The Bible and Cultural Studies: Critical Readings 0567677621, 9780567677624

Table of contents :
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Original Publications
Introduction
Part I: The Theoretical and Critical Basis of Cultural Studies
Chapter 1: Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies
Chapter 2: What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?
Chapter 3: Cultural Studies: An Introduction
Chapter 4: Introduction: In Debt to the Censor
Chapter 5: Graves of Craving: Fast Food, or, Manna and McDonald’s
Part II: Bible and Cultural Studies
Chapter 6: Jezebel Revamped
Chapter 7: Bathsheba Plotted, Shot, and Painted
Chapter 8: How the West Was Not One: Delilah Deconstructs the Western
Chapter 9: Dracula: “The Blood Is the Life!”
Part III: Cultural Studies and the Bible
Chapter 10: House Readings and Field Readings: The Discourse of Slavery and Biblical/Cultural Studies
Chapter 11: The Bible John Murders and Media Discourse, 1969-1996
Chapter 12: The World’s Largest Ten Commandments
Chapter 13: Almost Cultural Studies?: Reflections on the “New Perspective” on Paul
Chapter 14: The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetics
Part IV: Television and Film
Chapter 15: Sitcom Mythology
Chapter 16: Gospels of Death
Chapter 17: Why Girls Cry: Gender Melancholia and Sexual Violence in Ezekiel 16 and Boys Don’t Cry
Chapter 18: Reading “This Woman” Back into John 7:1–8:59: Liar Liar and the “Pericope Adulterae” in Intertextual Tango
Part V: Next Stages
Chapter 19: The Question of the Animal
Chapter 20: From Affect to Exegesis
Chapter 21: Citizens of Fallen Cities: Ruins, Diaspora, and the Material Unconscious
Chapter 22: Seven Stations of Affect: Religion, Affect, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ
Chapter 23: Introduction to Critical Race Theory
Chapter 24: Freedom Is No Fear: The New Testament and a Theology of Policing
Chapter 25: What We Talk about When We Talk about Samson
Index

Citation preview

The Bible and Cultural Studies

Other titles in the series: The Son of Man Problem: Critical Readings The Letter to the Hebrews: Critical Readings The Hebrew Bible and History: Critical Reading The Bible, Gender and Sexuality: Critical Readings

The Bible and Cultural Studies Critical Readings Edited by Robert Paul Seesengood



T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Robert Seesengood, 2023 Robert Seesengood has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Petr Strnad/Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-7762-4 ePDF: 978-0-5676-7763-1 ePUB: 978-0-5676-7764-8 Series: T&T Clark Critical Readings in Biblical Studies Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Original Publications

vii viii ix x

Introduction  Robert Paul Seesengood

1

Part I  The Theoretical and Critical Basis of Cultural Studies

3

1 2 3 4 5

Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies  J. Cheryl Exum and Stephen D. Moore What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?  Richard Johnson Cultural Studies: An Introduction  John Storey Introduction: In Debt to the Censor  Roland Boer Graves of Craving: Fast Food, or, Manna and McDonald’s  Roland Boer

Part II  Bible and Cultural Studies: Biblical Characters and Passages Interpreted in Popular Culture 6 7 8 9

7 24 58 71 82 103

Jezebel Revamped  Tina Pippin 109 Bathsheba Plotted, Shot, and Painted  J. Cheryl Exum 120 How the West Was Not One: Delilah Deconstructs the Western  Jennifer L. Koosed and Tod Linafelt 140 Dracula: “The Blood Is the Life!”  Larry J. Kreitzer 149

Part III  Cultural Studies and the Bible: Cultural Studies Motifs and Methods Explored through the Bible

169

10 House Readings and Field Readings: The Discourse of Slavery and Biblical/ Cultural Studies  Jennifer A. Glancy 173 11 The Bible John Murders and Media Discourse, 1969–1996  William T. Scott 184 12 The World’s Largest Ten Commandments  Timothy K. Beal 195 13 Almost Cultural Studies? Reflections on the “New Perspective” on Paul  R. Barry Matlock 203 14 The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetics  Hugh S. Pyper 221 Part IV  Television and Film

235

15 Sitcom Mythology  George Aichele 16 Gospels of Death  Richard Walsh

239 252

vi

Contents

17 Why Girls Cry: Gender Melancholia and Sexual Violence in Ezekiel 16 and Boys Don’t Cry  Erin Runions 18 Reading “This Woman” Back into John 7:1–8:59: Liar Liar and the “Pericope Adulterae” in Intertextual Tango  Jeffrey L. Staley Part V  Next Stages: Posthumanism, Affect, and Critical Race Theory

273 289

305

19 The Question of the Animal  Hannah M. Strømmen 311 20 From Affect to Exegesis  Jennifer L. Koosed and Stephen D. Moore 339 21 Citizens of Fallen Cities: Ruins, Diaspora, and the Material Unconscious  Maia Kotrosits 345 22 Seven Stations of Affect: Religion, Affect, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ  Robert Paul Seesengood 367 23 Introduction to Critical Race Theory  Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic 379 24 Freedom Is No Fear: The New Testament and a Theology of Policing  Esau McCaulley 385 25 What We Talk about When We Talk about Samson  Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper 397 Index

407

Figures Detail from The Death of Jezebel (1865) by Gustave Doré Detail from Jehu’s Companions Finding the Remains of Jezebel (1865) by Gustave Doré 7.1 Rembrandt, Bethsabie au bain 7.2 Hans Memling, Bathseba im Bade 7.3 Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Het toilet van Bathseba 7.4 Carlo Maratti, David and Bathsheba (Photograph: Courtauld Institute of Art) 7.5 Hans van Aachen, David und Bathseba 7.6 Hans van Aachen, Scherzendes Paar mit einem Spiegel (Der Künstler mit seiner Frau) 12.1 World’s Largest Ten Commandments, Field of the Wood 12.2 Sinking Sheep, Field of the Wood 15.1 Levels of Reality 6.1 6.2

113 114 126 128 130 131 132 133 199 202 240

Acknowledgments I’d like to thank Dominic Mattos, who first approached me with the idea of this volume, as well as Sarah Blake and the endlessly patient colleagues and staff at T&T Clark. I am grateful for their deep patience despite an eight-month pandemic exasperated delay in the delivery of this manuscript. This is my third title with the press, and I’ve enjoyed each one. I particularly enjoyed this particular invitation to stroll back through my own student notes—and the syllabi for my students at present—bringing both a deeper connection in my scholarship and teaching and a renewed nostalgia at seeing years of work coming full circle. In the spirit of teaching and its scholarship, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank my religious studies colleagues at Albright College: Victor Forte, Midori Hartman, Chuck Brown, Mel Sensenig, Andrew Mbuvi, and, of course, Jennifer Koosed (my partner and collaborator in nearly everything). I am very grateful indeed to Ms. Trudy Prutzman for her tireless clerical assistance. I hope retirement is rewarding. Above all, however, I need to acknowledge the contributors of this volume. I’ve been a student of some of them, a colleague of many others, and luckily a friend of more than a few. I’ve learned and benefited much from them. It has been a joy to curate this collection of “old friends”—both metaphoric (the essays and ideas which shaped a younger me) and, in many cases, quite actual. I’m immensely grateful, and I hope, by this collection, to repay my gratitude by bringing in new readers to this work we all love. In summer 2022, I left the faculty of Albright College to become Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Teaching Professor of Bible & Cultures at Drew Theological School, Drew University. I am grateful to the warm, patient reception I received, particularly from my colleagues in academic affairs and in the Bible and Cultures area: Drs. Edwin Aponte, Tanya Bennett, Danna Nolan Fewell, Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, Stephen D. Moore, Kenneth Ngwa and Althea Spencer-Miller.

Abbreviations APC

Apocalypse and Popular Culture

BCCCS

Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

BibInt

Biblical Interpretation

BibIntersec

Biblical Intersections

BibleRec

Bible and Its Reception

BiblicalRec

Biblical Reception

BIPOC

Black, Indigenous and People of Color

BRPBI

Brill Research Perspectives in Biblical Interpretation

BRPHSS

Brill Research Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences

BMW

Bible in the Modern World

HBibRec

Handbooks of the Bible and its Reception

JSOTSup

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

LNTS

Library of New Testament Studies

MCS

Media, Culture, Society

OSHT

Oxford Studies in Historical Theology

Semeia

Semeia

SemeiaSt

Semeia Studies

ThTo

Theology Today

TTC

Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia

Original Publications Aichele, George. “Sitcom Mythology.” Pages 100–119 in Screening Scripture: Inter-Textual Connections Between Scripture and Film. Edited by George Aichele and Richard Walsh. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2002. Beal, Timothy K. “The World’s Largest Ten Commandments.” Pages 102–116 in Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. Boer, Roland. “Introduction: In Debt to the Censor,” and “Graves of Craving: Fast Food, or, Manna and McDonalds.” Pages 1–12, 130–149 in Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door: The Bible and Popular Culture. Biblical Limits. New York: Routledge, 1999. Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. “Introduction.” Pages 17–24 in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3d ed. New York: New York University Press, 2017. During, Simon. “Introduction.” Pages 1–25 in The Cultural Studies Reader. Edited by Stuart Hall. London: Routledge, 1993. Exum, J. Cheryl. “Bathsheba Plotted, Shot and Painted.” Pages 47–74 in Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz. Edited by Alice Bach. Semeia 74. Atlanta: SBL, 1996. Exum, J. Cheyrl and Stephen D. Moore. “Biblical Studies / Cultural Studies.” Pages 19–45 in Biblical Studies / Cultural Studies: The Third Sheffield Colloquium. Edited by J. C. Exum and S. D. Moore. JSOTSup, 266; Gender, Culture, Theory, 7. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Glancy, Jennifer A. “House Readings and Field Readings: The Discourse of Slavery and Biblical/ Cultural Studies.” Pages 460–78 in Biblical Studies / Cultural Studies: The Third Sheffield Colloquium. Edited by J. C. Exum and S. D. Moore. JSOTSup, 266; Gender, Culture, Theory, 7. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Johnson, Richard. “What is Cultural Studies Anyway?” Pages 75–114 in What is Cultural Studies? Edited by John Storey. London: Edward Arnold, 1996. Junior, Nyasha and Jeremy Schipper. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Samson.” Pages 11–29 of Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Koosed, Jennifer L. and Stephen D. Moore. “From Affect to Exegesis.” BibInt 22.4-5 (2014): 381–387. Koosed, Jennifer L. and Tod Linafelt. “How the West Was Not One: Delilah Deconstructs The Western.” Pages 167–182 in Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz. Edited by Alice Bach. Semeia, 74. Atlanta: SBL, 1996.

 Original Publications

xi

Kotrosits, Maia. “Citizens of Fallen Cities: Ruins, Diaspora, and the Material Unconscious.” Pages 42–66 in The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Kreitzer, Larry J. “Dracula: ‘The Blood is the Life.’” Pages 113–142 in Pauline Images In Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999. Matlock, R. Barry. “Almost Cultural Studies? Reflections on the ‘New Perspective’ on Paul.” Pages 478–497 in Biblical Studies / Cultural Studies: The Third Sheffield Colloquium. Edited by J. C. Exum and S. D. Moore. JSOTSup, 266; Gender, Culture, Theory, 7. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. McCaulley, Esau. “Freedom is no Fear: The New Testament and a Theology of Policing.” Pages 25–46 in Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as a Exercise in Hope. Grand Rapids, MI: InterVarsity Press, 2020. Pippin, Tina. “Jezebel Revamped.” Pages 32–42 in Apocalyptic Bodies: The Biblical End of the World in Text and Image. New York: Routledge, 1998. Pyper, Hugh S. “The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetis.” Pages 70–90 in Biblical Studies / Cultural Studies. Edited by J. Cheryl Exum and Moore. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998. Runions, Erin. “Why Girls Cry: Gender Melancholia and Sexual Violence in Ezekiel 16 And Boys Don’t Cry.” Pages 188–212 in Screening Scripture: Inter-Textual Connections Between Scripture and Film. Edited by George Aichele and Richard Walsh. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2002. Scott, William T. “The Bible John Murders and Media Discourse, 1969-1996.” Pages 478–97 in Biblical Studies / Cultural Studies. Edited by Exum and Moore. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998. Seesengood, Robert Paul. “Seven Stations of Affect: Religion, Affect, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.” Pages 174–186 in The T & T Clark Companion to the Bible And Film. Edited by Richard Walsh. London: T & T Clark, 2018. Staley, Jeffrey L. “Reading ‘This Woman’ back into John 7:1-8:59: Liar, Liar and the ‘Pericope adulterae’ in Intertextual Lingo.” Pages 85–107 in Those Outside: Noncanonical Readings of the Canonical Gospels. Edited by G. Aichele and R. Walsh. London: T & T Clark, 2005. Storey, John. “Cultural Studies: An Introduction.” Pages 1–13 in What is Cultural Studies? Edited by John Storey. London: Edward Arnold, 1996. Strømmen, Hannah. “The Question of the Animal.” Pages 1–36 in Biblical Animality After Jacques Derrida. Semeia St, 91. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2018. Walsh, Richard. “Gospels of Death.” Pages 81–103 in Finding St. Paul in Film. London: T & T Clark, 2005.

xii

Introduction Robert Paul Seesengood

For this volume, I have opted to include the full text of some foundational, “ground level” works, much from the earliest decades of publication in Bible and cultural studies. I do so for two reasons. The first is perhaps the most earnest: this volume is intended for students and scholars at the very beginning of their work in the area. Several of these chapters are becoming difficult to locate. They provide, however, a sturdy foundation to later work, are careful in their theory, and are intentionally engaged with work beyond the borders of traditional biblical scholarship. Students have the greatest need in developing a common, strong foundation, ideally one which acquaints them with major voices and directions. My second reason is the sheer, exuberant abundance of work in Bible and cultural studies in the early twenty-first century. The field has simply exploded. I have kept my own comments brief, wishing to let the selections do most of the speaking. Following the chapters presented in full, I have included a select, annotated bibliography of later work—much of it drawing out themes or concepts first mapped in the readings provided. For the bibliographies, I have placed a priority on edited collections. Through these, readers will gain access to a significant number of individual scholars working in the field; perusing these volumes will acquaint readers with several hundred individual authors and an array of methods, foci, and interests. The chapters will be grouped into parts; at the beginning of each, I will write a general introduction and context for the chapters that follow. The chapters are arranged into five major parts. The chapters in Part I are pivotal to the history and development of cultural studies as scholarly approach, and in particular to its application to biblical studies. Part II contains chapters that are focused on the Bible and cultural studies— where biblical characters, passages, or explicit themes appear in popular or mass culture. These chapters, in general, argue for pop culture as a mode of biblical interpretation and examine the way Bible influences our media lives. Part III features chapters that focus upon cultural studies and the Bible. In these, the guiding interest is theory or work in cultural studies, itself, often mediated by means of analysis of a point of biblical intersection. Part IV focuses primarily on Bible in television and film. Bible in/and the moving image may be the most expansive area in North American Bible and cultural studies. Finally, Part V focuses on the “next wave” of work, with emphasis on three key areas: posthumanism, affect studies, and critical race theory.

