not discuss the specific biblical allusions in the novel.

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was the controversial novel The Gospel of Jesus Christ. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. Our sixth work is José Saramago’s final piece of writing, Cain (2010). This is a contrarian rewriting of some of the major texts of the OT/HB, certainly qualifying as an extreme retelling and falling into our category of ‘fantastic excursion.’ In basic Genettian terms this is an expansion of the life of Cain, combining analeptic, elliptical and proleptic amplifications. We are made privy to the circumstances of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden and the exact situation surrounding the sacrificial fires offered by Cain and Abel, before the narrative becomes an account of Cain’s wanderings in the land of Nod and beyond. This turns out to involve encounters with Lilith, Noah, Abraham and Isaac, Lot and his family, Joshua and Job, with the narrative finally recoiling on itself to provide an unexpected ending to the story of the emergence of Noah and his family from the Ark. Among the radical changes to the plots of the relevant biblical hypotexts, we read that Cain was actually the secret offspring of Eve and Azael, the angel sent to guard Eden after the expulsion of Adam and Eve; that Cain persuaded Abel to join him in several attempts to offer sacrifices and that every time the smoke rose for Abel and not for Cain; that after Cain was sent into exile with the mark on his forehead and travelled to the land of Nod, he began a voluptuous affair with Lilith, who was (in this account) Noah’s insatiable wife. We learn that it was Cain himself who intervened to prevent Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, the angel arriving too late, and that there were some terrible inconsistencies in the destruction of the wicked in Sodom and Gomorrah, not least over the matter of the innocent children who perished. Joshua finally does make the sun stand still at Gibeon, but only after a wrangle with God who points out that it is always the earth that moves and not the sun. Cain is present during the era of Moses and Aaron and witnesses the episode of the Golden Calf and later the slaughter of the Midianites. On a further journey, Cain travels to Uz and is a witness to the testing of Job, yet he concludes that the deity knows no more about Job at the end than he did at the beginning. We are warned by the narrator that the present and future are intertwined and this is confirmed when the account of Cain’s wandering finally takes him back to the episode of Noah and the ark. He makes himself an indispensable part of Noah’s dwindling crew, ostensibly with the private motivation of taking up with Lilith again, but in fact in order to thwart God irrevocably. Cain, who during his journeys has been appalled at the wanton slaughter of whole populations at the behest of God, now takes decisive action and murders the family of Noah. Noah for his part drowns himself. In this way the entire biblical saga comes to an abrupt stop. Cain has closed down the Bible.

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Clearly without the Bible none of the stories reworked in this novel or novella would have been available to the writer, let alone any material subsequent to the time of Joshua. This is part of the work’s playfulness as a travesty. There are many amusing anachronisms. Cain’s cultural knowledge allows him to hail the overseer who helps him find lodging as a Good Samaritan.²⁹⁹ The narrator is able to discuss the essential features of what moderns would regard as a city: “Calling this place a city was something of an exaggeration….no city worthy of the name would recognize itself in the scene now before us, there are no cars or buses, no road signs….”³⁰⁰ In a witty allusion to the Graham Greene film-script (and associated novella), the Third Man, God turns out to be the third man of Abraham’s encounter with the three mysterious visitors, as witnessed by Cain on his travels. Cain himself, as the biblical figure sent by God into permanent exile, is the obvious vehicle for an oppositional version of the events described. The novel draws on the fog surrounding his post-biblical fate as well as the uncertainties attaching to Lilith, as an essentially extra-biblical character, to construct its alternative account of the opening stages of biblical monotheism. The attempt by three agents of Noah to kill Cain after the beginning of his liaison with Lilith dramatizes one of the few definite features of his exile according to the Genesis account, namely that he was immune from such attack. The narrator inevitably keeps a low profile at first, but eventually we learn that even “repeaters of ancient stories” hover between “ingenuous credulity and the most resolute scepticism.”³⁰¹ He looks back with a sort of modern condescension to the crude levers available to the deity of a primitive society, at one moment commanding battles resulting in the annihilation of thousands of people on both sides and then ordering “Go forth and multiply” to replace the losses.³⁰² Again, it is Cain himself who highlights the scale of death and destruction which attends the corresponding passages of the OT/HB, this work suggesting that it takes the world’s first murderer to be aware of what is happening. One of the most telling moments is near the beginning, when Adam and Eve are informed by Azael that actually they are not the only human beings on earth and this is subsequently confirmed when they are able to escape from their life in the wilderness outside Eden by joining a passing caravan of merchants. It seems that they have been kept aside from the rest of humanity as part of a divine experi-

   

Cain: 38. Cain: 35. Cain: 86. Cain: 88.

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ment. Thereafter both they and Cain do not appear on the official cast-list, something which gives such edge to Cain’s inconvenient interventions in the plot. As we intimated at the start of this chapter, these six retellings are ambitious, contrarian rewritings which tend to take a panoptic view of the Bible as a cultural entity. The first two evince an earnestness which is missing from the approaches of Sillitoe and Saramago, while Christa Wolf ’s Accident uses the biblical base-text to deal with a diegetic topic which is intrinsically sombre. If we were to characterize the separate reformist agendas of these writings, they might be set out as: Apocalypse: Setting free the suppressed vitality of a projected Ur-Text behind the received text of the Bible. Answer to Job: Reading behind the lines of the biblical Book of Job to uncover a theological and ontological revolution. Snow on the North Side of Lucifer: A whimsical attempt to imagine the eradication of evil from human life. The Book of Light: Rescuing the Bible from patriarchy. Accident, a Day’s News: A chilling confrontation with the realities of a nuclear explosion, using the linguistic building blocks provided by the opening chapters of Genesis. Cain: A satirical tour de force, exposing what the author regards as the arbitrary nature of a biblical master-plot deemed as authoritative. As a group these rewritings demonstrate the wide range of reformist hypertexts. D.H. Lawrence and C.J. Jung in their very different ways re-activate a sense of transcendence, as though to release the numinous from incarceration in biblicist piety. Saramago is more concerned with the de-activation of the numinous dimension of his biblical hypotexts. Sillitoe and Clifton play with the trope of Lucifer in a post-Blakean way, the first to reinforce cheerful optimism about the outcome of salvation history, the second to highlight the upheaval which is required to overturn patriarchal theology. Wolf makes of the Chernobyl disaster a reiteration of the Fall which, because of its diegetic reference, is less about a mythical past and more about the complete environmental crisis facing the planet as a result of human greed and stupidity. As a rewriting it is less of a re-activation of transcendence than a re-validation of the warning mounted by the Genesis hypotext. All six of these works could be nominated as examples of the Rewritten Bible in its most radically extreme form.

Chapter Eleven: Conclusions This survey has covered a wide range of extreme literary rewritings of biblical tropes and narratives. It has been found that the description “extreme” can apply to the structural manipulation of the hypotext; to the diegetic content of the rewriting itself; to the ontological outlook of the implied author or implied audience; and to such factors as degrees of compression or expansion of the base text. Recalling the Latin root word, extremis, as the superlative of exterus, “outward”, it can be argued that radically contrarian and flamboyant rewritings provide a sort of outside, objectified view of the contemporary significance of any given hypotext. With an ancient text as the hypotext, proximization is often inherently extreme, given a cultural gulf spanning anything from two thousand to four thousand years or even more. Since many of the biblical base-texts or hypotexts under consideration are themselves extreme in one sense or another, there is the question of the extent to which extreme narratives beget further extreme rewritings. Beyond all this there is the fact that the gateway to the hypotext is often for various reasons through a given hypertext or indeed through the whole, cumulative tradition. To take the most commonplace example, Milton’s Paradise Lost stands in the literary tradition as a portal to the Genesis story of Eden and is itself the funnel through which much of cumulative tradition before Milton is conveyed to the subsequent literary tradition.. In addition to this, as a strong rewriting (in the Bloomian sense), Paradise Lost vies with its hypotext almost to the point of becoming a rival hypotext. We saw how an early rewriting of the Book of Job, The Testament of Job, established itself in the early middle ages as an alternative to its biblical hypotext. The afterlife of Paradise Lost in turn includes the production of the central figure of Lord Byron’s Cain and aspects of Phillip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, just as Carl Jung’s Answer to Job informs Muriel Spark’s various literary reworkings of the story of Job. In Chapter Three we observed the dominating effect of Charles Dickens’s portrait of Uriah Heep as a character constructed as a foil for another character, the inscribed narrator, David Copperfield. A phenomenon related to that of the usurping hypertext is that of the folkloric analogue, in which a nexus of folkloric motifs attaches itself to some of the material of the biblical hypotext to create a more or less freestanding separate entity. Examples include the stories of Gog and Magog, Nebuchadnezzar reincarnated as King Robert of Sicily, and the journeys of the Magi across Europe and beyond, merging sometimes with the legend of Prester John. There is also the related case of the biblical story transmuted into a saint’s legend, as in the metamorphosis of the Job story into the legend of St Eustace. Finally, there are the free-floating Chrishttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-012

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tian legends of the Sleepers of Ephesus and of the Wandering Jew and the Jewish legend of the Golem. Throughout this study the main categories developed by Gérard Genette in Palimpsests have been used as the vertebrae on which to hang a range of other categories which seem specifically relevant to the literary reception of the Bible. These include the segmentary expansion, the fantastic excursion and the exaltation of minor characters. Yet a core term remains “proximization,” precisely because of the task of bridging what over the course of time become ever greater cultural divides. It is often remarked that Cain as the reluctant and resentful tither of the fourteenth-century Wakefield play is much closer to the agricultural world of the Genesis author than is his counterpart in Herman Hesse’s Demian or other modern retellings. Similarly, Herod as the irascible squire of the York mystery play seems part of a hierarchical social world which is closer to Roman Palestine than to life in a modern Western democracy. The matter of proximization leads on to the choice which frequently faces modern authors between ‘modern dress’ and ‘ancient dress’ rewriting. There are, of course, further alternatives, including the attempt at a neutral setting and the selection of a setting which is historical but unrelated to that of the biblical hypotext, as when Stephen Phillip’s play The Sin of David transfers the story of David and Bathsheba to the Cromwellian era in England.³⁰³ All of these approaches can result in ‘extreme’ rewritings. Sylvie Germain’s The Book of Tobias stands out for its marriage of ‘modern dress’ setting with a supercharging of the folkloric and supernatural elements within its meme. ‘Contrarian’ is a term which may have been used here sometimes perhaps with insufficient precision. Yet it seems the most apt way to describe rewritings which go out of their way to overturn the received view of certain biblical events and personages. John Masefield’s play The King’s Daughter seeks to rehabilitate Jezebel in a way never attempted previously and seldom since. “What-really-happened” contrarian rewritings such as this and Robert Graves’s King Jesus (or indeed the darker The Gospel of Jesus Christ by José Saramago) are, of course, forced to use an ‘ancient dress’ approach. In a different register, David Maine’s The Flood uses its ‘ancient dress’ setting as a way of highlighting the sheer strangeness of the primitive world inhabited by Noah and his family. Richard Beard’s The Book of the Assassins highlights the strangeness of the world of the ancient martyrs to a modern audience by egregiously importing the genre of the gum-shoe detective story. In a different mode, Moshe Shamir’s The Hittite Must Die uses the antique-documentary mode to initiate the reader into the noble mind

 See Swindell: Reforging the Bible: 108 – 109.

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of Uriah, husband of Bathsheba. Different again is the ‘demotivation’ (in the Genettian sense) which manifests itself in Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ where the historical diegetic setting is close to neutral. Contrarian in a different way are those plot upheavals which reverse the course or the outcome of the base story. Claude McKay’s ‘The Prince of Puerto Rico’ provocatively allows Uriah to shoot David dead in a rewriting which is at once a proximization and four other things: a ‘modern dress’ rewriting, a demotivation, a revaluation and a pragmatic transposition (guns instead of swords.) In this it has a surprising amount in common (technically but not thematically) with Dickens’s treatment of the figure of Uriah in David Copperfield. Just as strong hypertexts have the capacity to usurp or to rival their biblical hypotexts, there are examples where a genre forms itself around a series of biblical tropes. The outstanding examples, as has been demonstrated, are the adventure novels of Rider Haggard which merge at times with the phenomenon of the ‘fantastic excursion.’ By contrast with such works, the deliberate imposition of an inappropriate and anachronistic genre makes for comic disjunction in Richard Beard’s The Book of the Assassins, where of course the anachronisms extend to the police-procedural methods used and the modern quest for a sort of elusive journalistic truth. The same writer’s Lazarus is Dead manages to be a compendium of literary treatments of Lazarus which at once salutes the value of literary reception history and almost negates it by refusing to evaluate competing literary versions of the same tropes. Robert Frost’s A Masque of Reason uses what might be described as an inappropriate register to supply a burlesque of the Book of Job in a proleptic continuation in which God and Job and his wife meet up for a reunion long after the events recorded in the biblical book. It was shown how Lucille Clifton in The Book of Light exploited this very conceit of a reunion after millennia to construct something very different, the vision of a pluralistic, post-gender, post-racialist future.

Four Types of Updating Both amplification and compression can have extremely distorting effects on the reception of the hypotext. This is particularly the case with what Genette characterized as ‘murderous continuations’ where the sequel upstages the central story. Yet there are other forms of large-scale amplification which seem to merit different sorts of description. Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers amounts to an epic attempt to mediate between the biblical story and modern philosophy and

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theology, while Leopoldo Marechal’s Adam Buenosares uses the Genesis story of Adam and Eve in Eden as the wrapper for a saga of life in Argentina’s capital city on two days in 1940, in stylistic imitation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Adam Buenosares is a flagrantly modern-dress reworking and indeed is precisely focused on presenting a diegetic record of life in contemporary Buenos Aires. Quite different is Jeanette Winter’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, where biblical paradigms are employed to frame a (previously) heterodox view of human sexuality and (in travesty fashion) to dramatize an individual autobiographical experience. One of the most conspicuous modern-dress reworkings is H.G. Well’s The Undying Fire which manages to update the Job story in a structurally very faithful way to the Britain of 1919 while also turning it into a mirror of bourgeois values. Mann’s trilogy uses an ‘ancient dress’ approach while yet setting out to universalize the hypotext. By way of contrast, Loetscher’s Noah novel, while framed as a substantial ‘ancient dress’ reworking, is a comic revaluation of the hypotext in terms of contemporary capitalist values. One work endorses modern liberal and progressive thought in conjunction with an ‘ancient dress’ reformulation of the hypotext. The other work lampoons modern capitalist values through the medium of an ‘ancient dress’ reworking.

The Synecdoche We noted the tendency in cultural history to treat the Book of Job as a synecdoche for the whole Bible, something reinforced by Shakespeare’s constant reworking of the story of Job across the corpus of his plays and by the prominence of Jobian rewritings within twentieth-century drama and fiction. Equally one might argue that almost any given biblical rewriting tends to stand in for the Bible as a cultural entity and it is quite common for rewritings of specific biblical tropes to allude to biblical material beyond their own range. Gabriel Josopovici suggests near the end of his study, The Book of God, in discussing the richness of the Bible and the co-existence within it of conflicting points of view, that any reading of the Bible should be compared to a meeting with a person: “We do not decipher people, we encounter them.”³⁰⁴ If this analogy holds, then literary rewritings of biblical topoi are, in the aggregate, the record of particular authors as persons meeting the Bible and inviting the reader (or audience) to share in that meeting. What can be deemed ‘extreme’ biblical rewritings arise

 Gabriel Josipovici: The Book of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990): 307.

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when inventive authors confront serious contradictions between the world they perceive themselves to inhabit and the world of Scripture or when a biblical trope proves attractive as a means of informing, or at least dignifying, some sort of ontological or philosophical quest. Clearly there are some biblical rewritings which are driven primarily by a desire to degrade or disrupt religious orthodoxy, biblical androcentricity and patriarchy, or simply by the attempt to entertain. Yet it is extraordinary how many of the retellings discussed in our study, whether orthodox, heterodox, or agnostic, lean on the numinosity of the Bible to evoke the sense of an ontological quest. It is as though the constraints of limiting the plot or the character-portrait to a biblical subject provide the springboard for a certain sort of creativity, like the sonata form in music. Perhaps also the Bible is simply an important source of European and American culture, to whose afterlife each writer has the chance to contribute. This would make biblical literary reception studies less about the record of the “effects” of any given hypertext and more about the analysis of an organic and continuing creative process.

Refreshing the Hypotext If one were to summarize the justification for the study of extreme biblical rewritings, it might include the value of seeing disparate hypertexts in relation to each other and in relation to a broader, cumulative tradition. It might include the fresh light which such study throws on a range of literary authors who are not usually examined from the point of view of their contribution to rewritten scripture. It might include the refining and further classification of the repertoire of possibilities facing the author of any rewriting. Yet perhaps the most important merit which can be claimed for rewritten biblical stories and tropes in the aggregate is that they refresh the hypotext and that extreme rewritings do this in an acute way. Defamiliarization is the term associated with the Russian formalists, particularly Viktor Shklovsky, and with the writing technique of Bertholt Brecht, where it signifies the disruption of the sort of automated reading response generated by everyday speech and prose. In other words, it is an artistic device which draws attention to an act of aesthetic perception by invoking something outlandish. Shklovsky himself cited the example of Tolstoy’s Kholstomer, where the narrator is a horse, able from its standpoint to describe some of the absurdities and paradoxes of human attitudes to animals.³⁰⁵

 See Victor Shklovsky: ‘Art as Techique’ in Lee T. Leon and Marion J. Reis (eds.): Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1965): 3 – 25 (13 – 15).

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Extreme biblical rewritings perform something similar by distorting or disrupting the hypotext as they replace it with a new version which jarringly changes the plot or modifies the register or updates the diegetic setting to that of the contemporary world, among the other possible alterations which we have observed in this study. Unlike the simple proximization which merely seeks to update the ancient text, these extreme rewritings problematize the reading of the hypotext by calling attention to the cultural gulf between (say) the fourth-century BCE and the twenty-first century CE or by suggesting a different account of the events recounted in the hypotext. Although deliberately disruptive at the individual level, extreme rewritings are yet (as this book has shown) participants in a cumulative tradition which can be described as part of the afterlife of the biblical hypotext. In fact this cumulative tradition can be construed as much more than a catalogue of “effects.” It is, in one sense, constitutive of the story or trope itself as an organic process. This is especially the case in the modern and postmodern eras when many readers approach the biblical material for the first time through its manifestation in a particular film, play, novel , poem, oratorio or opera. The balance of influence between these forms and, probably, the relative dominance exerted by film versions are subjects worthy of further study. Beyond such considerations is the recognition that such works as Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers or Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood are creative works in their own right. Both engage in a dialogue with the biblical hypotext and set out their own portrait of diegetic worlds, together with their own particular insights into the human condition, all of which are unfettered by any previously normative readings of the hypotext. It is here that the decisive distinction that Julie Sanders urges between “adaptation” and “appropriation” becomes relevant.³⁰⁶ Extreme rewritings which set out to challenge the hegemonic influence of the Bible through its association with imperialism belong to a different order of disruption. Here the quarrel is an ideological one in which the merits or demerits of any given biblical hypotext (or its long cultural reception) disappear beneath the hail of bullets supplied by the antagonist. In Derek Walcott’s Ti-Jean and his Brothers, as was seen, the tropes of David and Goliath and of Cain as the Man in the Moon are mobilized as tokens of the biblical presence in a cultural war. If the play’s (entirely valid) protest is against the monstrous abuse of power by those who treat the Bible as their shibboleth, then there is little space for balanced or nuanced appreciation of the hypotexts’ other dimensions. In such cases the ob-

 Julie Sanders: Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), passim.