2

Part I

The Theoretical and Critical Basis of Cultural Studies Cultural studies approaches to biblical criticism have benefited from revolutionary change of spirit over the past three or four decades. In the early days, it would not be uncommon to hear biblical scholars assert that the study of, say, the use of the Bible within the movies of the Marvel Comics’ cinematic universe, was not “biblical studies.” Times have changed. Now, such an observation would not be considered broadly literate or fully engaged with current trends in either the humanities or biblical studies. This anthology, in part, tells the story of why. The chapters in this first portion begin, appropriately, with the theoretical underpinnings of cultural studies itself, with a particular attention to the way biblical studies scholars, at least initially, understood or framed their own work. The study of the Bible alongside popular or mass culture is now often understood to be a subset of “Reception Criticism.” Certainly, if one intends “reception” to be an analysis of how the Bible has been read and interpreted or affected its readers (and the cultures they lived in), it may well be. Cultural studies would overlap with, or include, Reception Criticism (defined as I have) and the study of Bible in pop/mass culture, but it would not be synonymous with either. Cultural studies certainly contains the study of items of mass culture, but it also turns its eye toward the structures and mechanics of the culture itself. Cultural studies approaches to Bible certainly can attend to Reception Critical questions such as the way the Bible has been interpreted and read by culture (whether within or without a theological agenda), but it may also look more structurally, more ethereally at ways that cultural tropes, “mechanics,” or structures appear within the Bible are analogous with the Bible, or even shaped the way the Bible was written, edited, collected, and canonized. Cultural studies differs from both reception criticism and the study of mass culture by observing that the Bible itself is not only an item of mass culture but that it arose to become a Bible via cultural means and influences. The chapters in this volume focus on cultural studies approaches. Accordingly, the chapters in this initial section explore the borders of what “cultural studies” includes. Essentially, as we will see in the first three chapters to follow, the field began in the mid-twentieth century as a fusion of diverse conversations among humanities scholars, historians, and social scientists. The central question is the examination of where and how culture is produced and how discrete parts of culture intersect and inter-animate. It is a common enough refrain within critical theory to say that something is not, in itself, a “methodology,” but more a set of questions and concerns, a focus of inquiry. This is particularly the case for cultural studies. As the chapters in this section trace (particularly Exum and Moore), cultural studies began in the work of post-war critics who were turning their thoughts to defining and understanding what we mean by “culture.” Their work was heavily influenced by continental philosophical

4

The Bible and Cultural Studies

thought and conversations emerging from nuanced understandings of Marxism and other hegemonic forces and structures. This work pooled in intriguing and disciplinary-founding ways at Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It arrived on US shores largely alongside other ingress of continental philosophy, particularly via programs at Yale and Duke universities. Within biblical studies, cultural studies emerged earliest among critical theorists, but soon merged with a blossoming North American interest in scholarship on mass/ pop entertainments (particularly television, film, and internet). The chapters listed in Part I begin with the introduction to the notable volume Biblical Studies/ Cultural Studies: The Third Sheffield Colloquium edited by J. Cheryl Exum and Stephen D. Moore, both, at the time, faculty at Sheffield University. The core of the chapters for the volume originated as a general colloquia on the topic. At the time, Sheffield University’s program in biblical studies was among the most methodologically innovative in the field, and was a center for publication of secular, academic biblical studies. Exum and Moore, in their introduction, trace the origins of cultural studies as a field, describing its early work—the formation of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies—and noting landmark figures such as Stuart Hall, and outline the intellectual origins and interests of cultural studies. Were that not enough to pack a simple chapter, they turn to outline specific ways cultural studies might intersect with contemporary methodologies in biblical criticism. The chapter is a landmark, justifiably notable for its combination of both brevity and comprehensiveness. The next two chapters, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” by Richard Johnson and “Cultural Studies: An Introduction” by John Storey, drill more deeply into the theory and history of cultural studies work. Not quite as broadly cited as Exum and Moore, their work, nevertheless, is exemplary in its critical command of literature. Completing this section are two excerpts from Roland Boer’s 1999 Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. Boer, an amazingly prolific and innovative biblical scholar, wrote one of the earliest sustained monographs to fuse cultural studies and biblical studies. His approach is decidedly oriented around material mass culture and interrogates the systems and structures that separate “High” and “Low” (or “intellectual” and “mass”) culture, very much continuing the themes of classical BCCCS cultural studies. Boer’s work is also, like the Birmingham Centre, decidedly Marxist in orientation (his later writing over the past twenty years has become even more so). Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door is a collection of several discrete chapters on the theme of the Hebrew Bible interpreted via the machinery of mass culture. Knitting the book’s chapters are a series of vignettes of a noir detective story (ultimately a metaphor for postmodernity). Boer treats such subjects as heavy metal music, pornography, and McDonald’s restaurants, reveling in the most “mass” of mass Western anglophone culture. Boer’s central concern is the interrogation—and evasion—of “the censor.” The Censor is a mechanism in culture which bifurcates between “high” and “low,” “common” and “serious” art and intellectualism. Boer attempts to collapse this binary, leaving his reader to see the arbitrary (and somewhat Victorian) class differences and the ways structures of hegemony and control create class differences that first describe and populate the “altern” and “subaltern,” even as they create and perpetuate that distinction, as well. He lays his agenda out (and traces the history of cultural studies) in his introduction “In Debt to the Censor.” His later chapter “Graves of Craving: Fast Food, or, Manna and McDonalds” is an excellent review of his methodology applied.

Annotated Bibliography: Further Readings Althusser, Louis. For Marx. London: Allen Lane, 1969. This title is among the most engaged scholarly works by Althusser (its significant rival would be Reading Capital from 1965).

 The Theoretical and Critical Basis of Cultural Studies

5

Althusser outlines his understanding of Marx’s development of work and for an understanding of “historical materialism.” This concept, in particular, has been critical for cultural studies scholars (and, it is important to note, differs from some leading theories on Marx by other political and economic philosophers). Bach, Alice, ed. The Bible and Popular Culture. Biblical Interpretation 2.1 (1994). Alice Bach is among the earliest, and most prominent, biblical scholars to take up a serious approach to Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. This themed journal issue showcased her early work and was influential on the field. Boer, Roland. Novel Histories: The Fiction of Biblical Criticism. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994. This work is, in some ways, a blistering review of what Boer would define as a narrow view of biblical studies, arguing that not only is a cultural studies approach (or, later, “Reception Critical”) a legitimate form of biblical scholarship, all biblical scholarship is, he argues, cultural interpretation. Butsch, Richard. For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure to Consumption. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990. This is an important work which collects main arguments against the separation of “high” and “mass” culture in critical analysis. Connor, S. Postmodern Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. This work is a good, general overview for postmodernity (and, in turn, a good presentation of modernity and its limitations). Cuff, Simon. “Affected History: The Truth of Gadamer and Methods in New Testament Hermeneutics.” Hermeneia 23 (2019): 127–36. This article reviews work that argues cultural studies approaches to biblical scholarship (“Reception History”) are epistemologically rooted in the work of Gadamer. It is important to note, however, most early scholars of Bible and culture do not cite Gadamer. During, Simon, ed. The Cultural Studies Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1993. This book is one of the best introductions to the early work on cultural studies, generally. Its opening readings and review, alone, are remarkable in their depth while sustaining brevity. England, Emma and William John Lyons, eds. Reception History and Biblical Studies: Theory and Practice. LHBOTS, 615; Critical Perspectives on the Reception and Influence of the Bible, 6. London: T & T Clark, 2015. This book is a good review of Reception History, which is, in many ways, a subset of cultural studies (focusing concern chiefly on the ways the Bible has influenced culture and upon the history of interpretation). Many reception critics also integrate their work into theological and confessional interests in ways cultural studies scholars would not. Another good overview is: Robert Evans. Reception History: Tradition and Biblical Interpretation. LNTS, 510. New York: Bloomsbury / T & T Clark, 2014. Fuller, David J. “Gadamer and Biblical Studies: Retrospect and Prospect.” Dialogismos 2 (2017): 17–52. This article, like Cuff discussed earlier, provides an overview of “Reception Criticism” arguing, as well, its assumptions are rooted in the work of Gadamer. Again, however, while there is an emerging community of reception critics engaged with Gadamer, and while many of Gadamer’s arguments (particularly in his Truth and Method) are interesting structurally for many contemporary reception critics, they were not part of cultural studies critique in its origins. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971. Alongside Althusser, Gramsci’s neo-Marxist readings are foundational to cultural studies reviews of cultural hegemony. Readers may also wish to advance to his 1978 Selections from the Cultural Writings. Edited by D. Forgacs and G. Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Media Culture Society 2 (1980): 57–72. Stuart Hall is one of the foundational critics for the formation of cultural studies (and was integral with the Birmingham Centre). Also of interest is his “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies” (56–90 in Culture, Society and the Media, ed. M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran, and J. Woolacott [London: Methuen, 1982]).

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Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. New York: Penguin, 1957. A landmark example of the type of work advanced by the Birmingham Centre. Jameson, Frederick. “Postmodernism, Or: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984): 59–92. This article (eventually expanded into Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991]) defines our current intellectual moment as one of “late capitalism,” fusing the conversations of cultural studies and (continental) critical theory. Jameson, in the monograph, offers an extended argument that justifies cultural studies attention to mass culture and to the importance of serious consideration of pop, often seemingly superficial, culture. Leavis, F. R. Mass Civilization and Minority Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930. This early-twentieth-century landmark work lays the groundwork for cultural studies, particularly its recognition of the importance of mass culture and the ways cultural divisions reflect social hierarchies. Legaspi, Michael. The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies. OSHT. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. In an intensely interesting work, Legaspi traces the history of scholarship in biblical studies which was grounded in the assumption that the Bible could be encountered as if it were a book like any other book from antiquity. Legaspi argues that such an approach (“biblical studies”) is substantively different from the scholarship of the Bible pursued by confessional communities (Scripture). Munns, Jessica and Gita Rajan, eds. A Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory and Practice. New York: Longman, 1995. This book is an excellent introduction to the founding authors, methods, and assumptions of cultural studies. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780-1950. London: Chatto & Windus, 1958. Raymond Williams is a central figure behind the earliest development of UK cultural studies. This book is seminal to his work as a whole.

1

Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies J. Cheryl Exum and Stephen D. Moore

This book originated in an international colloquium on “Biblical into Cultural Studies” held at the University of Sheffield in April of 1997 under the auspices of the Centre for Biblical and Cultural Studies. The colloquium, the third in a series of interdisciplinary colloquia sponsored by the Department of Biblical Studies,1 took as its starting point the premise that the practice of cultural studies offers critical tools for analysing the Bible’s position of privilege in the Western canon and provides a theoretical perspective from which to look not only at the production of meaning in the past but also at ways the Bible and contemporary culture mutually influence each other. The participants, scholars from various disciplines but mainly from within the field of biblical studies, were invited to write on a topic of their choice relating to the intersection of cultural studies and biblical studies. The result was a series of stimulating discussions, leading to further reflection, revision, and a cultural product: the following, and we believe fascinating, mix of essays. It is not the intention of this volume to try to define the emerging area of biblical cultural studies—even if that could be done—but rather, in these early stages of what promises to become a significant development in biblical studies, to provide a sense of the possibilities a cultural studies approach to the Bible opens up and to indicate some of the directions it might take. Since cultural studies is relatively new on the biblical horizon, we begin with a brief sketch of how cultural studies has developed, which we hope will help to situate the present project in its larger academic and cultural context.