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ject of the ‘extreme rewriting’ needs to be recognized as the Bible itself as a total cultural and historical entity, rather than the specific hypotexts which the work handles. In another play by Walcott, O Babylon! the Four Riders of the Apocalypse become displaced as the Four Motorcyclists of the Apocalypse in a serio-comic attack on the ruthless greed of real-estate development companies, a polemic which has little to do with the hermeneutics usually connected with Rev.6:1– 8. Nevertheless, this particular form of disruption is a de facto part of the literary reception of the Bible as a whole and deserves a place in any account which aims at completeness.

Restitution To a degree the kind of extreme, disruptive rewriting discussed in the previous paragraph could be seen as falling within the category of ‘Restitutive Rewritings’ formulated earlier, using the term borrowed from W.G. Sebald. This kind of restitution seeks to redress the damage caused by the colonialist use of the Bible. Another kind is the restoration of a viewpoint missing or largely unstated in the biblical base-text, as when Moshe Shamir reconstructs the story of David and Bathsheba from the viewpoint of Uriah. In fact, that particular rewriting goes further than simply drawing out the experience of the victim, since it decidedly valorizes Uriah as a person. In a different way, Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary claims to be a literary act of restitution by imagining the life of Mary, Mother of Jesus, after the Crucifixion. Clearly this novella is hostile to orthodox Christian accounts of the aftermath of the Crucifixion, making it also a contrarian rewriting for some or even many readers. Nevertheless, it remains an outstanding example of a sympathetic imagining of the grief of Mary which seeks to rescue the figure from subjugation within a possibly authoritarian master-plot. A much more central example would be A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll, which realizes the project implicit in much post-Holocaust Jewish writing of reconstituting the Hebrew Scriptures to encompass the Shoah. Clearly Klein’s novel is a more affirmative piece of writing than that important body of poetry which treats biblical tropes as abrogated by the wholesale atrocities of the Nazi genocide. This body includes works such as Dan Pagis’s laconic version of the story of Cain and Abel in Scrawled in Pencil in a Sealed Railway Car and many of the poems of Amir Gilboa and Paul Celan.

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The Fantastic Excursion Perhaps the form of biblical rewriting best suited to the upheavals of the modern world with its mechanized warfare, accelerating environmental crisis, yawning gaps in inter-religious dialogue, and large-scale displacement of human populations is, after all, the Fantastic Excursion. It could be argued that the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood (eighth- century) is an early example of the genre. Yet moving to the chief examples considered in this book, the novels of H. Rider Haggard represent an early twentieth-century attempt to forge a new path in which a sense of the numinous is evoked through an adventure yarn which treats both biblical tropes and indigenous religions with a measure of respect. Examples discussed here include Sheba’s Ring and Belshazzar. Slightly earlier, George Macdonald’s Lilith (1895) is a powerful attempt to imagine Adam and Eve living on in a world parallel to ours in which Lilith is still at large, while Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea (1866) is an extraordinary imaginative exercise in which the character of Job is shared between two characters whose lives are determined by the sea as a transcendent elemental force. In their very different ways, Tournier’s The Four Kings, Christopher Moore’s Lamb, Beard’s The Book of Assassins and Marechal’s Adam Buenosares are also fantastic excursions, each of them using a biblical departure-point for a journey into worlds far removed from that of the hypotext. These rewritings do not “illustrate” the biblical base text by offering an equivalence in a different cultural or historical setting, but rather plunge into new diegetic worlds in forms of dialogical encounter. Tournier releases the reader into a wilder, more chaotic world than that of the sanitized magi of holy pictures and Christmas cards. Christopher Moore uses the excuse of the “hidden years” of Jesus’ early life to construct a speculative and humorous, yet sympathetic, encounter with the religions of the Far East. Beard adopts a zany approach to the deaths of the early Christian martyrs, importing incongruously the modern genre of the gum-shoe detective story as a framework. As an example of the technique of distortion discussed above, the effect is to highlight the strangeness to the modern mind of ancient martyrologies., even if (like the present writer) the reader finds the result distasteful. Marechal, imitating the technique of the Irish novelist James Joyce in his masterpiece, Ulysses, turns an ancient story into the loose framework for an extensive portrayal of daily life in the capital city of the Argentina of his day. In this case the biblical story as hypotext is more of a loose, controlling metaphor than part of a dialogical process. Louis Levy’s Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring Fresh Methuselah (1910) is another stunning psychological tour de force, turning on the shifting identities of human beings as life is prolonged, while Anton Tamsaari’s The Adventures of the

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New Satan highlights human deviousness in a world in which Satan is set a task even harder than that of testing Job. On a much smaller scale – yet highly entertaining – is Rubião’s re-imagining of the building of the Tower of Babel as a bureaucratic project out of control. Angela Carter’s Passion of the New Eve, provocative in its time, exposes the stubborn stereotypes which propel Western consumer society with its decaying patriarchal values. Sylvie Germain’s The Book of Tobias (1999) extends the reach of the Tobit story to encompass the tragedies of people displaced across Europe in the wake of World War II and the suggestiveness of the Gothic Horror genre in relation to individual human experience. Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood imagines a world in which the environmental crisis has overtaken civilization and biblical terms have been reduced to the level of the figurative. Christa Wolf ’s Accident frames an actual, specific environmental disaster in biblical terms. Evilio Rosero’s novel Feast of the Innocents (2012, Eng. trans. 2015) transfers the biblical story of the Massacre of the Innocents to the brutal world of power struggles in modern Colombia. The diegetic content of these remarkable novels ranges across human experience of the dangerous unpredictability of the sea, the devastating power of dictatorships in Latin America, the oppressive power of foreign landlords in pre-World War II Estonia, the aftermath of the Holocaust, the collapse of global eco-systems, nuclear catastrophe, and the constructedness of gender identities in the industrialized USA, amongst other things. We might conclude that the extremity of the biblical rewriting matches the extremity of human experience in these works and that what often seems the closed world of biblical scholarship would gain substantially from the dialogical encounter which they offer.

A Dialogical Engagement with Scholarship In fact, from its side, literary rewriting has at times been affected in a major way by academic scholarship. Within the examples explored in this book, it has been shown how H. Rider Haggard was influenced by the work of Andrew Lang in the arena of comparative mythology and how Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ takes as its point of departure that axiom of New Testament scholarship, the contrast between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. In a similar way, Amos Oz’s The Book of Judas relies to an extent on the consensus of scholarly views that the Judas of the gospels is a figure constructed by the narrative requirements surrounding the Passion story in the gospels. Al-

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though not discussed in this book, Robert Graves’s novel King Jesus relies on the author’s recondite scholarship in the field of Greek mythology and its Hebrew analogues. At the level of popular fiction, there has been an explosion of writings exploiting the prospect of recovering ‘lost gospels’ in the service of conspiracy theories about the power of faceless corporations or deep government, something dependent on the publicity surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi gnostic texts and other similar material. Meanwhile, Christopher Moore’s novel Lamb (as was seen) eschews conspiracy theories to construct an absorbing comic romp centered on the missing thirty years in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This time the reference to scholarship is deliberately stated in the afterword, as well as being present in different ways throughout the narrative, where it frequently furnishes the foil for the knockabout humour. A more postmodern use of scholarship (or of fashions in literary scholarship) is H.G.Parry’s romp, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, which exploits such notions as that of the implied author or implied reader to drive a fantasy which is nevertheless very uncritical of the way in which the figure of Uriah Heep in Dickens’s novel is constructed.

A Universalized Bible Clearly journalistic interest in the more sensational possibilities surrounding the discovery of “new” biblical texts, together with the interest shown in the Bible by the great variety of writers discussed in this study, is reliant on the assumption that the Bible and its component parts matter as sources of meaning in the contemporary world. Extreme apocryphal texts, like extreme readings and extreme rewritings of established biblical texts, simply testify to the sense that something very important is at stake in the handling of material which is designated as biblical or quasi-biblical and to the sense that the “something” goes beyond the credibility of religious institutions and religious teachings. Thomas Mann’s great trilogy about Joseph was addressed to the audience for a universalized Bible and it makes sense to see a great deal of the literary rewriting of the Bible which has followed in the same light. In Mann’s case, the outcome was a rewriting of 1207 pages, extreme indeed compared with the biblical hypotext of the latter sections of Genesis. In Robert Walser’s case, the result was a microscript purportedly sourced from the Elder Brother in the story of the Prodigal Son. In both cases the springboard is human curiosity about where the truth might lie in relation to a document freighted with authoritative significance. What great literary rewritings of the Bible offer is not a forensic answer to such questions as “What was the medical history of Mrs Potiphar?” or “What economic conditions in first-century Roman Palestine led to

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younger sons leaving home?” Rather they offer what James Wood claims about all important literature, namely truthfulness about the human condition.³⁰⁷ This is something an innovative writer achieves by outwitting convention and shocking the reader into seeing the world in a fresh way, as when Kafka in Metamorphosis imagines a salesman awaking to find himself transformed into a giant insect. The argument of this book has been that extreme literary rewritings of biblical hypotexts perform an analogous procedure, not on the commonsense world of expectations about how a salesman is expected to awake, but rather on the common stock of narratives which forms the Bible. The horizon of a Universalized Bible informs the quest of D.H. Lawrence in Apocalypse, to construct a version of the Book of Revelation which has been set free from what he saw as the oppressive effects of the popular preaching of his day. This horizon in a different way informs Carl Jung’s Answer to Job in which he imagines the Book of Job as the record of dynamic turmoil within the godhead, issuing in a new phase in religious history. Earlier, Henry Rider Haggard’s quasibiblical thrillers treated biblical themes as part of the common stock of global sacred narrative.

Aestheticism and Seriousness If the community of conventional biblical scholarship is inclined to see literary rewritings as aestheticized forms of the object of their concern, it may be worth drawing attention to the genuinely innovative theology of Joseph Roth in seeking to portray the asymmetric response of God to human suffering in Job, The Story of a Simple Man and Muriel Spark’s deliberate staging of a confrontation between aestheticism and real life in The Only Problem. In both cases, the biblical hypotext is the Book of Job, which proclaims itself as a fiction. Yet, as has been argued here, fiction can support a particularly important form of truth-telling. Even when scholarship has a large investment in the historicity of the hypotext, as in the case of the Synoptic Gospels, the literary rewriting can often pose questions of truthfulness which are of a different order from those addressed by archaeology, form-criticism, redaction-criticism and even so-called ‘literary criticism.’ This is evident in Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation and Amos Oz’s Judas. While some authors of fiction seem most at home with those biblical hypotexts which are distant from serious claims about historicity (we think of Michel Tournier or Sylvie Germain), it sometimes seems as though the seriousness of their

 James Wood: How Fiction Works (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008): 180 – 187.

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writings is in a sort of inverse relationship to the historical weight of the hypotext. Perhaps this underlines the sense that the seriousness of the Bible itself as a collection of writings embraces a great range of genres. Rewritings can, of course, be skittish and funny in a way that few, if any, biblical hypotexts are. This is certainly evident in Charles Moore’s Lamb. Yet sometimes, it might be argued, humour is what is constantly needed to revitalize a topos such as Noah and the Flood or the Tower of Babel. Literary reception-history can do much more than merely assert that sort of claim. It can provide an objective account of successive literary rewritings across different historical periods, through which the argument for revitalization can be examined. By deploying the categories of literary rewriting which have been discussed in this study (from “analeptic continuation” to the “fantastic excursion”), attention is drawn to the toolkit of reception studies as a field of study. By focusing on examples which can be classified in various ways as “extreme”, something intrinsic to the biblical material itself is highlighted. In other words, the argument is that extreme literary rewritings correspond to a quality present in that collection of writings known as “the Bible” and that this may be characterized as the authoritativeness belonging to an ancient sacred text which yet turns out to be much more selfreflexive than its reputation suggests. As has been shown, there are some extreme literary rewritings which degrade their biblical hypotexts, yet there are far more which burnish them and set them free. The end-result is the Bible as an organic entity, moving forward on the legs provided by a literary tradition stretching from that anonymous masterpiece The Dream of the Rood (with its origins in the eighth-century) to Tournier’s The Four Kings in the twentieth-century. At the same time, as shown in Chapter Four’s exploration of rewritings of the essentially post-biblical trope of Lilith, there is a considerable hermeneutical appetite in literature for a Reinvented Bible which goes beyond the limits even of extreme rewriting of the canonical hypotexts, despite the rich possibilities available there. Focusing one strand of feminism firmly on the figure of Lilith, yet extending to revised, feminist portraits of Miriam and Mary Magdalene, it proceeds in Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light to imagine a post-feminist, postcolonial dialogue between an interlocutor and the God of the Bible. It is as though one could get back not just behind the canonical form of the text (as D.H. Lawrence sought to do in Apocalypse) but behind the surface of reality. What is interesting is that the notion of the Book persists even here. It is as though the purpose both of extreme rewriting of the Bible and of a Reinvented Bible were to point towards a transcendent text which is at once simultaneously authoritative and unreachable. Perhaps this is a good description of the medieval Bible, though shorn of the teaching magisterium of the Church. Perhaps also it is this ethereal, notional Bible which haunts the Western imagination and which in the abstract provides its

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greatest model, as Gabriel Josopovici argues so exquisitely in The World and the Book. If all this is true, then the extreme literary rewritings which have been the main subject of this study serve in the aggregate to extend the life of the canonical hypotexts of the Bible in a world of great flux, while memorializing a different Bible which was always more of a cultural idea than a collection of specific texts. Three of the modern or postmodern examples discussed in this study, Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light , Charles Moore’s Lamb and Colm Tóibin’s The Testament of Mary, bring to the fore the question of whether the quest for a Reinvented Bible is ultimately a radical project or a conservative one. In a sense this issue runs right through the survey of rewritings presented here, from the dramatically refocalised (and possibly contrarian) Passion story of the Dream of the Rood to H. Rider Haggard’s enthusiastic approach to motifs in World Religions as analogues of biblical topoi in his adventure novels; and from William Blake’s expansive view of the Book of Job to Derek Walcott’s campaign in Ti-Jean and his Brothers to contest the colonialist hegemonic use of biblical stories. Extreme literary rewritings seem to have a great capacity to deal with the relationship of the Bible as an authoritative cultural text to cultural claims from outside its orbit, whether these claims are rooted in religious pluralism, feminism, womanism, post-colonialism, ecological concerns or simply modern liberalism. In conclusion, I hope to have shown that extreme literary rewritings constitute a sizeable constituency, whether they are seen to fall on the side of a radical view of the Bible or a conservative one, and that in the aggregate they offer a unique forum for the imaginative understanding of a wide range of human experience. They are all also a continuing indicator of the vitality of the tropes contained within the Bible, extending the range of those tropes and (at times) exposing their limitations. Northrop Frye’s argument, mentioned in the Introduction, was that the degree and quality of attention paid to biblical tropes can be taken as a measure of the weight of any given hypotext. The classification of the many different types of rewriting, using Genettian categories and developing others, should help to supply a framework for understanding new works as they appear. Seeing all the material in the light of this book’s title, Going to Extremes, it may be said that we have covered a great range of radical reworkings. As a collection they seem to endorse, enrich, modify, challenge, or even at times efface the base text. Yet all biblical rewritings equally form part of that totality which constitutes the story of Job, the story of Joseph, the story of Judas, the story of the mother of Jesus and so on. They are part of the effects of a biblical trope and therefore part of its meaning. The question of what is a ‘faithful’ or an ‘unfaithful’ rewriting may be engaged with at the level of technical form, as when Genette argues that changing the name of the principal character signals an ‘unfaithful’ continuation. Or it may

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be addressed at the level of the reader’s religious belief or unbelief. Or indeed it may form part of an evaluation of the relative merits of any hypertext as a piece of writing. Yet perhaps the most important qualities which a rewriting may display are, on the one hand, the capacity to use a biblical trope to convey vital truths about human experience in an era far removed from the circumstances associated with the biblical text’s original production, and on the other to refresh the sense of encounter with divine alterity or the numinous by accentuating the strangeness of the material. This survey has identified a significant number of works which go to this core. Each of them establishes a dialogical relationship between the selected biblical paradigm and a contemporary quest for meaning. Once read, the most powerful examples make it impossible to return to the base text without approaching it under their influence. That base text is the fountain of a cumulative series of reworkings of which the literary author or the reader (or audience) may have varying degrees of awareness. Even minor reworkings may highlight aspects of the hypotext’s potentiality under the pressure of changing human experience. In turn even the newest reworking can be expected to be followed in the future by further movements and upheavals in the reception, an open-ended process which may render each and every past rewriting more valid or less valid for those who encounter it, but always in the context of a sense that fresh meaning is waiting to be mined from the source. No other part of the western literary canon displays such continuity or flexibility.

Appendix One: Summary of Genette’s Main Categories in Palimpsets (Adjusted to Biblical Rewriting) 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Parody: a distortion of the text by means of minimal transformation. Travesty: stylistic transformation whose function is to debase. Parody in Aristotle’s schema is low action in narrative mode. Para-ode or beside-chant. May change text from a noble register to a more vulgar one. But canonical parody can be serious parody, e. g. Mann’s Dr Faustus, Joyce’s Ulysses, Tournier’s Friday. Parody is most frequently visited on brief texts, e. g. proverbs or titles. Burlesque travesty had its onset in 17thc Italy. Seeks to modify subject without altering style. It overtook parody as a fashionable concept in the 19thc. Thereafter parody tended to mean travesty. Can be a kind of dual utterance, half way between transformation and commentary. Modern travesty exemplified in the libretti to Offenbach operettas and in the works of Charles Fourest and Alfred Jarry. Sacrilegious travesty is related to sophomoric seminary jokes. Pastiche was revived in 18thc encyclopedias. Parody now associated with a satirical caricature effect. Also with the substitution of a new subject. Pastiche as homage, e. g. Debussy and Rameau. Genette’s formulation: strict parody proceeds through a transformation of the text and satirical pastiche through an imitation of style. Fictitious pastiche requires a pastiche contract between author and reader. Everything else is apocrypha. The mock-heroic goes back to the 6th c – the Batrachomachia. Mixed parody mixes styles of parody, burlesque, travesty and mock-heroic. Types of continuation: A.: a sequel, not a completion but a prolongation. B: The posthumous continuation of an unfinished work. C: Proleptic, analeptic and elliptic continuations. Unfaithful continuations are emancipated from any stylistic mimeticism or any ideological faithfulness. Murderous continuations eclipse the hypotext, e. g. Ariosto or Rabelais or Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’ as a refutation of the gospel story. A supplement seeks to erase what it completes. The sequel is defined as an allographic continuation, e. g. Tournier’s Friday. The epilogue is a brief exposition subsequent to the source-text’s denouement. The example discussed in this book’s survey is Frost’s Masque of Reason.