The Story of Cultural Studies There is a “received history” of cultural studies, a fairly tightly plotted narrative of ascent and decline, which generally begins with the work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams in the 1950s, continues through the founding and flowering of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s, and culminates in the internationalization, institutionalization—and domestication—of cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s. This historical recital customarily commences with verbal portraits of the founding fathers. The first depicts Hoggart clutching a copy of his 1957 book, The Uses of Literacy.2 Hoggart’s For the proceedings of the first two colloquia, held in 1990 and 1995, see Loveday C.A. Alexander (ed.), Images of Empire (JSOTSup. 122; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), and John W. Rogerson, Margaret Davies and M. Daniel Carroll R. (eds.), The Bible in Ethics: The Second Sheffield Colloquium (JSOTSup, 207; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995). 2 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). 1

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quirky book, with its affectionate ethnographic attention to such mundane matters as English working-class speech patterns, living-room decor, eating habits, motherhood, fatherhood, neighbourhoods, and so on, proceeding to a critique of popular magazines, songs, newspapers, and pulp fiction, anticipates what British cultural studies would become—pre-eminently the study of British working-class culture and popular media. The second founder figure, Raymond Williams, is, like Hoggart, customarily portrayed clutching a book to his breast, in this case Culture and Society.3 In certain respects, Culture and Society anticipates the subsequent agenda of British cultural studies less markedly than The Uses of Literacy, being a historical study of the emergence and evolution of the modern notion of culture. Yet Williams’s legacy to cultural studies consists precisely in his intense attention to the concept of culture itself (a concept everywhere evoked but nowhere defined in The Uses of Literacy). In Culture and Society and its successor volume, The Long Revolution, Williams shifts the definition of culture away from “the best that has been thought and said” to “a whole way of life.” “The analysis of culture, from such a definition . . . will . . . include analysis of elements in the way of life that to followers of the other definitions are not ‘culture’ at all: the organization of production, the structure of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social relationships, the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate.”4 In sum, Culture and Society, and The Long Revolution which builds upon it, can be read as a sustained historical and theoretical argument for a paradigmatic shift of attention from an aesthetic to an anthropological study of culture—the culture in question, however, not being the “primitive” or “exotic” cultures beloved of ethnographers but the culture(s) of industrial societies instead—just as The Uses of Literacy can be read as the first instalment of this improbable fieldwork, an ethnography of English working-class culture. Much more could, and perhaps should, be said about the primaeval history of cultural studies, in particular Hoggart’s and Williams’s debts to the educational philosophy of F.R. Leavis,5 but let us press on. A third figure is often pushed on stage at this point in the story, also bearing a book—indeed, a little flushed with the effort of holding aloft his thousand-page tome, The Making of the English Working Class. This is E.P. Thompson, and his book is commonly regarded as exemplary of cultural history “written from below.”6 Far more significant than Thompson, however, for the subsequent development of British cultural studies is a fourth figure (a fourth evangelist?), Stuart Hall. In 1964 the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (henceforth, CCCS) was established at the University of Birmingham as a graduate annex of the English Department with Hoggart as Director and Hall as Deputy Director. In 1968 Hoggart left for Paris to take up a position with UNESCO. For the next 11 years, first as Acting Director, and then, from 1972, as Director, Hall ran the Centre. This period is generally seen as the “golden age” of British cultural studies. The 1970s was also the Marxist phase of CCCS. The influence of Marxism on British cultural studies is regularly emphasized (and often exaggerated). “All the basic assumptions of cultural studies are Marxist,” claims John Storey. “This is not to say that all practitioners of cultural studies are Marxists,” he continues, “but that cultural studies is itself grounded in Marxism.”7 Richard Johnson draws up a checklist of three Marxist premises that have informed cultural studies: the Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958). Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp. 57-58. 5 On Leavis and cultural studies, see Fred Inglis, Cultural Studies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), pp. 35-46. 6 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963). 7 John Storey, “Cultural Studies: An Introduction,” in John Storey (ed.), What Is Cultural Studies? A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1996), pp. 1-13 (3). 3 4

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first is that cultural processes are intimately connected with social relations, especially with class relations and class formations; the second is that culture involves power and helps to produce asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define and realize their needs; and the third, which follows from the other two, is that culture is neither an autonomous nor an externally determined field, but a site of social differences and struggles.8 The cultural studies to which Storey and Johnson refer is primarily that which was forged at CCCS.9 It was not until 1970-71, however, that Marxism took centre stage at CCCS: “We chose as a coherent theory one the Centre had not previously analysed, that of Karl Marx.”10 But which interpretation of Marxist theory would CCCS endorse? By 1973 the Marxism of French structuralist Louis Althusser had come to dominate the agenda at the Centre.11 This is also the period when explicit concern with ideology comes to the fore at CCCS—so much so, indeed, that at least one commentator would later suggest that “British cultural studies could be described just as easily and perhaps more accurately as ideological studies.”12 This is, in fact, the most conspicuous point of convergence between cultural studies and recent biblical studies (we speak, of course, of that ever-expanding body of biblical scholarship now commonly termed “ideological criticism”). Central to Althusser’s system was the concept of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs). This rather inelegant term designated a disparate group of relatively autonomous but functionally interlocking social institutions, such as the family, the media, and the educational and political systems. ISAs were to be distinguished from overtly coercive social institutions, such as the army, the police, and the legal system. By covertly inducing people to behave in socially acceptable ways, as though they were free agents, ISAs do the subtle work of ideology. Ideology, in Althusser’s celebrated definition, “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”13 The Althusserian Marxism in vogue at CCCS was by no means unadulterated, however. Althusser’s concept of ideology, in its details, seemed to lack nuance. Very soon, leading CCCS members such as Hall were attempting to synthesize the more persuasive features of Althusser’s system with other concepts drawn from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and subsequently, in the 1980s, from the poststructuralist Marxist Ernesto Laclau.14 Other influences on British cultural studies from the late 1970s onwards included the French theorists Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Johnson, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?,” in Storey (ed.), What Is Cultural Studies?, pp. 75-114 (76). 9 Another locus for British cultural studies in the 1970s was the group centred on the influential film studies journal, Screen, on which see loan Davies, Cultural Studies and Beyond: Fragments of Empire (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 89-93. 10 Anon., Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Report: 7. 1969-12.1971 (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1971), p. 10, quoted in Colin Sparks, “Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies and Marxism,” in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 71-101 (81). 11 See Louis Althusser. For Marx (trans. Ben Brewster; London: Penguin Books, 1969), and Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (trans. Ben Brewster; London: New Left Books, 1971). 12 James W. Carey, “Overcoming Resistance to Cultural Studies,” in Storey (ed.), What is Cultural Studies?, pp. 61-74 (65). 13 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 127-86 (153). 14 See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey NowellSmith; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), idem, Selections from the Political Writings (ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), and idem, Selections from Cultural Writings (ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985); also Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977), and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Social Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). On Hall’s appropriation of Gramsci see 8

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Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault.15 Althusser’s enduring legacy to British cultural studies, however, has consisted in inducing it to make ideology, viewed as housed especially in the mass media, in state institutions, and in language itself, a central focus of attention. Additionally during the 1970s, British cultural studies began to forge a style of analysis of social institutions and cultural products that is best termed “semiotic”—a decoding of “surface” features designed to reveal underlying meanings, and ideological meanings in particular. The most notable precursor for this sort of work was Mythologies by Roland Barthes and the most celebrated example of it to emerge from CCCS was Stuart Hall’s 1980 essay, “Encoding, Decoding.”16 As Hall’s essay is heavy on theory but light on application, however, we shall attempt to convey the flavor of the eclectic cultural critique—Marxist, ideological, semiotic— that characterized CCCS in its heyday with reference instead to another influential essay, one by Richard Johnson, who succeeded Hall in 1979 as Director of the Centre. At one point in his essay, Johnson homes in on the Mini-Metro, a pretty standard late twentieth-century capitalist commodity that happened to carry a particularly rich accumulation of meanings. The metro was the car that was going to save the British car industry, by beating rivals from the market and by solving British Leyland’s acute problems of industrial discipline. It came to signify solutions to internal and external national threats. The advertising campaigns around its launching were remarkable. In one television ad, a band of Mini-Metros pursued a gang of foreign imports up to (and apparently) over the White Cliffs of Dover, whence they fled in what looked remarkably like landing craft. This was a Dunkirk in reverse with the Metro as nationalist hero. Certainly these are some of the forms—nationalist epic, popular memory of World War II, internal/external threat—that I would want to abstract for further formal scrutiny. But this raises interesting questions too about what constitutes a “text” (or raw material for such abstractions) in these cases. Would it be enough to analyse the design of the Metro itself as Barthes once analysed the lines of a Citroën? How could we exclude ads and garage showroom displays? Shouldn’t we include, indeed, the Metro’s place in discourses upon national economic recovery and moral renaissance? Supposing that we answered these questions affirmatively (and gave ourselves a lot more work) there would still be some unposed questions. What was made of the Metro phenomenon, more privately, by particular groups of consumers and readers? We would expect great diversity of response. Leyland workers, for example, were likely to view the car differently from those who only bought it. Beyond this, the Metro (and its transformed meanings) became a way of getting to work or picking the kids up from school. It may also have helped to produce, for example, orientations towards working life, connecting industrial “peace” with national prosperity. Then, of course, the products of this whole circuit returned once more to the moment of production—as profits for fresh investment, but also as market researchers” findings on “popularity” (capital’s own “cultural studies”). The subsequent use, by British Leyland management, of similar strategies for selling cars and weakening workers suggests considerable accumulations (of both kinds) from this episode. Indeed the Metro his “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” in Morley and Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall, pp. 41140; and on Hall’s appropriation of Laclau see Sparks, “Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies and Marxism,” pp. 89-95. 15 On this see Simon During, “Introduction,” in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1-25 (10-13). 16 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (trans. Annette Lavers; London: Jonathan Cape, 1972); Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” in During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader, pp. 90-103.

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became a little paradigm, though not the first, for a much more diffused ideological form, which we might term, with some compression, “the nationalist sell.”17

CCCS members published little in the 1960s and early 1970s. Beginning around the mid-1970s, however, a succession of highly significant publications begin to issue from the Centre. The first was Resistance through Rituals, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson.18 That it was a collectively authored work, like several of its immediate successors, was itself not without significance. Michael Green has noted how CCCS was concerned “to democratise academic knowledge forms” and has provided an account of the key role that group work played in research and pedagogy at the Centre.19 Resistance through Rituals consists of ethnographic explorations of the relations between British youth subcultures (ranging from teddy boys to skinheads) and the dominant ideologies of British society, complex relations of contestation and compromise. This preoccupation—a pervasive one at CCCS through the 1970s—received its definitive expression in Dick Hebdige’s Subculture.20 The positive significance ascribed to subcultural speech, hairstyles, dress, music, and dance by Hebdige and his CCCS colleagues (Subculture focuses especially on punks) suggested the distance that the study of working-class culture had come from Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, which took an unremittingly negative view of popular culture and (then nascent) youth subculture. Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour, another CCCS product from the 1970s, is also much preoccupied with strategies of resistance to state power employed by the relatively powerless, while John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson’s Working Class Culture, with its Althusserian and Gramscian subtexts, further suggests the rift that had opened up between the first and second generation of cultural studies scholars.21 (E.P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory from 1978 is principally a denunciation of the Althusserian Marxism that seduced the second generation.22) The first major studies of television to emerge from CCCS were Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley’s Everyday Television: “Nationwide” and Morley’s The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and Decoding—the “Nationwide” of the titles being a popular BBC news-magazine show—followed by Dorothy Hobson’s “Crossroads”: The Drama of a Soap Opera.23 There were at least two “interruptions” (as Hall would later put it) in the work of the Centre during the 1970s, “the first around feminism, and the second around questions of race.”24 When feminism broke into CCCS’s agenda, Hall recalls, it was as a “thief in the night. . . . The title of the volume in which this dawn-raid was first accomplished—Women Take Issue—is instructive: for

Johnson, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?,” pp. 83-85. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds.), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1976). 19 Michael Green, “The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,” in Storey (ed.), What Is Cultural Studies?, pp. 49-60 (54-56). 20 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979). 21 Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1977); John Clarke, Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson, Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1979). 22 E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978). Hall addresses the rift in his own way in “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980), pp. 57-72. 23 Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley, Everyday Television: “Nationwide” (London: British Film Institute, 1978); David Morley, The “Nationwide” Audience. Structure and Decoding (London: British Film Institute, 1980); Dorothy Hobson, “Crossroads”: The Drama of a Soap Opera (London: Methuen, 1982). 24 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paul Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 277-94 (282). 17 18

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they ‘took issue’ in both senses—took over that year’s book and initiated a quarrel.”25 The feminist intervention at CCCS, which began at least as early as 1974,26 yielded, in addition to Women Take Issue, a number of other significant publications.27 The feminist intervention exposed the androcentrism, not just of the first generation of cultural studies scholars, but frequently of the second generation as well, notably its failure to engage critically with the sexism and misogyny of many of the youth subcultures it analysed, coupled with its neglect in its media studies of genres such as soap operas, perceived as “feminine,” in favour of “masculine” genres such as news and current affairs shows.28 With regard to the second “interruption,” Hall (himself of black Jamaican extraction) recalls that “getting cultural studies to put on its own agenda the critical questions of race, the politics of race, the resistance to racism . . . was itself a profound theoretical struggle, a struggle of which Policing the Crisis was, curiously, the first and very late example.”29 Policing the Crisis, collectively authored by Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, is often regarded as CCCS’s most impressive product, a multifaceted analysis of the emergence of a New Right in 1970s Britain.30 The trajectory it represented was extended in subsequent works such as CCCS’s The Empire Strikes Back and Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack.31 Of the hardwon emergence of race and ethnicity as objects for cultural analysis (as a result of which cultural studies forefathers such as Hoggart and Williams now seemed not only narrowly androcentric in their concerns, but narrowly anglocentric and well), Hall notes: “It represented a decisive turn in my own theoretical and intellectual work, as well as in that of the Centre.”32 A third defining trait of British cultural studies in its formative period, in addition to its fundamental preoccupations with contemporary culture and with ideology, was its antidisciplinary inclinations. This was bound up with a distrust of academic disciplines, specifically of their tendency to turn inwards, to become esoteric dialogues between experts conducted in the pages of technical journals and scholarly monographs read only by professional scholars or scholars-in-training (a distrust that also crops up in some of the essays in the presents volume, notably Alice Bach’s). Hall remarks of CCCS, “there is no doubt in my mind that we were trying to find an institutional practice in cultural studies that might produce an organic intellectual.”33 The term “organic intellectual” is drawn from Gramsci (on whom see further Jennifer Glancy’s

Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” p. 282. See Women’s Studies Group, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women’s Subordination (London: Hutchinson, 1978). For a detailed account of the “quarrel” to which Hall refers, see Charlotte Brunsdon, “A Thief in the Night: Stories of Feminism in the 1970s at CCCS,” in Morley and Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall, pp. 276-86. 26 See Helen Butcher et al., Images of Women in the Media (Stencilled Occasional Paper, 34; Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1974). 27 E.g. Angela McRobbie, Jackie: An Ideology of Adolescent Femininity (Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1978); Angela McRobbie and Trisha McCabe (eds.), Feminism for Girls (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); Hobson, “Crossroads”; Charlotte Brunsdon (ed.), Films for Women (London: British Film Institute, 1986); Janice Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines (London: Pandora, 1987). 28 See Elizabeth Long, “Feminism and Cultural Studies,” in Storey (ed.), What Is Cultural Studies?, pp. 197-207 (198). 29 Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” p. 283. 30 Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1979). 31 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in ’70s Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982); Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987). 32 Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” p. 283. As examples of Hall’s numerous essays on race and ethnicity, see “New Ethnicities” and “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” in Morley and Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall, pp. 441-49, 465-75. 33 Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” p. 281. 25

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essay in this volume). The organic intellectual “must work on two fronts,” explains Hall.34 First of all, he or she must be at the cutting edge of intellectual work. But the second aspect is just as crucial; that the organic intellectual cannot absolve himself or herself from the responsibility of transmitting those ideas, that knowledge . . . to those who do not belong, professionally, in the intellectual class. And unless those two fronts are operating at the same time, or at least unless those two ambitions are part of the project of cultural studies, you can get enormous theoretical advance without any engagement at the level of the political project.35