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17. Generic re-activation. This is when a form is revived, like John Barth’s The SotWeed Factor as the revival of an 18th c form. 18. Transposition does not have to be brief, unlike some parodic forms. Cf Dr Faustus or Ulysses. 19. Translation is a complex topic, influenced by ideas that poetry is less translatable than prose. 20. Transtylization is the substitution of one style for another, e. g. a journalistic style for an academic style. 21. Quantitative transformation. Genette points out that, unlike graphic art, texts cannot be reduced or enlarged without a change to the ideational content. 22. Excision is reduction by amputation, e. g. versions of Robinson Crusoe for children. 23. Concision is defined as an abridgement. 24. Condensation is an autonomous synthesis performed on the text. 25. The digest is defined as a metaliterary summary. 26. The resumé is a summary created to serve the convenience of the general reader, e. g. Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. There is a need to distinguish between autodiegetic summaries and authorial ones. 27. Extension and expansion. May involve suppression through massive addition. The examples in this book are The Lazarus Rumba or Belshazzar (Rider Haggard.) 28. Amplification is the obverse of condensation – e. g. Mann’s Joseph and his Brethren. 29. Intermodal transmodalization is the introduction of speeches or analeptic passages which disrupt the narrative. 30. Diegetic transposition. There is no such thing as innocent transposition. Transdiegetization cannot occur without some changes in the action itself, i. e. a modern Faust cannot be entirely like Marlowe’s Faust. 31. Diegetic faithfulness usually signalled by preservation of the character’s names. Conversely Joyce’s Ulysses (with Bloom), Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and Mann’s Dr Faustus change the names of the main protagonists. 32. Proximization is the transposition of a text into a new, usually more familiar, cultural setting – e. g. Swiss Family Robinson. 33. Pragmatic transformation occurs when changes are made to the minor details of a narrative, to render it more assimilable, e. g. pistols instead of swords. 34. Motivation supplies a motivation missing from the text, e. g. finding a reason why Mrs Potiphar provokes Joseph and why he turns her down.

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35. Demotivation occurs when a rewriting omits a motivation inscribed in the hypotext, e. g. Flaubert’s Herodias, where the audience does not understand why Salome calls for Iokama’s head. 36. Remotivation is when a new motivation is substituted, as in Wilde’s Salome or Hebbel’s Judith. 37. Valuation includes rehabilitation of a character such as Judas or Don Juan. 38. Devaluation is the negation of the positive value of a text or its main character, as in Fielding’s Shamela as a refutation of Richardson’s Pamela. 39. Mimimal pastiche is the term Genette gives to the attribution of (say) The Imitation of Christ to Céline or Joyce. 40. A metatext such as a commentary is by essence non-fictional. Yet hypertexts often function like metatexts – as criticism in action – but are more potent.

Appendix Two: A Reader’s Guide This addendum aims to set out a general bibliographic guide to the vast subject of the literary rewriting of the Bible. In terms of the history of the study of the premodern period, the collection edited by Margaret B. Crook, The Bible and Its Literary Associations (1937) marks the beginning of scholarly attempts to synthesize the material. A magisterial survey of the beginnings of Christian literary appropriation of the gospels and Acts is Roger P.H. Green’s Latin Epics of the New Testament (2007). Also of relevance is F.J. E. Raby’s earlier survey, A History of Christian Latin Poetry (1927/1953). The early and pre-modern period in the Christian literary reception of the Bible is characterized by some bold experiments in the rewriting of the Passion narrative and by the transformative influence of the rise of religious drama. The eighth-century Old English poem The Dream of the Rood (which casts the Cross as the narrator) and ninth-century Saxon epic poem the Heliand (presenting Christ as a Germanic hero) are examples of the first and are accessible in modern translations. Two volumes by David C. Fowler – The Bible in Early English Literature (1976) and The Bible in Middle English Literature (1984) – provide a valuable overview of the treatment of biblical material in Old English and Middle English literature and are supplemented by the collection of essays edited by Michael Fox and Manish Sharma Old English Literature and the Old Testament (2014) and by Samantha Zacher’s Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse (2013). Important studies of central texts include Paul G. Remley’s Old English Biblical Verse (1996) (covering Genesis, Exodus and Daniel) and Brian Murdoch’s The Medieval Popular Bible (2003). For scholarly translations of Genesis A , Genesis B , Exodus, Daniel and Azarias , see the volume edited and translated by Daniel Anlezark; and for a detailed scholarly edition of and commentary on the Saxon versions of Genesis, see A.N. Doane’s The Saxon Genesis (1991). For the rise of biblical drama important studies are those of Karl Young, Lynette Muir and Rosemary Woolf. For Geoffrey Chaucer’s complex and often ironic use of biblical texts, valuable studies include David Lyle Jeffrey’s Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition (1984) and Lawrence Besserman’s Chaucer’s Biblical Poetics (1998). Later developments in French and German drama are covered by J.S Street’s French Sacred Drama from Bèze to Corneille (1983) and James A. Parente’s Religious Drama and the Humanist Tradition (1987). From the multitude of rich medieval literary fantasies on biblical topics we might suggest as tasters the translation by Martha Bayless versions of the riotous Cena Cypriani and that by Jan Ziolkowski of Solomon and Marcolf. Central in any overview must be the treatment of the Dehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-014

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scent into Hell, derived from the Gospel of Nicodemus in its many recensions, and the theme’s monumentally influential transformation in Dante’s Purgatorio. For the period after this, significant monographs include Lily Campbell’s Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth Century England (1961) and Ruth Blackburn’s Biblical Drama Under the Tudors (1971). Although Shakespeare was not previously viewed as a major contributor to biblical reception, recent studies have revealed a great density of biblical allusions in the plays, such as the presence of repeated references to the biblical Eden and the Book of Life in Richard II. There have also been recent explorations of the exotic use of biblical tropes in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (by Eric McPhail and by Ita Mac Carthy) and in Torquat Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (by Tobias Gregory). The writer who serves pre-eminently as the bridge between the pre-modern and modern periods in English literature is John Milton, who in Paradise Lost and elsewhere shows a profound knowledge of the antecedent tradition as J.M. Evans has shown. In France Du Bartas Antoine de Montchrestien, and Marc-Antoine Gérard de Saint-Aman provided other sorts of continuity, as R.A Sayce shows in The French Biblical Epic (1955). Overt rewritings of biblical tropes become less common after the mid-seventeenth-century but then reappear with the rise of Romanticism in the late eighteenth-century. Abraham Avni’s study The Bible and Romanticism (1969) covers the influence of Novalis on Brentano, Eichendorff, Lamartine, Vigny and Hugo. The French poets stand out for their adventurous use of biblical material in support of radical visions of the human future. In England Byron’s Cain, A Mystery gestured towards the medieval past yet in reality articulated the sense of anomie brought on by the latest findings in geology. Victorian concentration on the Bible, whether caused by revivalism or by the new findings of historical-critical scholarship, gave biblical material a new currency. In the novels of Charles Dickens this took the form of an urbane and often ironic approach to biblical motifs (such as those of the Book of Job and Esther in Bleak House). For the influence of the KJV on American writers from Herman Melville to Cormac McCarthy, Robert Alter’s Pen of Iron (2010) is indispensable. In the novels of George Eliot, who was the first English translator of D.F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, the usage is more searching. In the poetry of Alfred Tennyson there is a wistful tone, suggesting that the value of biblical tropes consists in their ability to evoke compassion or to bring consolation. In Germany Rainer Maria Rilke and Berthold Brecht used biblical motifs in more radical ways, while the poets of the Great War tended to use biblical tropes to evoke the horror of the battlefield or to hark back to an Edenic homeland. The inter-war period gave rise to major literary rewritings which challenged conventional views of reality, ranging from Thomas Mann’s huge trilogy Joseph and his Brethren to Joseph’s