Of CCCS in the 1970s Michael Green recalls: “Inside the Centre, groups attempted to think of their work in relation to the problems of the nearest appropriate constituency, which might not always be that of teachers in higher or secondary education”; instead it might be media workers, alternative publishers and bookshops, or working-class teenage girls.36 In the 1980s and 1990s, British cultural studies became increasingly occupied with matters of race and ethnicity,37 of gender and sexuality, of nationalism and postcolonialism, and also with postmodernism, which became the great challenge for cultural studies in the 1980s just as Marxism had been its great challenge in the 1970s.38 This realignment of interests actually created the conditions for cultural studies’ internationalization.”39 Analyses of racism, sexism, nationalism, and (post)-colonialism, coupled with debates on and with postmodernism, possessed a cross-cultural appeal and trans-Atlantic transposability (at least for academics) that ethnographic analyses of British working-class culture did not possess, analyses that often seemed arcane, or merely parochial, to non-natives. In the 1980s cultural studies began to take off, in Britain but in other countries as well, notably the United States. First and foremost, this was a curricular boom, linked, in Britain at least, with the 1980s bust in higher education. The curricular dissemination of cultural studies in Britain resulted from the widespread modularization of degree courses in response to the crisis in higher education; the eclectic combinations of subjects that students now routinely chose were conveniently labelled cultural studies in many institutions. Similarly, in the United States, the dismantling and reassembling of media-based programmes by cost-cutting administrators could be justified in the name of “cultural studies.”40

Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” p. 268. Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” p. 268. Cf. Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” pp. 432-33. 36 Green, “The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,” p. 57. Brunsdon, too, offers a description of this “outreach” (“A Thief in the Night,” p. 281). 37 See Houston A. Baker, Jr. Manthia Diawara and Ruth H. Lindeborg (eds.). Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 38 See, e.g., Morley and Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall, Part II, “Postmodernism and Cultural Studies: First Encounters”; Lawrence Grossberg, It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodernism, Politics, and Culture (Sydney: Power Publications, 1988); idem, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992); Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Davies, Cultural Studies and Beyond, pp. 149-55; John Fekete, “Postmodernism and Cultural studies: On the Utopianization of Heterotopia,” in Martin Kreiswirth and Thomas Carmichael (eds.), Constructive Criticism: The Human Sciences in the Age of Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 201-19. 39 See During, “Introduction,” p. 15. 40 See Brundson, “A Thief in the Night,” p. 277. 34 35

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The 1980s and 1990s saw the establishment of a remarkable number of cultural studies journals. The first was the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, founded in 1983,41 which, in keeping with the “internationalization” of cultural studies then underway, was retitled Cultural Studies in 1987 (and its headquarters relocated to the United States shortly thereafter). Other cultural studies journals founded in the past 15 years in the United States, Canada, Britain, or Australia have included Cultural Critique, Social Text, Arena, Borderlines, New Formations, News from Nowhere, Theory, Culture and Society, and parallax. Additionally during this period new professional associations for cultural studies were formed, notably the Cultural Studies Association and the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and international conferences were staged. The first book-length introductions to cultural studies did not appear until 1990, somewhat surprisingly—Patrick Brantlinger’s Crusoe’s Footprints and Graeme Turner’s British Cultural Studies—although a host of other introductions followed hard on their heels.42 As the 1990s progressed, more and more publishers began to converge on cultural studies, with Routledge leading the pack. In spring 1995, Routledge even began publishing a promotional “newspaper,” The Cultural Studies Times, targeted especially at booksellers. Mimicking the masthead of The New York Times, the “Late Edition” produced in time for the 1995 American Booksellers Association convention in Los Angeles carried a “weather box”; “Today, cleaning minds. Tomorrow, clearing shelves. Monday, creating cultural studies sections in your bookstore.” Even casual observers could hardly fail to be struck by “the contradictions of pushing ostensibly radical critique like so much laundry soap.”43 Cultural studies’ stunning success, especially in the United States, is causing considerable concern, and in two very different camps. On the one hand, traditionalists in literature Although the first cultural studies journal per se was CCCS’s house journal, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, founded in 1971, of which ten issues appeared. 42 Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (New York: Routledge, 1990); Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990: New York: Routledge, 2nd edn, 1996). Other volumes, too, showcased national (or, in one instance, ethnic) traditions in cultural studies: John Frow and Meaghan Morris, Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader (St. Leonard’s: Allen & Unwin, 1993); Rob Burns (ed.), German Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Neil Campbell and Alasdair Kean, American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997); Baker, Diawara and Lindeborg (eds.), Black British Cultural Studies. Several other readers appeared. One of the earliest was Martin Barker and Anne Beezer (eds.), Reading into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992), largely a series of excerpts from the “golden age” of British cultural studies (the prototype for this collection was CCCS’s own “reader,” Stuart Hall et al. [eds.], Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79 [London: Hutchinson, 1980]). This was followed by Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993), which roped into the cultural studies corral thinkers as diverse as Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Teresa de Lauretis, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Jean François Lyotard, Gayatri Spivak, Cornel West, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Pierre Bourdieu (although the collection’s excessive eclecticism is offset by During’s excellent introduction). Also electric (comprising 31 selections from Williams to Bourdieu and beyond) was Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan (eds.), Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader (London: Arnold, 2nd edn, 1997 [1993]). John Storey published An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Hemel Hompstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993; London: Prentice Hall, 2nd edn. 1998) and a competition volume, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 1994; London: Prentice Hall, 2nd edn, 1998). Especially useful, however, is Storey’s other reader, What Is Cultural Studies?, 22 essays focused (more or less) on the title question. Also indispensable is the 800-page mega-collection modestly entitle Cultural Studies (ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler; New York: Routledge, 1992), if only to demonstrate the astonishing range of cultural studies in the 1990s. Notable among the other introductory volumes that appeared were Antony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991); Inglis, Cultural Studies: Davies, Cultural Studies and Beyond: Morley and Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall (a mine of information on the history and present state of cultural studies); and two glossy undergraduate textbooks, Paul du Gay et al, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage Publications, 1997), and Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publications, 1997). 43 Rick Perlstein, “Funny Doctor, I Don’t Feel Antidisciplined: Cultural Studies as Disciplinary Habitus (or, Reading Cultural Studies),” parallax 1 (1995), pp. 131-42 (141 n. 31). 41

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departments especially are alarmed at the spectacle of faculty and graduate students in apparent flight from the classics of the literary canons to analyse music videos or shopping malls instead. But cries of alarm can also be heard in the cultural studies camps itself, warning that cultural studies’ connections with its political and activist roots are being cut, that it is being declawed and domesticated in the process of being institutionalized—even that it is now deceased, having been “dead on arrival in the United States.”44 In 1990, at a high-profile international conference on cultural studies, Stuart Hall expressed the fear that if cultural studies managed to achieve an institutionalization in the United States equivalent to that earlier achieved by deconstruction, “it would, in rather the same way, formalize out of existence the critical questions of power, history, and politics.”45 Yet the “Birmingham experiment” in cultural studies can hardly be repeated in the United States. For one thing, as Alan O’Connor observes, “the relative absence of a Left intellectual tradition” in the US—not to mention a Left political party of any standing—has significant repercussions for the way in which cultural studies is there understood. In the States, cultural studies “is being sponsored by scholars who rarely have any connection to existing political and cultural movements and are somewhat surprised that this might even be possible.”46 On a similar note, Ioan Davis complains that cultural studies is almost always perceived as an academic phenomenon in the US as opposed to a political or publicly situated one, “forgetting that many of the debates in Britain took place in the pages of New Left Review, Marxism Today, and a host of non-academic magazines and journals.”47 And Cary Nelson has prophesied bitterly that “of all the intellectual movements that have swept the humanities in America since the 1970s, none will be taken up so shallowly, so opportunistically, so unreflectively, and so ahistorically as cultural studies.”48 We find this a bit unfair, however. Why should cultural studies in the US strive to reproduce faithfully the elements of its British roots? (The “War of Independence” or “Revolutionary War,” depending on how you look at it, might serve as an interesting analogue here.) Like the appropriation of the Bible by different interest groups, with which the present volume is very much concerned, the transmutation of cultural studies is inevitable, and trying to proscribe how it should be done, and according to whose agenda or “original intentions,” is unlikely to make much of a difference. Nonetheless, some may feel that Nelson’s allegations are not without substance, and biblical scholars who are beginning to apply the convenient label “cultural studies” to their own work might do well to consider them seriously. We leave the last word to Hall, however, who, at a high-profile conference at Nelson’s home campus in 1990, refused to play the professional policeman: “I don’t want to talk about British cultural studies . . . in a patriarchal way, as a keeper of the conscience of cultural studies, hoping to police you back into line with what it really was if only you knew.”49 Still, it cannot hurt to know.

Neil Nehring, untitled letter, PMLA 112 (1997), p. 264. Nehring’s letter was one of 32 selected and published in this issue of PMLA in response to a call for comments on the actual or potential relations between cultural and literary studies. 45 Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” p. 286. 46 Alan O’Connor, “The Problem of American Cultural Studies,” in Storey (ed.), What Is Cultural Studies?, pp. 187-96 (190). See also Joel Pfister, “The Americanization of Cultural Studies,” pp. 287-99 in the same volume. A section of Pfister’s essay is titled “Americanization: Towards a Post-Political Cultural Studies.” 47 Davis, Cultural Studies and Beyond, p. 158. 48 Cary Nelson, “Always Already Cultural Studies: Academic Conferences and a Manifesto,” in Storey (ed.), What Is Cultural Studies?. pp. 273-86 (274). 49 Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” p. 277. Entitled “Cultural Studies Now and in the Future,” the conference was held at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and its proceedings were published as Grassberg, Nelson and Treichlet (eds.), Cultural Studies. 44

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Cultural Studies as Biblical Studies No one doubts the immensity of the Bible’s influence on the Western tradition, yet the ways it continues to affect contemporary culture are only beginning to be explored. One place where discussion of the issues can be found these days is at the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, which have provided an important and congenial forum for testing new approaches and presenting experimental studies that draw on cultural criticism. There is a programme unit of the SBL devoted specifically to “The Bible and Cultural Studies,” and other programme units, such as “The Bible in Ancient and Modern Media,” “Semiotics and Exegesis,” and “Reading, Theory and the Bible” welcome papers taking a cultural studies slant. The 1998 annual meeting in Orlando, Florida, may well prove to be a biblical–cultural phenomenon in itself, offering an irresistible opportunity for looking at such bizarre cultural developments as the “Disneyfication” of the Bible.50 If, indeed, papers presented at the SBL represent the latest trends, developing methodologies, and cutting-edge work-in-progress in biblical studies, then the future promises to see an ever greater attention to cultural constructions of the Bible, ancient and modern. There is now a biblical journal devoted to cultural criticism, Bibliocon, founded in 1997, edited by Alice Bach, and published (not insignificantly we think) by Sheffield Academic Press. Scholarly articles that either self-consciously identity themselves as cultural studies or that draw on cultural studies models can be found in the pages of Biblical Interpretation and Semeia, and both these journals have published thematic issues that would fall under the rubric of cultural studies.51 Other works in the broad area of cultural studies and the Bible that come to mind include Mieke Bal’s important contributions to biblical studies,52 Alice Bach’s recent book in which she traces the cultural history of Salomé,53 Fernando Segovia’s self-conscious intercultural readings,54 Itumeleng Mosala’s CCCS-inspired study in black South African hermeneutics,55 diverse cross-cultural experiments by George Aichele, Roland Boer, and Tina Pippin,56 and we Several of the programme units both in the SBL and in the American Academy of Religion (which meets jointly with the SBL) have invited “Disney” offerings in their official “Call for Papers.” 51 See Alice Bach (ed.), The Bible and Popular Culture (Biblical Interpretation, 2.1; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994); J. Cheryl Exum (ed.), The Bible and the Arts (Biblical Interpretation, 6.3 and 4; Leiden: E.J. Brill, forthcoming); Alice Bach (ed.), Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz (Semeia, 74; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996); Stephen D. Moore (ed.), In Search of the Present: The Bible through Cultural Studies (Semeia; Atlanta: Scholars Press, forthcoming). 52 Especially relevant in connection with cultural studies are her Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), and “Myth à la lettre. Freud, Mann, Genesis and Rembrandt, and the Story of the Son,” in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (ed.), Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 57-89. Bal’s Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge University Press, 1991) is also important for cultural readings of Rembrandt’s biblically inspired works. 53 Alice Bach, Women, Seduction, and Betrayal in Biblical Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 54 See, e.g., his several contributions to Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (eds.), Reading from This Place. I. Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States; II. Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994–95). Segovia was one of the first biblical scholars to apply the term “cultural studies” to his work. 55 Itumeleng J. Mosala, “Race, Class, and Gender as Hermeneutical Factors in the African Independent Churches’ Appropriation of the Bible,” Semeia 73 (1996), pp. 43-57. As far as we know, Mosala was the first biblical scholar to draw on the work of the Birmingham school. He is followed by Ralph Broadbent in “Ideology, Culture, and British New Testament Studies: The Challenge of Cultural Criticism” (forthcoming in Semeia). 56 See, e.g., George Aichele and Tina Pippin (eds.), The Monstrous and the Unspeakable: The Bible as Fantastic Literature (Playing the Texts, 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); Roland Boer, Novel Histories: The Fiction of Biblical Criticism (Playing the Texts, 2; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997). 50

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would also include our own work here.57 The present volume is intended as a contribution to this developing area of inquiry, and the range of topics it includes reflects the fluidity, breadth, and interdisciplinarity of cultural approaches to the Bible. It is concerned with the Bible as culture and the Bible in culture, ancient and modern. While some of the contribution, such as Robert Carroll’s and Hugh Pyper’s, foreground the role of the Bible in modern Western culture, others, like Philip Esler’s and David Clines’s, are concerned with the ancient cultural context of the Bible and the ways we investigate, or construct, the context, and interact with it, from out distinct and distant cultural location. It is characteristic of the approach to cultural studies reflected in this volume that no fixed boundary is observed between ancient and modern culture; indeed, the transgression of such boundaries is the aim of many of the contributors. The title of this volume, Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies, rather than, say, “Biblical Studies and Cultural Studies” or “Cultural Studies and Biblical Studies,” is another attempt to blur boundaries, as well as a refusal to legislate the particular nature of the relationship between these areas of inquiry or to prioritize one over the other. (The title layout on the jacket of this book is designed to represent this refusal in a way that standard typeface does not allow.) Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies is not just the Bible influencing culture or culture reappropriating the Bible, but a process of unceasing mutual redefinition in which cultural appropriations constantly reinvent the Bible, which in turn constantly impels new appropriations, and biblical scholars find themselves, in their professional capacity, haunting video stores, museums, and other sites of cultural production. A number of shared assumptions and common interests characterize these essays. They are interdisciplinary, reflecting their authors’ suspicion of the way the codes or discourse of a discipline function to limit and define the kinds of interpretative questions that it may “legitimately” consider. A topic repeatedly addressed at the Colloquium and running through these essays is the appropriation of the Bible by various groups to serve ideological purposes—an appropriation that derives its efficacy from the authority ascribed to this book by so many social and religious constituencies. Many of the contributors share a suspicion of this authority and the hegemonic ideologies it undergirds. But they are also keenly aware of the ideological character of their own interpretations, and that there is no neutral place from which interpretation may occur, that social locations are always interpreted, not given. As we noted earlier, this preoccupation with ideology, which the contributors to this collection share with an ever-increasing number of biblical scholars, marks the most readily apparent point of convergence with the British tradition of cultural studies, epitomized by the work of the Birmingham Centre. A common denominator among the contributors is the recognition of the Bible’s status as cultural icon. This special status is addressed directly in the essays by Robert Carroll and Hugh Pyper. Carroll deals with the Bible as a commodity in the consumer-oriented capitalist society of the West (mainly the US and the UK), taking us on a Dantesque tour through a dizzying variety of Bibles and the subsidiary market of Bible paraphernalia available to the consumer who will perforce want to own a Bible though not necessarily to read it. If the Bible is subject to the law of supply and demand, then translation, mass production, and certain profit ensure a steady supply, while the cultural status of the object in question, coupled with the packaging targeted to specific consumer groups, creates the necessary desire and demand. “Productions of

J. Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Pointed: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women (JSOTSup, 215; Gender, Culture, Theory, 3; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). Stephen D. Moore, God’s Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible (New York: Routledge, 1996).

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the Bible,” observes Carroll with a nod to Hugh Pyper’s thesis, “are on of capitalism’s many ways of advancing capitalist objects and values.” The spread of the Bible throughout the world is intimately linked with the spread of Western culture, a culture the Bible has helped considerably to shape and support (notwithstanding its non-Western origins). This theme echoes throughout the volume. Pyper puts it provocatively— “Western culture is the Bible’s way of making more Bibles”—and draws an analogy between biological evolution and the development of culture in order to sketch out a novel account of the Bible’s influence, pervasiveness, and resilience. He posits a kind of DNA-model of the Bible as an “active replicator” that works on its environment—human communities—to increase its chances of being copied and disseminated. This amounts to the “survival of the fittest (of texts),” and one reason the Bible has survived so well, Pyper surmises, is because it successfully transmits to its readers the message that their survival and that of their community depend upon its survival. The Bible as adaptable—astonishingly so—and the fact that its contents are so diverse that almost anyone can find something to their liking within them has certainly contributed to its survival. While a number of other contributors are uneasy about the (mis)uses this adaptability encourages, Pyper proposes that this diversity can function for us a “cultural memetic reserve”—a potential resource of cultural variety and richness. The symbiotic relationship of the Bible and Western culture and the fact that wildly disparate meanings are constantly being attached to biblical texts as they enter and re-enter the culture is another concern of the cultural studies project represented in this volume. As an example of the Bible’s malleability, Pyper notes in passing its capacity to sustain both sides of the apartheid debate in South Africa. Jennifer Glancy, in her article on the appropriation of biblical texts about slavery in American politics, draws attention to the dangers inherent in such adaptability. Her point of departure is a recent speech by a southern legislator defending slavery, reported in The New York Times, which she uses to illustrate the way the cultural authority of the Bible is invoked to manipulate public opinion. Criticizing the Bible and its moral and cultural authority is tantamount to political suicide in the current American political climate, she notes (significantly, The New York Times found the speech morally reprehensible, but did not question the authoritative status of the Bible). There are serious ethical implications for the guild of biblical scholars. For example, a current trend in biblical studies affirms the “legitimacy” of the interpretations of “ordinary readers” from different social locations and seeks to encourage and promote such readings. What would happen, Glancy asks, if such a stance were taken in the case of a “real reader” like the racist Senator Davidson? An uncritical biblical pluralism that defers to popular readings without taking account of the social and political effects of those readings, she cautions, is likely to repeat and reinscribe the liabilities of the readings. Glancy thus advocates a more pragmatic approach, one that focuses on the consequences of adopting a particular interpretation and also questions the consequences of relying on biblical authority in political discourse. Glancy’s essay also highlights the difficulty of effectively challenging an ideological apparatus like the Bible in the first place, as do other essays in this volume. Alice Bach is another reader who is critical of the privileging of the Bible in Western culture and, in particular, of what has traditionally been promulgated as the canon. She asks us to ponder the curious process by which the god of ancient Israel became the God of European civilization. Using the debate within classical studies over Martin Bernal’s Black Athena as a resource, she criticizes the ideological hegemony of Euro-American academic discourse that has led, among other things, to the privileging of the biblical god over all others. It is, moreover, testimony to the disciplinary compartmentalizing of knowledge, which constitutes part of the problem, that the Bernal-versus-the-classicists debate had had virtually no impact on the field of biblical studies,

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only a stone’s throw across the Mediterranean. All too often scholars read only through the codes or conventions of their specialized disciplines, and whereas codes make interpretation possible, they also control and delimit it. When readers encounter the biblical god, Bach observes, they resort to the theological code to explain his behaviour, and frequently end up being his uncritical, pious defenders. When they read about Greek and ancient Near Eastern gods, in contrast, they employ a literary code that allows them to dismiss not only their behaviour but the gods themselves as mere mythical creations. As a counter-strategy, Bach proposes an intercultural comparison of the god Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchea with the biblical god in the book of Judges that takes seriously as its point of departure Dionysus’s status as a god. Bach’s caveats about reading the Bible through the theological code and Greek myths through the literary code finds an interesting counterpoint in Yael Feldman’s criticism of the scholarly, but also popular, habit of reading the Bible through the lens of Freudian psychology and its Greek foundations. In particular, an interpretation of the Aqedah, the story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, in terms of the Oedipal conflict imposes upon the biblical text psychological dynamics that are culturally alien to it. In the Bible, where sibling rivalry plays a much larger role than generational conflict, fathers and sons do not fit the Freudian masterplot. In spite of fundamental differences, however, the Aqedah, as a central text in contemporary Israeli culture, has become the equivalent of the Oedipal scene in Freudian psychology, and Feldman examines the complex psychological dynamic that have contributed to its power as a cultural paradigm: the ability of the story to accommodate interpretations ranging from passive victimhood to stoic heroism, ideological martyrdom, and even fanatic aggression. The Bible is cultural property. While Feldman looks at transmutations of the Aqedah, Francis Landy, in his contribution to this collection, tackles transmutations of the flood story. Beginning with the biblical version, with its two intertwined narrative stands that stand in tension yet are indispensable to each other, Landy examines the flood as a source of anxiety in the Bible. He then moves on to trace echoes and appropriations of its themes of dissolution and concord (symbolized in the ark) in midrashic interpretations, mystery plays, novels, children’s Bibles (considered also by Robert Carroll in his survey of Bibles aimed at specific consumer groups), and even children’s toy arks (which calls to mind as well the religious paraphernalia of which Carroll is so critical), coming to rest on Hilary Mantel’s 1989 novel, Fludd. Erich Zenger, in his study of David as musician and poet, is also concerned with cultural transmutations; in this case, with the history of the reception of the motif of David as musician and poet. After a survey of how the motif finds expression in the Bible and the non-biblical literature of early Judaism, Zenger turns his attention to the reception of the motif in selected examples from the visual arts: the murals in the synagogue of Dura-Europos, the sequence of reliefs on the door of the basilica of San Ambrogio in Milan, the Psalterium aureum of St Gallen, the Bamberg Psalm commentary of Peter Lombard, and, lastly, portrayals of David by Rembrandt and his school. His analysis demonstrates dramatically what cultural studies emphasizes about appropriations of the Bible: they take on a cultural and political significance of their own independent of the biblical context. The paintings, he stresses, are not supposed to be interpretations of specific biblical texts; rather they function to create a particular religious, cultural, anthropological, or political horizon for their viewers. Culture in this volume, as we noted above, refers to both ancient and modern culture. While some of the contributors focus more on one than the other, all are keenly aware of the kinds of interaction that take place between the contemporary interpreter and the biblical text as the product of a culture quite alien to our own modern or postmodern one, in spite of the manifold ways it has been Westernized. Philip Esler stresses the importance of giving the biblical culture

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its due by asking how the portrayal of Saul’s madness in 1 Samuel might have been understood by its original ancient audience. In considering a typical scholarly view that Saul’s suffering is best understood theologically, Esler exposes the limitations imposed by the disciplinary codes that Bach warns us about in her essay. Esler’s reading of the narrative through the anthropological code demonstrates its obvious advantages over the theological code. His reading of Saul’s madness in a cultural perspective involves three stages: analysis of the narrative within the framework of ancient Mediterranean culture, with its orientation of social relations around the group rather than the individual, its notions of honour and shame, and of “limited good”; consideration of Saul’s condition in relation to both emic and etic frameworks of health, illness, and disease (drawing on insights from cross-cultural health care); and a reading of two paintings of David playing the lyre for Saul from the Rembrandt school (paintings also discussed by Zenger) as an intercultural exercise that seeks to bring insights gained about the ancient culture into a creative tension with the interpreter’s own cultural context. Margaret Davies, in her essay on cultural stereotyping in New Testament times and ours, has a similar concern for ancient literary conventions and the way ancient audiences would have understood them. Focusing on the depiction of the Pharisees in the Gospel of Matthew, she highlights three features that distinguish biblical characterization from that familiar to modern readers: simple rather than complex characterization, group rather than individual characterization, and the attribution of distinctive cultural traits to a particular group. The Pharisees are depicted in Matthew as the inverse of Jesus; they provide the negative stereotype that clarifies the positive and sets it in sharp relief. Against the background of Matthew’s culturebound stereotypes, Davies asks us to examine our own and their potential political and ethical ramifications. Another contributor who focuses primarily on the ancient context is David Clines, who examines the cultural construction of masculinity as represented in the figure of Jesus in the Gospels. In theorizing about biblical characters—be it Saul, the Pharisees, or Jesus—neither Esler nor Davies nor Clines is interested in the historical figures that assumedly underlie these characterizations. But whereas Esler defines his task as historical in the sense of interpreting the textual evidence in the light of our reconstructions of the ancient cultural context, Davies and Clines pursue a decidedly literary approach. Unlike Davies, who tacitly acknowledges the singularity of the Matthaean picture of the Pharisees, Clines is interested in the composite picture of Jesus, for it is the composite picture that has become a cultural property, and few outside the biblical field would bother to distinguish between the Jesus of Matthew or Mark or Luke or John. It is Clines’s own identity as an Old Testament scholar that emboldens him to violate this most sacred taboo of New Testament scholarship, the sharp separation of the four canonical portraits of Jesus? Jesus is portrayed in traditional male categories, Clines concludes, and he proceeds to evaluate these categories against modern constructions of masculinity in order to highlight significant differences. To speak simply and unreflectively of Jesus as human, as is customary in traditional theological discourse, he cautions, is to ignore his limitations as a traditional man. The importance of the cultural location of the interpreter stressed in so many of the essays presented here is forcefully illustrated in Barry Matlock’s contribution to Paul. Not unexpectedly for students of culture, but not evident to all of its practitioners, the “new perspective” discussion in Pauline studies is as embedded in its own cultural trappings as the old perspective it seeks to overturn. For example, the “new perspective” Paul, like so many moderns, is less concerned with sin, guilt, and forgiveness than with community, and reconstructions of Paul’s relation to his Jewish tradition are subtly—or not so subtly—shaped by a contemporary renewed interest in Jewish–Christian dialogue. The Paul of the “new perspective” is the construction of contemporary

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Protestant interpretation, and thus the vexed question of Paul’s continuity and discontinuity with his nomocentric Jewish tradition plays central role in the debate, with Judaism now being evaluated positively whereas earlier it was assessed negatively. The position of Judaism in the equation may have shifted from one side to the other, notes Matlock, but the same set of values are still brought to bear in the calculation. Into this equation Matlock introduces a potentially destabilizing variable, Daniel Boyarin’s cultural reading of Paul in A Radical Jew. A number of the essays in this volume deal with the appropriation of the Bible in the visual arts. We have already mentioned Zenger’s study of the motif of David as musician and poet in artistic representations through the ages, and Esler’s intercultural engagement with two paintings from the Rembrandt school. David Jasper, in a discussion of the artist J.M.W. Turner as an interpreter of the Bible, draws attention to the habitual refusal of art to understand itself as derivative. Biblically inspired art can claim a cultural life of its own, an independence that enables it to take the role of an equal partner in a critical dialogue with the Bible. Turner’s utter lack of concern with biblical accuracy—even when bestowing very precise titles on biblical paintings—is an illuminating example of the way cultural appropriation works in general and in the realm of the art in particular. In Turner’s art, Jasper finds a radical refiguring of Scripture based not on history or even on narrative but rather on colour and light, a “reading” of Scripture with fascinating epistemological implications, which Jasper proceeds to unpack. What Zenger observes of the artistic representations of David is, if anything, still more true of Turner: his works are not supposed to be “interpretations” of biblical texts, at least not in any conventional sense. The two-way dialogue between the Bible and artistic representation of it that Jasper speaks about is precisely the focus of Fiona Black and Cheryl Exum, and also of Athalya Brenner and Jan Willem van Henten in their respective essays in this volume. Using the specific example of a stained-glass window representing the Song of Songs by the pre-Raphelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, Black and Exum ask not simply how the Bible has influenced art but also how art can influence biblical interpretation. They note the way that key issues in the interpretation of the source text—questions about its unity and plot—reappear when one starts to interpret the window, and they apply to the biblical text some of the insights gained from answering these questions in relation to the window. Among other things, Burne-Jones’s foregrounding of the only disturbing aspects of the Song (in particular, the scent in which the woman is beaten by the watchmen) leads them to reconsider features of the biblical text that scholars typically gloss over, and to ask what would happen if these aspects were given a greater role in the interpretation of the biblical text. The visual arts serve as only one of the sources used by Brenner and van Henten in their essay, which emerged out of a course they jointly offered on the story of Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39. They describe how they focused on gaps, ambiguities, and repetitions in the story and on the ways these are dealt with in a range of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and non-religious source from different times and cultural locations and reflecting different ideologies. They trace out the implications of various readings—central among them, a reading of the narrative as a story of gender relations—noting the way certain elements reappear in criss-cross fashion across the spectrum of sources, both visual and literary (the literary texts ranged from early postbiblical sources to Thomas Mann’s novel, and also included scholarly commentary). Not only do Brenner and van Henten provide a helpful resource for the venturesome teacher who might want to try something similar in the classroom, they also sketch out how such a course might be conducted. The other essay that deals directly with pedagogy is that of Regina Schwartz, who reflects on the challenge of teaching the Bible, a body of literature that, on the one hand, enjoys such cultural