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Roth’s Job: The Story of a Simple Man. In the novels of James Joyce and the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges biblical tropes encountered the full array of modern (soon to be postmodern) perspectives on the status of master narratives in a world of collapsing ontologies. On the brink of WW2 itself. English provincial novelists such as H.G Wells and Charles Williams adopted an almost plaintive use of biblical motifs to evoke the sense of a dissolving world. The biblically-inflected novels of the American-Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer were concerned with the literally disappearing world of East European Jewry. Poets attempting to deal with the Holocaust using biblical tropes included Amir Gilboa and Dan Pagis. The late twentieth-century and start of the twenty-first saw a spate of novels which combined biblical tropes with those of other religions, such as Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), or which used biblical tropes to explore the looming ecological crisis, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009). Studies which cover the impact of the Holocaust on literature include David C. Jacobson’s ‘The Holocaust and the Bible in Israeli Poetry’ and Chapter 6 of his Modern Midrash. Recent outstanding monographs on the biblical rewritings of important authors of the twentieth-century include Iain Bailey’s Samuel Beckett and the Bible (2014). There are also collections of essays dedicated to specific authors, such as Toni Morrison and the Bible (2006), ed. Shirley A. Stave, and Borges and the Bible (2015), ed. Richard Walsh and Jay Twomey. At the fountainhead of modern studies of the Bible in literature is Sol Liptzin’s Biblical Themes in World Literature (1985) which organizes itself around thematic topics from the HB (Lilith, Cain, Job etc.) More or less contemporaneous was the collection of essays edited by David H . Hirsch and Nehama Aschkenasy, Biblical Patterns in Modern Literature (1984), which covered a rich, if eclectic, list of topics, and discussed authors ranging from Joseph Andrews to Gabriel Marquez. These pioneering volumes were followed by the extensive collection edited by David Lyle Jeffrey, A Dictionary of the Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992), which makes occasional sorties into the work of authors outside its ostensible remit, such as Dante. A different approach is found in the more recent Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (2009), ed. Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowland. Much of the content is devoted to specialist essays on specific authors or groups of authors, ranging in the early period from Old English poetry to Chaucer and in the modern period from Edmund Spenser to T.S. Eliot. Edited by Timothy Beal The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts (2016) contains useful essays on a range of rewritings in global literature. Journals which frequently include articles on the topic include Literature and Theology, Religion and Literature, Religion and the Arts, Christianity and Literature and the Journal of the Bible and Its Reception.

Abbreviations CE HB KJV NT OE OED OT RSV

Common era Hebrew Bible King James Version New Testament Old English Oxford English Dictionary Old Testament Revised Standard Version

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Bibliography Introduction Breed, Brennan W.: Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History (Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2014). Genette, Gérard.: Palimpsests: Literature in the Third Degree trans. Channa Newman and Claude Dubinsky (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).

Chapter One: A Survey of Biblical Rewritings from the Early Centuries to the Present Day Primary Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Secondary Breed, Brennan W.: Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History (Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2014). Genette, Gérard.: Palimpsests: Literature in the Third Degree trans. Channa Newman and Claude Dubinsky (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Swindell, Anthony C.: Reworking the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010). Swindell, Anthony C.: Reforging the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014).

Chapter Two: The Book of Job Across Time Primary Alidjis, Homero: Eyes to See Otherwise/ Ojos de otro mirar, Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2011). Andreyev, L., Anathema trans. H. Bernstein (New York: Macmillan,1923). Beckett, Samuel: Murphy (London: Faber and Faber, 2009 [1938]). Dickens, Charles: Bleak House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 [1853]). Dostoevsky, Fydor: The Brothers Karamazov trans. C. Garnett (London: Dent, 1967). Goldsmith, Oliver: The Vicar of Wakefield ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2006). Hugo, Victor, The Toilers of the Sea trans. W. Moy Thomas (Guernsey: The Guernsey Press 1990). Hugo, Victor, The Toilers of the Sea trans. W. Moy Thomas (Guernsey: The Guernsey Press 1990). Jung, C.G., Answer to Job trans. R.F.C . Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). Kafka, Franz: The Trial trans. Mike Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-016

212

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Kemper, M., ’God’s goodness,’ in C.M Curtis (ed.), Faith Stories (New York, 2003 =2002). Kierkegaard, S.: Repetition trans. W. Lowrie (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941). Kotker, N., Learning About God (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1988). MacLeish, A, J.B: Play in Verse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958). Melville, Herman: Moby Dick (London: Dent, 1977). Pope, Alexander: Of the Use of Riches (London: Lawton Gilliver, 1732 [British Library, 2011.]) Roth, J., Job, the Story of a Simple Man trans. Dorothy Thompson (London: Granta, 2000). Shelley, P.B.: Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters ed. A.S.B. Glover (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1951). Simon, N., God’s Favorite (New York: Random House, 1975). Singer, I.B.: Job trans. David Stromberg, The New Yorker, August 14, 2012, downloaded from www.new yorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/job-isaac-bashevis-singer.html Spark, M.: The Only Problem (London: The Bodley Head, 1984). Szymborska, Wislaw, Poems, New and Collected 1957 – 1997 trans. Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). Wells, H.G., Experiment in Autobiography (London 1969 [1934]). The Undying Fire (London, Macmillan, 1912) Wiesel, Elie., The Trial of God (New York: Schocken Books, 1995 [1979]). Yagel, A. Ben H., ‘Job’s Novella,’ trans. D.B Ruderman , from A Valley of Vision, in D. Stern and M.J. Mirsky (eds.), Rabbinic Fantasies (New Haven, 1990), 313 – 331. Zach, Natan, The Static Element: Selected Poems trans. Peter Everwine and Shulamit Yasny-Starkman (New York: Atheneum, 1982).

Secondary Besserman, L., The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages (Cambridge MA., Harvard University Press, 1979). Breeze, Andrew: ‘Job’s Gold in Medieval England, Wales and Navarre,’ Notes and Queries (September 1990): 275 – 278. Cohn, Alan M. And Richard F. Peterson: ‘James Job: The Critical Reception of Joyce’s Letters,’ James Joyce Quarterly, Vol.19, No.4, Letters Issue (Summer, 1982), pp. 429 – 440). Fisch, H., New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel (London, 1998). Frye, Northrop: Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake 2nd ed. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969). The Great Code (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Garmonsway, G.N. and R. M .Raymo, ‘A Middle English Metrical Life of Job,’ in Early English and Norse Studies ed. Arthur Brown and Peter Foote (London: Methuen, 1963). Gerould, Gordon Hall, ‘Forerunners, Congeners and Derivatives of the Eustace Legend,’ PMLA , Vol. 19, No. 3 (1904): 335 – 448. The North-English Homily Collection (London, 1902, reprinted Forgotten Books, London: 2015) Larson, Janet L., Dickens and Broken Scripture (Athens, Georgia: University of Athens Press, 1985). Levenson, Jon Douglas, The Book of Job in Its Time and in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972). Linafelt, Tod, Strange Fire: Reading the Bible after the Holocaust (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). Liptzin, S., Biblical Themes in World Literature (Hoboken, NJ., 1985).

Chapter Three: Uriah Transposed and Amplified

213

May, James E., ‘Early Eighteenth-Century Paraphrases of the Book of Job’ in Donald C. Mell, Jr., Theodore E.D. Braun and Lucia M. Palmer (eds.): Man, God and Nature in the Enlightenment (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press 1988: 151 – 161. Miles, J.A., ’Gagging on Job, or The Comedy of Religious Exhaustion,’ Studies in the Book of Job ed. R. Polzin and D. Robertson (Missoula, MT, 1977), 71 – 126. Rollins, Hyder: Old English Ballads 1553 – 1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920). Sheehan, Jonathan, The Enlightenment Bible (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Shelley, Bryan, Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1994). Sherwood, Y., A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Stout, J., ’Melville’s Use of the Book of Job,’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol.25, No. 1 ( June, 1970), 69 – 83. Swindell, A.C.: in English, Welsh and Irish Literature,’ in M.Caspi and J.T. Greene (eds.): Job of Uz (New York: Gorgias Press, 2012). Wright, Andrew: Blake’s Job: A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

Chapter Three: Uriah Transposed and Amplified Primary Dickens, C., David Copperfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989 [1850]). Our Mutual Friend (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989 [1865]). Graves, R., The Real David Copperfield (London: Arthur Barker, 1933). Kipling, R., The Collected Poems (Ware, Herts: Wordsworth Editions, 2001). Ordinalia: The Cornish Mystery Cycle, A Verse Translation by Alan M Kent (London: Francis Bootle, 2005. Parry, H.G., The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep (London: Orbit 2020). Peele, G., The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (London: Malone Society Reprints, 1912 [1599]). Powys, T.F., Uriah on the Hill (Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1930). Shamir, M., The Hittite Must Die trans. M. Benaya (New York: East and West Library, 1978 [1964]).

Secondary Bar-Josef, E., ‘ ‘It’s the old story’: David and Uriah in II Samuel and “David Copperfield”’ , The Modern Language Review , Vol. 101, No. 4 ( October 2006): 957 – 965. Blackburn, R., Biblical Drama under the Tudors (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). Diamond, J. A., ‘King David of the Sages: Rabbinic Rehabilitation or Ironic Parody?’, Prooftexts, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Fall 2007): 323 – 426. Ewbank, I-S., ‘The House of David in Renaissance Drama: A Comparative Study,’ Renaissance Drama, Vol. VIII (1965): 3 – 40. Ginzberg, L., The Legends of the Jews, Vols. IV and VI (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication of Society of America) 1956). Heller, J., God Knows (New York: Simon and Schuster 1997). Hirsch,E.G. and Oscher, C, ‘Uriah, Urijah,’ in Jewish Encyclopedia, downloaded 16. 12. 2021, jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/14605-uriah-urijah

214

Bibliography

Kennedy, G.W., ‘Naming and Language in Our Mutual Friend,’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol.28, No. 2 (September 1973): 165 – 178). Kutesky, S., ‘“What Was Pat Lady?”: The David and Bathsheba Story in Medieval and Early English Renaissance Literature’ (1994), Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W & M ScholarWorks, downloaded 1st December 2021 from ….. Larson, J.L., Dickens and Broken Scripture (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press 1985). Longsworth, R., The Cornish Ordinalia: Religion and Dramaturgy (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). Magonet, J., Bible Lives (London: SCM Press 1992). Morse, J.M., ‘Prejudice and Literature,’ College English, Vol. 37, No.8 (April 1976): 785 – 807. Rosen, J.M., ‘Minor Characters Have Their Day: The Imaginary and Actual Politics of a Contemporary Genre,’ Contemporary Literature, Vol. 54, No.1 (Spring 2013): 139 – 174. Shepherd, D.J. and N.E. Johnson: Bertolt Brecht and the David Fragments 1919 – 1921: An Interdisciplinary Study (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2020). Welsh, A., The City of Dickens (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press 1971).