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currency, and, on the other, is considered to be something more than literature—something sacred, indeed—by many of its readers. Her essay resonates with others in this book, with Alice Bach’s reflections on the elevation of the biblical god to the position of “real” god and on the status of canons, and with other contributors’ emphasis on Western culture as responsible for the hegemony of biblical “truths.” Schwartz’s discussion of fruitful juxtapositions of texts and traditions and of the kinds of questions about meaning, interpretation, and, yes, truth that lead to a genuine learning experience for student and teacher alike directs our attention to that one sphere where most of us with a professional stake in teaching and writing about the Bible have the best chance of influencing the culture at large—the classroom. Music, which throughout the ages has been an important means of keeping the Bible alive in culture, is represented in only one essay in this volume, John Rogerson’s study of the use of the Song of Songs in Bach’s Church Cantatas. Rogerson’s examination of the way the Song figures in the work of one composer, and the cultural context in which it was performed, provides a complement to Black and Exum’s discussion of the Song in the work of one particular artist. What music is uniquely able to represent is the mutuality some commentators find in the Song, for in music it is possible to have two voices simultaneously singing different words set to different melodic lines, and, as Rogerson shows, Bach exploits this potential beautifully. And, like the Bible, Bach’s works have been able to survive transplantation into a world in which culture has become increasingly commercialized and the secular has largely displaced the sacred. Curiously enough, given the important role it plays in cultural studies of the Bible, film, too, is central to only one of the essays in this collection, in Philip Davies’s review of a movie you either love or hate, Life of Brian. One strongly suspects that Davies himself loves it; certainly he finds it a much more informed and incisive biblical film than much of the bland fare Hollywood has cooked up for the mass audience, and he offers illustrations of its sophistication that might well surprise Monty Python “himself.” Brian’s singular characteristic is that he is not Jesus. Or is he? Davies suggests that Monty Python has parodied Christian theology’s concept of the dual nature of Jesus by using the Jesus character to represent the divine and Brian, the human. This device, he notes, no doubt contributed to the success of the film by allowing it to escape charges of blasphemy. And while the film may seem like an iconoclastic romp, it nevertheless manages to affirm its own set of values, which are resolutely different from those of conventional Christian piety. Pious images of Jesus, and their subversion, are also of concern to Stephen Moore in his essay. Moore is intrigued by the fact that whereas fewer and fewer people know what Jesus is supposed to have said, most remain reasonably confident that they at least know what he looked like. But does Jesus’ physical appearance play any role in the current quest for the historical person? To discover the answer, Moore proceeds to read a number of scholarly Jesus books by their coverts, all of which feature surprisingly specific images of the elusive Nazarene, images that almost invariably depict him as exceptionally handsome. To what extent do popular representations of Jesus as physically well-favoured buttress the oppressive age-old equation of beauty with virtue? asks Moore. Might not the socially subversive Jesus sketched out by leading contemporary Jesus scholars be in need of an ill-favoured face and form? Something about the Identikit sketch of “Bible John,” discussed in William Scott’s essay on the media coverage of a series of murders in Scotland in 1969, looks suspiciously like the kind of book-jacket Jesus that caught Moore’s attention. Was the shadowy suspect’s similarity to Jesus suggested purely by his propensity to quote the Bible? If so, the sketch is an excellent example of the power of suggestion that Scott is concerned with in his analysis of cultural relativism. Like other contributors to his volume, Scott stresses the importance of context, of social location, for

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the production of meaning. His case study, like Glancy’s, is one drawn from the media. Analysing the factors that made a murder suspect popularly dubbed “Bible John” into a media figure in the late 1960s, Scott shows how changing cultural conditions made it impossible for a 1990s audience, when the case was resurrected, to have the same reactions as viewers only a generation earlier. Not only would the earlier, moralizing manner of reporting be quite unacceptable now, but the media could no longer take for granted its audience’s familiarity with the Bible and a commonly shared cultural attitude towards it. In some respects, Scott’s study, centred as it is on the mass media (not entirely unexpectedly, since the author teaches in a Language and Media Department), is closest of any of the essays in this collection to the “classic” cultural studies tradition, which, as we saw earlier, was much preoccupied with the media as mediators of ideology. Few of the essays in the volume borrow directly from nonbiblical cultural studies (Glancy’s being the main exception; her debt to the cultural studies “tradition” is actually more explicit than Scott’s). For although there is a “received history” of cultural studies—witness our recital of it earlier in this introduction—biblical cultural studies seems to have sprung up entirely independently of this history, especially of its first two phases, the early period associated with Hoggart and Williams and the middle period associated with CCCS. (The third phase in this potted history, it will be recalled, is the period of international and transdisciplinary dissemination.) Biblical cultural studies seems to have emerged instead out of that subspecialization of religious studies known (especially in the US) as “arts, literature, and religion,” specifically, the analysis of how biblical scenes, themes, and stories have been represented in the traditional arts (especially painting) and modern media (especially cinema). With the recent dissemination of the term “cultural studies” in the humanities, it is not surprising that this handy label should come to be applied to a disparate body of work in biblical studies that is otherwise difficult to categorize. But it is also probable that, as biblical cultural studies advances, more and more of its practitioners will turn to the history and practice of nonbiblical cultural studies as a source of challenge and an impetus for innovation. We eagerly wait to see what this yet to be written chapter of biblical cultural studies will bring.

2

What Is Cultural Studies Anyway? Richard Johnson

Cultural studies is now a movement or a network. It has its own degrees in several colleges and universities and its own journals and meetings. It exercises a large influence on academic disciplines, especially on English studies, sociology, media and communication studies, linguistics, and history. In the first part of the article,1 I want to consider some of the arguments for and against the academic codification of cultural studies. To put the question most sharply: should cultural studies aspire to be an academic discipline? In the second part, I’ll look at some strategies of definition short of codification, because a lot hangs, I think, on the kind of unity or coherence we seek. Finally, I want to try out some of my own preferred definitions and arguments.

The Importance of Critique A codification of methods or knowledges (instituting them, for example, in formal curricula or in courses on “methodology”) runs against some main features of cultural studies as a tradition: its openness and theoretical versatility, its reflexive even self-conscious mood, and, especially, the importance of critique. I mean critique in the fullest sense: not criticism merely, nor even polemic, but procedures by which other traditions are approached both for what they may yield and for what they inhibit. Critique involves stealing away the more useful elements and rejecting the rest. From this point of view cultural studies is a process, a kind of alchemy for producing useful knowledge; codify it and you might halt its reactions. In the history of cultural studies, the earliest encounters were with literary criticism. Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, in their different ways, developed the Leavisite stress on literary-social evaluation, but turned the assessments from literature to everyday life.2 Similar appropriations have been made from history. The first important moment here was the development of the post-war traditions of social history with their focus on popular culture, or T h is paper is a revised and expanded version of talks given at the Department of English at Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples and at the University of Palermo in April 1983. I am grateful to colleagues at Naples, Palermo, Pescara and from Bari for fruitful discussions around the themes raised here. In revising this paper, I have tried to respond to some comments, especially those concerning questions about consciousness and unconsciousness. I am grateful to Lidia Curti, Laura di Michele and Marina Vitale for encouraging the production of this paper and advising on its form, to the British Council for funding my visit, and to friends and students (not mutually exclusive categories) at Birmingham for bearing with very many different versions of “the circuit.” 2 T h e key texts are Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Penguin Books, 1958); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Penguin Books, 1958); Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Penguin Books, 1961). 1

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the culture of “the people” especially in its political forms. The Communist Party Historians’ Group was central here, with its 1940s and early 1950s project of anglicizing and historicizing old marxism. In a way this influence was paradoxical; for the historians were less concerned with contemporary culture or even with the twentieth century, putting energies instead into understanding the long British transition from feudalism to capitalism and the popular struggles and traditions of dissent associated with it. It was this work which became a second matrix for cultural studies. Central in both literary and historical strands was the critique of old marxism. The recovery of “values” against Stalinism was a leading impulse of the first new left, but the critique of economism has been the continuous thread through the whole “crisis of marxism” which has followed. Certainly cultural studies has been formed on this side of what we can call, paradoxically, a modern marxist revival, and in the cross-national borrowings that were so marked a feature of the 1970s. It is important to note what different places the same figures have occupied in different national routes. The take-up of Althusserianism is incomprehensible outside the background of the dominant empiricism of British intellectual traditions. This feature helps to explain the appeal of philosophy, not as a technical pursuit, but as a generalized rationalism and excitement with abstract ideas.3 Similarly, it is important to note how Gramsci, a version of whose work occupies a place of orthodoxy in Italy, was appropriated by us as a critical, heterodox figure. He provided mighty reinforcements to an already partly-formed cultural studies project, as late as the 1970s.4 Some students of culture remain “marxist” in name (despite the “crisis” and all that). It is more interesting, however, to note where cultural studies has been Marx-influenced. Everyone will have their own checklist. My own, which is not intended to sketch an orthodoxy, includes three main premises. The first it that cultural processes are intimately connected with social relations, especially with class relations and class formations, with sexual divisions, with the racial structuring of social relations and with age oppressions as a form of dependency. The second is that culture involves power and helps to produce asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define and realize their needs. And the third, which follows the other two, is that culture is neither an autonomous nor an externally determined field, but a site of social differences and struggles. This by no means exhausts the elements of marxism that remain active and alive and resourceful in the existing circumstances, provided only they, too, are critiqued, and developed in detailed studies. Other critiques have been distinctly philosophical. Cultural studies has been marked out, in the British context, for its concern with “theory,” but the intimacy of the connection with philosophy has not been obvious until recently. Yet there is a very close cousinhood between epistemological problems and positions (e.g. empiricism, realism and idealism) and the key questions of “cultural theory” (e.g. economism, materialism, or the problem of culture’s specific effects). Again, for me, a lot of roads lead back to Marx, but the appropriations need to be wider ones. Lately there have been attempts to go beyond the rather sterile opposition of rationalism and empiricism in search of a more productive formulation of the relation between theory (or “abstraction” as I now prefer) and “concrete studies.”5 For a still useful summary of CCCS responses to Althusser, see McLennan, Molina and Peters, “Althusser’s theory of ideology” in CCCS, On Ideology (Hutchinson, 1978). 4 See, for example, Hall, Lumley and McLennan, “Politics and ideology: Gramsci” in On Ideology. But Gramsci’s theorisations are a main presence in much of the empirical work from the Centre from the mid-1970s. 5 See McLennan, Methodologies and Richard Johnson, “Reading for the best Marx: history-writing and historical abstraction” in CCCS, Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics (Hutchinson, 1982). 3

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More important in our recent history have been the critiques deriving from the women’s movement and from the struggles against racism.6 These have deepened and extended the democratic and socialist commitments that were the leading principles of the first new left. If the personal was already political in the first phase of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), it was oddly ungendered. The democratic foundations or the early movements were therefore insecurely based as a new form of politics. Similarly there were (and are) deep problems about the ethno- and anglo-centricity of key texts and themes in our tradition.7 The contemporary salience in Britain of a conservative-nationalist and racist politics means these flaws are all the more serious. It is incorrect therefore to see feminism or anti-racism as some kind of interruption or diversion from an original class politics and its associated research programme. On the contrary, it is these movements that have kept the new left new. The specific results for cultural studies have been no less important.8 Much more has been involved than the original question: “what about women?” Feminism has influenced everyday ways of working and brought a greater recognition of the way that productive results depend upon supportive relationships. It has uncovered some unacknowledged premises of “left” intellectual work and the masculine interests that held them in place. It has produced new objects of study and forced a rethinking of old ones. In media studies, for example, it has shifted attention from the “masculine” genre of news and current affairs to the importance of “light entertainment.” It has aided a more general turn from older kinds of ideology critique (which centred on maps of meaning or versions of reality) to approaches that centre on social identities, subjectivities, popularity and pleasure. Feminists also seem to have made a particular contribution to bridging the humanities/social science divide by bringing literary categories and “aesthetic” concerns to bear on social issues. I hope these cases show how central critique has been and how connected it is with political causes in the broader sense. A number of questions follow. If we have progressed by critique, are there not dangers that codifications will involve systematic closure? If the momentum is to strive for really useful knowledge, will academic codification help this? Is not the priority to become more “popular” rather than more academic? These questions gain further force from immediate contexts. Cultural studies is now a widely taught subject, thus, unless we are very careful, students will encounter it as an orthodoxy. In any case, students now have lectures, courses and examinations in the study of culture. In these circumstances, how can they occupy a critical tradition culturally? This is reinforced by what we know—or are learning—about academic and other disciplinary dispositions of knowledge. Recognition of the form of power associated with knowledge may turn out to be one of the leading insights of the 1970s. It is a very general theme: in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, in the radical philosophers’ and radical scientists’ critiques of science or scientism, in radical educational philosophy and sociology and in feminist critiques of the dominant academic forms. There has been a marked change from the singular affirmation of science in the early 1970s (with Althusser as one main figure) to the dissolution of such T h ese are difficult to represent bibliographically, but key points are marked by CCCS Women’s Study Group, Women Take Issue (Hutchinson, 1978); CCCS, The Empire Strikes Back (Hutchinson, 1982). See also the series on women and on race in CCCS stenciled papers. 7 T h is is not a new criticism but given fresh force by the 1970s salience of race. See Paul Gilroy, “Police and thieves” in Empire strikes Back, esp. pp. 147-51. 8 Some of these, at an early stage, are discussed in Women Take Issue, but there is need for a really full and consolidated account of the transformations in cultural studies stemming from feminist work and criticism. See also Angela McRobbie, “Settling accounts with sub-cultures,” Screen Education 34 (Spring, 1980) and the articles by Hazel Carby and Pratibha Parmer in Empire strikes Back. 6

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certainties (with Foucault as one point of reference) in our own times. Academic knowledgeforms (or some aspects of them) now look like part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. In fact, the problem remains much as it has always been—what can be won from the academic concerns and skills to provide elements of useful knowledge.

Pressures to Define Yet there are important pressures to define. There is the little daily politics of the college or the school—not so little since jobs, resources and opportunities for useful work are involved. Cultural studies has won real spaces here and they have to be maintained and extended. The context of (“big”) politics makes this still more important. We also have a Conservative CounterReformation in Britain and the US. One manifestation is a vigorous assault on public educational institutions, both by cutting finance and by defining usefulness in strictly capitalist terms. We need definitions of cultural studies to struggle effectively in these contexts, to make claims for resources, to clarify our minds in the rush and muddle of everyday work, and so decide priorities for teaching and research. Most decisively, perhaps, we need ways of viewing a vigorous but fragmented field of study, if not as a unity at least as a whole. If we do not discuss central directions of our own, we will be pulled hither and thither by the demands of academic self-production and by the academic disciplines from which our subject, in part, grows. Academic tendencies, then, tend to be reproduced on the new ground: there are distinctively literary and distinctively sociological or historical versions of cultural studies, just as there are approaches distinguished by theoretical partisanship. This would not matter if any one discipline or problematic could grasp the objects of culture as a whole, but this is not, in my opinion, the case. Each approach tells us about a tiny aspect. If this is right, we need a particular kind of defining activity: one which reviews existing approaches, identifies their characteristic objects and their good sense, but also the limits of their competence. Actually it is not definition or codification that we need, but pointers to further transformations. This is not a question of aggregating existing approaches (a bit of sociology here, a spot of linguistics there) but of reforming the elements of different approaches in their relations to each other.

Strategies of Definition There are several different starting-points. Cultural studies can be defined as an intellectual and political tradition, in its relations to academic disciplines, in terms of theoretical paradigms, or by its characteristic objects of study. The last starting-point now interests me most; but first a word about the others. We need histories of cultural studies to trace the recurrent dilemmas and to give perspective to our current projects. But the informed sense of a “tradition” also works in a more “mythical” mode to produce a collective identity and a shared sense of purpose. To me, a lot of powerful continuities are wrapped up in the single term “culture,” which remains useful not as a rigorous category, but as a kind of summation of a history. It references in particular the effort to heave the study of culture from its inegalitarian anchorages in high-artistic connoisseurship and in discourses, of enormous condescension, on the not-culture of the masses. Behind this intellectual redefinition there is a somewhat less consistent political pattern, a continuity that

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runs from the first new left and the first Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to the post1968 currents. Of course there have been marked political antagonisms within the new left and between new left politics and the intellectual tendencies it has produced. The intellectual detours have often seemed politically self-indulgent. Yet what unites this sequence is the struggle to reform “old left” politics. This includes the critique of old marxism but also of old social-democracy too. It involves a constructive quarrel with dominant styles within the Labor Movement, especially the neglect of cultural conditions of politics, and a mechanical narrowing of politics itself. This sense of an intellectual-political connection has been important for cultural studies. It has meant that the research and the writing has been political, but not in any immediate pragmatic sense. Cultural studies is not a research programme for a particular party or tendency. Still less does it subordinate intellectual energies to any established doctrines. This politicalintellectual stance is possible because the politics which we aim to create is not yet fully formed. Just as the politics involves a long haul, so the research must be as wide-ranging and as profound, but also as politically directed, as we can make it. Above all, perhaps, we have to fight against the disconnection that occurs when cultural studies is inhabited for merely academic purposes or when enthusiasm for (say) popular cultural forms is divorced from the analysis of power and of social possibilities. I have said a lot already about the second definitional strategy—charting our negative/ positive relation to the academic disciplines. Cultural processes do not correspond to the contours of academic knowledges, as they are. No one academic discipline grasps the full complexity (or seriousness) of the study. Cultural studies must be inter-disciplinary (and sometimes anti-disciplinary) in its tendency. I find it hard, for example, to think of myself as an historian now, though perhaps historian-of-the-contemporary is a rough approximation in some contexts. Yet some historian’s virtues seem useful for cultural studies—concerns for movement, particularity, complexity and context, for instance. I still love that combination of dense description, complex explanation and subjective even romantic evocation, which I find in the best historical writing. I still find most sociological description thin and obvious and much literary discourse clever but superficial! On the other hand, the rooted empiricism of historical practice is a real liability often blocking a properly cultural reading. I am sure it is the same for other disciplines too. Of course, there are lots of half-way houses, many of them serviceable workshops for cultural study, but the direction of movement, to my mind, has to be out, and away, and into more dangerous places! Our third definitional strategy—the analysis and comparison of theoretical problematics— was, until recently, the favorite one.9 I still see this as an essential component in all cultural study, but its main difficulty is that abstract forms of discourse disconnect ideas from the social complexities that first produced them, or to which they originally referred. Unless these are continuously reconstructed and held in the mind as a reference point, theoretical clarification acquires an independent momentum. In teaching situations or similar interchanges, theoretical discourse may seem, to the hearer, a form of intellectual gymnastics. The point appears to be to See, for example, Stuart Hall, “Some paradigms in cultural studies,” Anglisitca (1978); Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: two paradigms,” Media, Cultural and Society 2 (1980) (reprinted here as Chapter 2 and reprinted in part in Tony Bennet et al. (eds), Culture, Ideology and Social Process [Open University and Batsford, 1981]), and the introductory essays in Hall, Hobson, Lowe and Willis (eds), Culture, Media and Language (Hutchinson, 1980). These essays are highly compressed versions of the MA Theory Course at CCCS which Stuart Hall taught and which comprised a comprehensive theoretical mapping of the field. See also my own attempts at theoretical clarification, much influenced by Stuart’s, especially in Clarke, Critcher and Johnson (eds), Working Class Culture (Hutchinson,1979).

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learn a new language, which takes time and much effort, in order, merely, to feel at ease with it. In the meantime there is something very silencing and perhaps oppressive above new forms of discourse. I think that this has been a fairly common experience, for students, even where, eventually, “theory” has conferred new powers of understanding and articulation. This is one set of reasons why many of us now find it useful to start from concrete cases, either to teach theory historically, as a continuing, contextualized debate about cultural issues, or to hook up theoretical points and contemporary experiences. This leads me to my preferred definitional strategy. The key questions are: what is the characteristic object of cultural studies? What is cultural studies about?

Simple Abstractions: Consciousness, Subjectivity I have suggested already that “culture” has value as a reminder but not as a precise category; Raymond Williams has excavated its immense historical repertoire.10 There is no solution to this polysemy: it is a rationalist illusion to think we can say “henceforth this term will mean . . .” and expect a whole history of connotations (not to say a whole future) to fall smartly into line. So although I fly culture’s flag anyway, and continue to use the word where imprecision matters, definitionally I seek other terms. My key terms instead are “consciousness” and “subjectivity” with the key problems now lying somewhere in the relation between the two. For me cultural studies is about the historical forms of consciousness or subjectivity, or the subjective forms we live by, or, in a rather perilous compression, perhaps a reduction, the subjective side of social relations. These definitions adopt and gloss some of Marx’s simple abstractions, but value them also for their contemporary resonance. I think of consciousness, first, in the sense in which it appears in The German Ideology. As a (fifth) premise for understanding human history, Marx and Engels add that human beings “also possess consciousness.” This usage is echoed in later works too. Marx implies it when in Capital, volume I, he distinguishes the worst architect from the best bee by the fact that the architect’s product has “already existed ideally” before it is produced. It has existed in the consciousness, the imagination. In other words, human beings are characterised by an ideal or imaginary life, where will is cultivated, dreams dreamt, and categories developed. In his 1844 manuscripts Marx called this a feature of “species being,” later he would have called it a “general-historical” category, true of all history, a “simple or universal abstraction.” Although the usage is less clear Marx also habitually refers to the “subjective side” or “subjective aspect” or social processes.11 In marxist discourse (I am less sure of Marx) consciousness has overwhelmingly cognitive connotations: it has to do with knowledge (especially correct knowledge?) of the social and the natural worlds. I think Marx’s consciousness was wider than this! It embraced the notion of a consciousness of self and an active mental and moral self-production. There is no doubt, however, that he was especially interested in conceptually-organised knowledge, especially in his discussions of particular ideological forms (e.g. political economy, Hegelian idealism, etc.). In his most interesting text on the character of thinking (the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse) other modes of consciousness, the aesthetic, the religious, etc., were bracketed out.

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society and the entry in Keywords (Fontana, 1976). For a discussion of “general-historical” abstraction in Marx, see Johnson, “Best Marx,” p.172.

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“Subjectivity” is especially important here, challenging the absences in consciousness. Subjectivity includes the possibility, for example, that some elements or impulses are subjectively active—they move us—without being consciously known. It highlights elements ascribed (in the misleading conventional distinction) to aesthetic or emotional life and to conventionally “feminine” codes. It focuses on the “who I am” or, as important, the “who we are” of culture, on individual and collective identities. It connects with the most important structuralist insight: that subjectivities are produced, not given, and are therefore the objects of inquiry, not the premises or starting-point. In all my thinking about cultural studies I find the notion of “forms” also repeatedly recurs. Lying behind the usage are two major influences. Marx continuously uses the terms “forms” or “social forms” or “historical forms” when he is examining in Capital (but especially in the Grundrisse) the various moments of economic circulation: he analyses the money form, the commodity form, the form of abstract labour, etc. Less often he used the same language in writing of consciousness or subjectivity. The most famous instance is from the 1859 Preface: a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out (emphasis added).

What interests me about this passage is the implication of a different parallel project to Marx’s own. His preoccupation was with those social forms through which human beings produce and reproduce their material life. He abstracted, analysed and sometimes reconstituted in more concrete accounts the economic forms and tendencies of social life. It seems to me that cultural studies too is concerned with whole societies (or broader social formations) and how they move. But it looks at social processes from another complimentary point of view. Our project is to abstract, describe and reconstitute in concrete studies forms through which human beings “live,” become conscious, sustain themselves subjectively. The stress on forms is reinforced by some broad structuralist insights. These have drawn out the structured character of the forms we inhabit subjectively: language, signs, ideologies, discourses, myths. They have pointed to regularities and principles of organization—of formfull-ness if you like. Though often pitched at too high a level of abstraction (e.g. language in general rather than language in particular) they have strengthened our sense of the hardness, determinancy and, indeed, actual existence of social forms which exercise their pressures through the subjective side of social life. This is not to say that the description of form, in this sense, is enough. It is important to see the historical nature of subjective forms too. Historical in this context means two rather different things. First, we need to look at forms of subjectivity from the point of view of their pressures or tendencies, especially their contradictory sides. Even in abstract analysis, in other words, we should look for principles of movement as well as combination. Second, we need histories of the forms of subjectivity where we can see how tendencies are modified by the other social determinations, including those at work through material needs. As soon as we pose this as a project, we can see how the simple abstractions which we have thus far used, do not take us very far. Where are all the intermediate categories that would allow us to start to specify the subjective social forms and the different moments of their existence? Given our definition of culture, we cannot limit the field to specialised practices, particular

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genres, or popular leisure pursuits. All social practices can be looked at from a cultural point of view, for the work they do, subjectively. This goes, for instance, for factory work, for trade union organisation, for life in and around the supermarket, as well as for obvious targets like “the media” (misleading unity!) and its (mainly domestic) modes of consumption.