Chapter Four: Lilith and the Rewritten Bible Primary The Alphabet of Ben Sira in David Stern and Mark J. Mirsky (eds.): Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Fantasies from Classical Hebrew Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Brennan, Christopher: ‘The Forest of Night,’ in Terry Sturm (ed.): Christopher Brennan (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1984): 31 – 83. Butler, Octavia: Dawn (London: Warner, 1997). Dame, Enid, Riviln Lilly and Henry Wenkart (eds.): Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-Create the World’s First Woman (Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson, 1998). Faulkner, William: The Marble Faun and A Green Bough (New York: Random House, 1960 [1933]). Hemingway, Ernest: The Garden of Eden (New York: Scribner, 2003). Joyce, James: Finnegan’s Wake (London: Penguin, 1992). Kipling, Rudyard, ‘On the City Wall’ in Rudyard Kipling: Stories and Poems ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 37 – 56. Kurz, Isolde: Die Kinder Lilith (Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger, 2010 [1908]). Llosa, Vargos: Bad Girl / Travesura de la nina mala (London: Faber, 2008 [2006]) Macdonald, George: Lilith (New York: Eerdmans, 1981). McKenna, Stephen: Lady Lilith (London: Hutchinson, 1920). Morrison, Toni: The Beloved (London: Picador, 1988). Pazzi, Roberto: La mallatia del tempo (Milan: Marietti, 1987). Shaw, Bernard: Back to Methuselah (London: Constable, 1931[1921]). Stevenson, Ann: Poems 1955 – 2005 (Highgreen, Tarset: 2005).

Chapter Five: Angels of Death and Angels of Mercy

215

Secondary Bennett, Timothy A., ‘Isolde Kurz’s Florentiner Novellen: Renaissance, Feminist and Bourgeois Mythologies,’ The German Quarterly, Vol. 63, No.1 (Winter1990): 92 – 106. Kiessling, Nicolas K., ‘Grendel: A New Aspect,’ Modern Philology, Vol. 65 (February 1968): 191 – 201. Muir, Lynette R., The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Powell, Tamara M., ‘Lilith started it! Catherine as Lilith in “The Garden of Eden”,’ The Hemingway Review, Vol. 15, No 2 (1996): 78 – 82. Prickett, Stephen: Victorian Fantasy (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979). Ricci, Franco, ‘The Cosmo-Conception of Time in Roberto Pazzi’s La Malattia del tempo,’ Italica, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Spring 1991): 13 – 28. Rushdie, Salman: Imaginary Homelands (London: Vintage, 2010). Stauffer, Andrew M., ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Burdens of Nineveh,’ Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 33 , No. 2 (2005): 369 – 394. Uitti, Karl D.: ’The Vision of Lilith in Hugo’s “La Fin de Satan”,’ The French Review, Vol. 31, No.6 (May, 1958), 479 – 486. Walton, RIvkah M.: ’Lilith’s Daughters, Miriam’s Chorus: Two Decades of Feminist Midrash,’ Religion & Literature, Vol.43.2 (Summer 2011), 115 – 127 (121 – 124).

Chapter Five: Angels of Death and Angels of Mercy Primary Abani, Christ: The Virgin of Flames (London: Vintage, 2008 [2007). Abse, Dannie: New Selected Poems 1949-2009 (London: Hutchinson, 2009). Alcuin: A Sequence for St Michael , text and trans. Helen Waddell (London: Constable & Co. , 1933): 90-93. Banville, John: Birchwood (London: Picador, 1998 [1973.]) Nooteboom, Cees: Lost Paradise trans. Susan Massotty (London : Vintage, 2008). Powys, T.F: Mr Weston’s Good Wine (London: Vintage, 2006 [1927]). Rushdie, Salman: The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 2006 [1988.]) Shakespeare, William: Complete Works (London: Collins, 1964). Tasso, Torquato: The Liberation of Jerusalem trans. Max Wickert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The Song of Roland trans. Glyn Burgess (London: Penguin, 1990). Vickers, Sally: Miss Garnet’s Angel (London: Harper, 2007 [2000]). Voragine, Jacobus de: The Golden Legend trans. William Grange Ryan (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Secondary Beer, Anna: Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).

216

Bibliography

Caruth, Cathy: Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996). Clarke, David: ‘Rumours of Angels: A Legend of the First World War,’ Folklore, Vol. 113, No. 2 (October, 2002): 151 – 173. Eisenbichler, Konrad: The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411 – 1785 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). Flusser David : ‘Palae Historica – An Unknown Source of Biblical Legends’ in Joseph Heinemann and Dov Noy: Scripta Ieroslymitana Vol. XXII: Studies in Aggadah and Folk-Literature: 48 – 79 (72 – 73). Green, Roger: Latin Epics of the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Hale, Amy: ‘Reigning with Swords of Meteoric Iron: Archangel Michael and the British New Jerusalem,’ in Joanne Parker (ed.): The Harp and the Constitution: Myths of Celtic and Gothic Origin (Leiden: Brill, 2016): 174 – 188. Herbert, Máire and Martin McNamara: Irish Biblical Apocrypha: Selected Texts (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989). Johnson, Richard F.: Saint Michael the Archangel in Medieval Legend (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005). Kirkconnell, Watson: The Celestial Cycle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952). Kugel, James L.: The Bible As It Was (Cambridge, Mass., Harvest University Press: 1997). Owen, D.D.R.: The Vision of Hell (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1970). Rees, Valery: From Gabriel to Lucifer (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013). Reynolds, Barbara: Dante: The \poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (London: I.B .Tauris, 2008). Shaheen, Naseeb: Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1999). Sherry, Beverley: ‘Milton’s Raphael and the Legend of Tobias,’ The Journal of English and Germanic Philology , Vol. 78, No. 2 (April, 1979): 227 – 241. Smit, W.A.P.: ‘The Emblematic Aspect of Vondel’s Tragedies as the Key to Their Interpretation,’ The Modern Language Review, Vol. 52, No. 4 (October, 1957): 554 – 562. Szittya, P.R., ‘The Angels and the theme of “Fortitudo” in the “Chanson de Roland”,’ Neuphilogische Mitteilungen, Vol. 72, No. 2 (1971): 193 – 223. Warner, Marina: Signs and Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture (London: Vintage, 2004).

Chapter Six: Three Early Twentieth-Century Excursionists – Rider Haggard, John Masefield, Claude McKay Primary Haggard, H.Rider: Belshazzar (London: Dodo Press, 2017 [1930]). Queen Sheba’s Ring (London: Fisher Unwin, 1910). Masefield, John: A King’s Daughter (London: Heinemann, 1923). Mc Kay, Claude: Gingertown (Harper & Bros: New York 1932. Reprinted Ayer Company, Salem, New Hampshire 1991.

Chapter Eight: Escaping the Straitjacket: Pullman, Beard, Oz, Moore, Toíbín

217

Secondary Cooper, Wayne (ed.): The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Prose and Poetry 1912 – 1948 (New York: Schocken Books 1973). Ellis, Peter Beresford: H. Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Infinite (London:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). Pocock, Tom: Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1993). Vance, Norman: Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015 [2013]).

Chapter Seven: Four Late Twentieth-Century Excursionists: A.M. Klein, Moshe Shamir, Michel Tournier and Sylvie Germain Primary Klein, A.M., The Second Scroll (Marlboro, Vermont: The Marlboro Press, 1985). Germain, Sylvie: The Book of Tobias trans. Christine Donougher (Sawtry, Cambs: Dedulas, 2000 [1998]). Shamir, Moshe: The Hittite Must Die trans. Margaret Benaya (New York: East and West Library, 1978[1964]). Tournier, Michel: The Four Wise Men trans. Ralph Manheim (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1980]).

Secondary Cloonan, William: ‘History and Legend in Tourner’s Works,’ in Michael Worton (ed.): Michel Tournier (London: Longman, 1995): 146 – 158. Davis, Colin: Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Gascoigne, David: Michel Tournier (Oxford: Berg, 1996). Jacobson, David C.: Modern Midrash: The Retelling of Traditional Jewish Narratives by Twentieth Century Hebrew Writers (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987). Strauss, Walter: ‘Toward a Third Testament: Michel Tourner’s Attempt to Re-Appropriate the Sacred,’ South Central Review, Vol.6., No. 1 (Spring 1989):75 – 83.

Chapter Eight: Escaping the Straitjacket (Phillip Pullman, Richard Beard, Amos Oz, Christopher Moore and Colm Toíbín) Beard, Richard: Lazarus is Dead (London: Vintage, 2012). The Book of the Assassins (London: Harvill Secker, 2015). Moore, Christopher: Lamb, A Novel. The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Friend (London: Orbit, 2007). Oz, Amos: Judas trans. Nicholas de Lange (London: Chatto & Windus, 2016).

218

Bibliography

‘Upon this Evil Earth,’ in Where the Jackals Howl trans. Nicholas de Lange (London: Vintage, 1992 [1980]): 168 – 217. Pullman, Philip: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (London: Canongate, 2010). Toíbín, Colm: The Testament of Mary (London: Viking, 2012).

Chapter Nine: The Hidden Truth: Seven More Rewritings (Louis Levy, Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Leopoldo Marechal, Derek Walcott, Jeanette Winterson and Hugo Loetscher) Primary Loetscher,Hugo, Noah. A Novel of the Boom Times trans. Samuel P. Willcocks (London:Seagull Books, 2014 (First published as Noah: Roman einer Konjunktur (Zürich: Diogenes Verlag AG, 1995). Mann, Thomas, Joseph and his Brothers trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (London: Secker and Warburg, 1956). Marechal, Lepoldo, Adam Buenosayres trans. Norman Cheadle (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). Walser, Robert, Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912 – 1932 trans. Christopher Middleton (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). Walcott, Derek: Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1971). Winterson, Jeanette, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (London: Vintage Books, 2014 [1985]).

Secondary Gnagnatti, Anita, ‘Discarding God’s Handbook: Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and the Tension of Intertextuality,’ in Mark Knight and Thomas Woodman (eds.): Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700 – 2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006): 121 – 136. Gordon, Ambrose, ‘Dublin and Buenos Aires, Joyce and Marechal, ‘ Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer 1982): 208 – 219. Wright, T.R, The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists as Biblical Interpreters (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

Chapter Ten: The Great Disruptors (D.H.Lawrence, C.J. Jung, Alan Sillitoe, Christa Wolf, Lucille Clifton and José Saramago) Primary Clifton, Lucille: The Book of Light (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993). Jung, C.J.: Answer to Job (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955). Lawrence, D.H.: Apocalypse (London: Penguin, 1995). Saramago, José: Cain trans. Margaret Jull Costa (London: Harvill Secker, 2011). Sillitoe, Alan: Snow on the North Side of Lucifer (London: W.H. Allen, 1979).

Chapter Eleven: Conclusions

219

Secondary Brassaw, Mandolin; ‘The Light That Came to Lucille Clifton: Beyond Lucille and Lucifer,’ Melus, Vol. 37, No 3 (Fall 2012: 43 – 70. Harding, Rachel Elizabeth: ‘Authority, History and Everyday Mysticism in the Poetry of Lucille Clifton: A Womanist View,’ Meridians, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2014): 36 – 57. Wright, T.R.: D.H.Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Chapter Eleven: Conclusions Josipovici, Gabriel: The Book of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Shklovsky:, Victor ‘Art as Techique’ in Lee T. Leon and Marion J. Reis (eds.): Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). Swindell, Anthony C.: Reforging the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014). Wood, James: How Fiction Works (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008).

Names of Authors Abani, Chris 121, 123 Alcuin 109, 112 Allison, Dorothy 36 – 37, 40 Andreyev, Leonid 63 – 64 Atwood, Margaret 41, 195 Banville, John 119 – 120 Barker, Pat 30 Bayless, Martha 14 Beard, Richard 154 – 159, 191, 193, 197 Blake, William 21,53 – 59 Borges, Jorges Luis 32 – 33 Brecht, Bertolt 83 Breed, Brennan W. 4 Brennan, Christopher 102 – 103 Butler, Octavia E. 101 Byron, Lord 26, 27, 191 Clifton, Lucille 107, 186, 189, 192 Clough, Arthur Hugh 27 – 28 Dante, Alighieri 21 De Assis, Machado 29 Delidda, Grazia 28 Dickens, Charles 25 – 26, 61, 79 – 80, 191 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 62 – 63 Ecclestone, Edward 19 Faulkner, William 101 – 102 Frost, Robert 67 – 68, 192 Frye, Northrop 4,5 Genette, Gérard 1, 3, 191, 204 – 206 Geoffrey of Monmouth 14, 15 Germain, Sylvie 147 – 149, 198 Gilboa, Amir 33 Ginzberg, Louis 11 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 48, 92 – 93 Goldsmith, William 49 – 51 Graves, Robert 35, 79, 124 Haggard, H. Rider 124 – 129 Halter, Marek 105 Heller, Joseph 85 – 86 Hemingway, Ernest 92 – 93, 104 Housman, Laurence 29 – 30 Hugo, Victor 26, 61 – 62, 89, 93 – 94 Joyce, James 63, 99 Jung, Carl 69, 181 – 182, 189, 191, 200 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110782141-017

Kafka, Franz 65 – 66 Kazantzakis, Nikos 36 Kierkegaard, Søren 59 – 60 Kipling, Rudyard 81 – 82, 97 Klein, A. M. 135 – 136, 196 Kotker, Norman 73 Kurz, Isolde 98 Lawrence, D.H. 180 – 181, 189, 200 Leivick, H. 68 – 69 Levy, Louis Nicolai 2, 168 – 169, 197 Llosa, Vargos 104 Loetscher, Hugo 178 – 179, 193 Louden, Bruce 10 Macdonald, George 28, 95 – 96 Machen, Arthur 118 MacLeish, Archibald 69 – 70 McKay, Claude 80, 132 – 135 McKenna, Stephen 98, 103 Magonet, Jonathan 76 Mailer, Norman 36, 40 Mann, Thomas 2, 31, 169 – 170, 192 – 193, 195, 199 Marechal, Leopoldo 171 – 174, 193, 197 Masefield, John 130 – 131 Melville, Herman 60 – 61 Milton, John 2, 21 ,47, 116 – 117, 122, 190 Moore, Christopher 163 – 165, 197, 201 Moore, C.L. 100 – 101 Morrison, Toni 101 Murphy, Tom 74 Neass, Atle 37 – 38 Nicholson, Norman 34 Nin, Anäis 103 – 104 Nooteboom, Cees 122 Owen, Wilfred 30, 40 Oz, Amos 159 – 163, 198 Parry, H.G. 86 – 88, 199 Pazzi, Roberto 100 Peele, George 78 – 79 Pope, Alexander 48 – 49 Powys, T. F. 31, 82 – 83, 119, 123 Pullman, Philip 2, 150 – 153, 192, 198 Roberts, Michèle 106

Names of Authors

Rosero, Evilio 38, 198 Rossetti, Gabriel 94 – 95 Roth, Joseph 66 – 67 Rubião, Murilo 34 – 35 Rushdie, Salman 97, 120 – 121 Saramago, José 186 – 189 Sayers, Dorothy 34 Shakespeare, William 22 – 23, 46, 114 – 115 Shamir, Moshe 84 – 85, 88, 136 – 139 Shaw, Bernard 98 – 99 Shelley, Percy 52 – 53 Sherwood, Yvonne 8 Sillitoe, Alan 183 – 184, 189 Simon, Neil 72 Singer, I .B. 72 Spark, Muriel 70 – 71, 73 – 75, 200 Steinbeck, John 31, 32 Stevenson, Anne 105 Szymborska, Wislawa 71 – 72

Tamsaari, Anton 31, 197 – 198 Tasso, Torquato 114 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 21 – 22 Tóibín, Colm 107, 165 – 166, 196 Tournier, Michel 139 – 147, 197 Todorov, Tzvetan 7 Vickers, Sally 121, 123 Vizenor, Gerald 105 Voltaire 24, 51 – 52 Vondel, Joost van den 115 – 116 Voragine, Jacobus de 110 Walcott, Derek 174 – 176, 196, 202 Walser, Robert 170 – 171, 199 Wells, H. G. 64 – 65 Wiesel, Elie 34, 40, 72, 74 Winterson, Jeanette 176 – 178 Wolf, Christa 184 – 186, 189 Yagel, Abraham ben Hananiah 46 – 47 Zach, Nathan 33

221

Titles of Principal Anonymous Works Cena Cypriani 13 – 14 Cornish Ordinalia 77 – 78 Dream of the Rood 3, 14, 197, 201 – 202 Genesis B 16 Gospel of Nicodemus 111 La Patience de Job 44

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Kabbala 91, 95 Song of Roland 112, 114 Testament of Job 43 – 44 Visio Pauli 111 Vision of Adomnan 113 Wakefield Mactacio Abel 19

Biblical Themes Abraham and Isaac 30 Acts of the Apostles 156 – 159, 166 Adam 171 – 174 Adam and Eve 27 Angels and Archangels 108 – 124 Apocalypse 180 – 181, 189 Belshazzar 127 – 129 Cain 187 – 189 Doubting Thomas 37 David and Bathsheba/ Uriah 76 – 88, 131 – 134, 136 – 139, 192 David and Goliath 174 – 176, 195 Elijah 28, 34 Fall, The 184 – 186, 190 Jehu 25 Jephthah and his Daughter 160 – 162, 167 Jezebel 131 – 132 Job 42 – 75, 182 – 183, 190, 192

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Jesus of Nazareth 35 – 36, 150 – 153, 163 – 165 Joseph 31, 169 – 170 Judas 32 – 33, 163 – 164, 166 Judith 18 Lazarus 20, 154 – 159, 166 Lilith 89 – 108 Magi, The 139 – 147 Massacre of the Innocents 38 Methuselah 168 – 169 Nativity 176 – 178 Noah 178 – 179 Pontius Pilate 12 Prodigal Son 22, 170 – 171 Queen of Sheba 125 – 127 Ruth 36 – 37 Sodom 13 Tobit 147 – 149 Virgin Mary 165 – 166