Circuits of Capital—Circuits of Culture? So we need, first, a much more complex model, with rich intermediate categories, more layered than the existing general theories. It is here that I find it helpful to pose a kind of realist hypothesis about the existing state of theories. What if existing theories—and the modes of research associated with them—actually express different sides of the same complex process? What if they are all true, but only as far as they go, true for those parts of the process which they have most clearly in view? What if they are all false or incomplete, liable to mislead, in that they are only partial, and therefore cannot grasp the process as a whole? What if attempts to “stretch” this competence (without modifying the theory) lead to really gross and dangerous (ideological?) conclusions? I certainly do not expect immediate assent to the epistemological premises of this argument. I hope it will be judged in the light of its results. But its immediate merit is that it helps to explain one key feature: the theoretical and disciplinary fragmentations we have already noted. Of course these could be explained by the political social and discursive differences we have also considered: especially the intellectual and academic divisions of labour and the social reproduction of specialist forms of cultural capital. Yet I find it more satisfactory to relate these manifest differences to the very process they seek to describe. Maybe academic divisions also correspond to rather different social positions and viewpoints from which different aspects of cultural circuits acquire the greatest salience. This would explain not merely the fact of different theories, but the recurrence and persistence of differences, especially between large clusters of approaches with certain affinities. The best way to take such an argument further would be to hazard some provisional description of the different aspects or moments or cultural processes to which we could then relate the different theoretical problematics. Such a model could not be a finished abstraction or theory, if such can exist. Its value would have to be heuristic or illustrative. It might help to explain why theories differ, but would not, in itself, sketch the ideal approach. At most it might serve as a guide to the desirable directions of future approaches, or to the way in which they might be modified or combined. It is important to bear these caveats in mind in what follows. I find it easiest (in a long CCCS tradition) to present a model diagrammatically (see p. 84). The diagram is intended to represent a circuit of the production, circulation and consumption of cultural products. Each box represents a moment in this circuit. Each moment or aspect depends upon the others and is indispensable to the whole. Each, however, is distinct and involves characteristic changes of form. It follows that if we are placed at one point of the circuit, we do not necessarily see what is happening at others. The forms that have most significance for us at one point may be very different from those at another. Processes disappear in results.12 All cultural products, for example, require to be produced, but the conditions of their production T h e diagram is based, in its general forms, on a reading of Marx’s account of the circuit of capital and its metamorphoses. For an important and original account of this, and of related questions (e.g. fetishism) see Victor Molina, “Marx’s arguments about ideology,” MLitt Thesis (University of Birmingham, 1982). This thesis

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cannot be inferred by scrutinising them as “texts.” Similarly all cultural products are “read” by persons other than professional analysis (if they weren’t there would be little profit in their production), but we cannot predict these uses from our own analysis, or, indeed, from the conditions of production. As anyone knows, all our communications are liable to return to us in unrecognisable or at least transformed terms. We often call this misunderstanding or, if we are being very academic, mis-readings. But these “misses” are so common (across the range of a whole society) that we might well call them normal. To understand the transformations, then, we have to understand specific conditions of consumption or reading. These include asymmetries of resources and power, material and cultural. They also include the existing ensembles of cultural elements already active within particular social milieux (“lived cultures” in the diagram) and the social relations on which these combinations depend. These reservoirs of discourses and meanings are in turn raw material for fresh cultural production. They are indeed among the specifically cultural conditions of production. In our societies, many forms of cultural production also take the form of capitalist commodities. In this case we have to supply specifically capitalist conditions of production (see the arrow pointing to moment 1) and specifically capitalist conditions of consumption (see the arrow pointing to moment 3). Of course this does not tell us all there is to know about these moments, which may be structured on other principles as well, but in these cases the circuit is, at one and the same time, a circuit of capital and its expanded reproduction and a circuit of the production and circulation of subjective forms. Some implications of the circuit may be clearer if we take a particular case. We can, for example, whiz a Mini-Metro car around it. I choose the Mini-Metro because it is a pretty standard late twentieth-century capitalist commodity that happened to carry a particularly rich accumulation of meanings. The Metro was the car that was going to save the British car industry, by beating rivals from the market and by solving British Leyland’s acute problems of industrial discipline. It came to signify solutions to internal and external national threats. The advertising campaigns around its launching were remarkable. In one television ad, a band of Mini-Metros pursued a gang of foreign imports up to (and apparently over) the White Cliffs of Dover, whence they fled in what looked remarkably like landing-craft. This was a Dunkirk in reverse with the Metro as nationalist hero. Certainly these are some of the forms—nationalist epic, popular memory of World War II, internal/external threat—that I would want to abstract for further formal scrutiny. But this raises interesting questions too about what constitutes the “text” (or raw material for such abstractions) in these cases. Would it be enough to analyse the design of the Metro itself as Barthes once analysed the lines of a Citreon? How could we exclude ads and garage showroom displays? Shouldn’t we include, indeed, the Metro’s place in discourses upon national economic recovery and moral renaissance? Supposing that we answered these questions affirmatively (and gave ourselves a lot more work) there would still be some unposed questions. What was made of the Metro phenomenon, more privately, by particular groups of consumers and readers? We would expect great diversity of response. Leyland workers, for example, were likely to view the car differently from those who only bought it. Beyond this, The Metro (and its transformed meanings) became a way of getting to work or picking the kids up from school. It may also have helped to produce, for example, orientations towards working life, connecting industrial “peace” with national prosperity. Then, of course, the products of this whole circuit returned once more to the moment of production— is currently being revised for submission as PhD. Also important in Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding” in Culture, Media, Language.

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as profits for fresh investment, but also as market researcher’s findings on “popularity” (capital’s own “cultural studies”). The subsequent use, by British Leyland management, or similar strategies for selling cars and weakening workers suggests considerable accumulations (of both kinds) from this episode. Indeed the Metro became a little paradigm, though not the first, for a much more diffused ideological form, which we might term, with some compression, “the nationalist sell.”

Publication and Abstraction So far I have talked rather generally about the transformations that occur around the circuit without specifying any. In so brief a discussion, I will specify two related changes of form indicated on the left and right hand sides of the circuit. The circuit involves movements between the public and the private but also movements between more abstract and more concrete forms. These two poles are quite closely related: private forms are more concrete, and more particular in their scope of reference; public forms are more abstract but also apply over a more general range. This may be clearer if we return to the Metro and, thence to different traditions of cultural study. As a designer’s idea, as a manager’s “concept,” the Metro remained private.13 It may even have been conceived in secret. It was known to a chosen few. At this stage, indeed, it would have been hard to separate it out from the social occasions at which it was discussed: board-room meetings, chats at the bar, Saturday’s game of golf? But as ideas were “put on paper” it started to take a more objective and more public form. The crunch came when decisions were made to go ahead with “the concept” and, then again, to “go public.” Finally, the Metro-idea, shortly followed by the Metro-car, moved into “the full glare of publicity.” It acquired a more general significance, gathering around it, in fact, some pretty portentous notions. It became, in fact, a great public issue, or a symbol for such. It also took shape as an actual product and set of texts. In one obvious sense it was made “concrete”: not only could you kick it, you could drive it. But in another sense, this Metro was rather abstract. There it stood, in the showroom, surrounded by its texts of Britishness, a shiny, zippy thing. Yet who would know, from this display, who conceived it, how it was made, who suffered for it, or indeed what possible use it was going to have for the harassedlooking woman with two children in tow, who has just walked into the showroom. To draw out more general points, three things occurred in the process of publication. First, the car (and its texts) became public in the obvious sense: it acquired if not a universal at least a more general significance. Its messages too were generalised, ranging rather freely across the social surface. Second, at the level of meaning, publication involved abstraction. The car and its messages could now be viewed in relative isolation from the social conditions that formed it. Thirdly, it was subjected to a process of public evaluation (great public issue) on many different scales: as a technical-social instrument, as a national symbol, as a stake in class war, in relation to competing models, etc. It became a site of formidable struggles over meaning. In this process it was made to “speak,” evaluatively, for “us (British) all.” Note, however, in the moment of consumption or reading, represented here by the woman and her children (who have decided views about cars), we are forced back again to the private, the particular and concrete, however publicly displayed that raw materials for their readings may be. I am afraid this illustrative case is largely hypothetical since I have no contacts inside British Leyland management. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely fortuitous and a pure instance of the power of theory!

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I want to suggest that these processes are intrinsic to cultural circuits under modern social conditions, and that they are produced by, and are productive of, relations of power. But the most germane evidence for this lies in some repeated differences in the forms of cultural study.

Forms of Culture—Forms of Study One major division, theoretical and methodological, runs right through cultural studies. On the one side there are those who insist that “cultures” must be studied as a whole, and in situ, located, in their material context. Suspicious of abstractions and of “theory,” their practical theory is in fact “culturalist.” They are often attracted to those formulations in Williams or E.P. Thompson that speak of cultures as whole ways of lie or whole ways of struggle. Methodologically, they stress the importance of complex, concrete descriptions, which grasps, particularly, the unity or homology of cultural forms and material life. Their preferences are therefore for social-historical recreations of cultures or cultural movements, or for ethnographic cultural description, or for those kinds of writing (e.g. autobiography, oral history, or realist forms of fiction) which recreate socially-located “experience.” On the other side, there are those who stress the relative independence or effective autonomy of subjective forms and means of signification. The practical theory here is usually structuralist, but in a form which privileges the discursive construction of situations and subjects. The preferred method is to treat the forms abstractly, sometimes quite formalistically, uncovering the mechanisms by which meaning is produced in language, narrative or other kinds of signsystem. If the first set of methods are usually derived from sociological, anthropological or social-historical roots, the second set owe most to literary criticism, and especially the traditions of literary modernism and linguistic formalism.14 In the long run, this division is, in my opinion, a sure impediment to the development of cultural studies. But it is important first to note the logic of such a division in relation to our sketch of cultural processes as a whole. If we compare, in more detail, what we have called the public and private forms of culture, the relation may be clearer.15 Private forms are not necessarily private in the usual sense of personal or individual, though they may be both. They may also be shared, communal and social in ways that public forms are not. It is their particularity or concreteness that marks them as private. They relate to the characteristic life experiences and historically-constructed needs of particular social categories. They do not pretend to define the world for those in other social groups. They are limited, local, modest. They do not aspire to universality. They are also deeply embedded in everyday social intercourse. In the course of their daily lives, women go shopping and meet and discuss the various doings of themselves, their families and their neighbours. Gossip is a private form deeply connected with the occasions and relations of being a woman in our society. Of course, it is T h is is the division between “structuralist” and “culturalist” approaches Stuart Hall and I, among others, have already discussed, but now in the form of “objects” and methods, rather than “paradigms.” See sources listed in note 9 above and add Richard Johnson, “Histories of culture/theories of ideology: notes on an impasse,” in Barrett et al. (eds), Ideology and Cultural Production (Croom Helm, 1979). 15 My thinking on “the public and the private” is much influenced by certain German traditions, especially discussions around Jürgen Habermas’ work on “the public sphere.” This is now being interestingly picked up and used in American work. See Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Neuweld, Berlin, 1962); Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Öffentlichkeit and Erfahrung; Zur Organisationsanalyse von Burgerlicher and proletarischer Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurst am Main, 1972). For an extract of Negt and Kluge’s work, see A. Matterlart and S. Siegelaub (eds), Communication and Class Struggle, Vol. 2. 14

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possible to describe the discursive forms of gossip abstractly, stressing for instance the forms of reciprocity in speech, but this does seem to do a particular violence to the material, ripping it from the immediate and visible context in which these texts of talk arose. An even more striking case is the working-class culture of the shop floor. As Paul Wills has shown there is a particularly close relationship here between the physical action of labour and the practical jokes and common sense of the workplace.16 The whole discursive mode of the culture is to refuse the separation of manual practice and mental theory characteristic of public and especially academic knowledge forms. In neither case—gossip and shop-floor culture—is there a marked division of labour in cultural production. Nor are there technical instruments of production of any great complexity, though forms of speech and the symbolic uses of the human body are complex enough. Nor are the consumers of cultural forms formally or regularly distinguished from their producers, or far removed from them, in time or space. I would argue that particular forms of inquiry and of representation have been developed to handle these features of private forms. Researchers, writers and all kinds of rapporteurs have adjusted their methods to what have seemed the most evident features of culture in this moment. They have sought to hold together the subjective and more objective moments, often not distinguishing them theoretically, or, in practice, refusing the distinction altogether. It is this stress of “experience” (the term that perfectly captures this conflation or identity) that has united the practical procedures of social historians, ethnographers and those interested, say, in “working-class writing.” Compared with the thick, conjoined tissue of face-to-face encounters, the television programme “going out on the air” seems a very abstracted, even ethereal product. For one thing it is so much more plainly a representation of “real life” (at best) than the (equally constructed) narratives or everyday life. It takes a separated, abstracted or objective form, in the shape of the programme/text. It comes at us from a special, fixed place, a box of standardised shape and size in the corner of our sitting room. Of course, we apprehend it socially, culturally, communally, but it still has this separated moment, much more obviously than the private text of speech. This separated existence is certainly associated with an intricate division of labour in production and distribution and with the physical and temporal distance between the moment of production and that of consumption, characteristic of public knowledge forms in general. Public media of this kind, indeed, permit quite extraordinary manipulations of space and time as, for example, in the television revival of old movies. I would argue that this apparent abstraction in the actual forms of public communication underlies the whole range of methods that focus on the construction of reality through symbolic forms themselves—with language as the first model, but the key moment as the objectification of language in text. It would be fascinating to pursue an historical inquiry linked to this hypothesis which would attempt to unravel the relationship between the real abstractions of communicative forms and the mental abstractions of cultural theorists. I do not suppose that the two processes go easily hand in hand or that changes occur synchronously. But I am sure that the notion of text—as something we can isolate, fix, pin down and scrutinise— depends upon the extensive circulation of cultural products which have been divorced from the immediate conditions of their production and have a moment of suspension, so to speak, before they are consumed.

Paul Willis, “Shop-floor culture, masculinity and the wage form” in Clarke, Critcher and Johnson (eds), Working Class Culture.

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Publication and Power The public and private forms of culture are not sealed against each other. There is a real circulation of forms. Cultural production often involves publication, the making public of private forms. On the other side, public texts are consumed or read in private. A girls’ magazine, like Jackie for instance, picks up and represents some elements of the private cultures of feminity by which young girls live their lives. It instantaneously renders these elements open to public evaluation— as for example, “girls stuff,” “silly” or “trivial.” It also generalises these elements within the scope of the particular readership, creating a little public of its own. The magazine is then a raw material for thousands of girl-readers who make their own re-appropriations of the elements first borrowed from their lived culture and forms of subjectivity. It is important not to assume that publication only and always works in dominating or in demeaning ways. We need careful analyses of where and how public representations work to seal social groups into the existing relations of dependence and where and how they have some emancipatory tendency. Short of this detail, we can nonetheless insist on the importance of power as an element in an analysis, by suggesting the main ways it is active in the public-private relationship. Of course there are profound differences in terms of access to the public sphere. Many social concerns may not acquire publicity at all. It is not merely that they remain private, but that they are actively privatized, held at the level of the private. Here, so far as formal politics and state actions are concerned, they are invisible, without public remedy. This means not only that they have to be borne, but that a consciousness of them, as evils, is held at a level of implicit or communal meanings. Within the group a knowledge of such sufferings may be profound, but not of such a kind that expects relief, or finds the sufferings strange. As often, perhaps, such private concerns do appear publicly, but only on certain terms, and therefore transformed and framed in particular ways. The concerns of gossip, for example, do appear publicly in a wide variety of forms, but usually in the guise of “entertainment.” They appear, for instance, in soap opera, or are “dignified” only by their connection with the private lives of royalty, stars or politicians. Similarly, elements of shop-floor culture may be staged as comedy or variety acts. Such framings in terms of code or genre may not, as some theorists believe, altogether vitiate these elements as the basis of a social alternative, but they certainly work to contain them within the dominant public definitions of significance. Public representations may also act in more openly punitive or stigmatising ways. In these forms the elements of private culture are robbed of authenticity or rationality, and constructed as dangerous, deviant, or dotty.17 Similarly the experiences of subordinated social groups are presented as pathological, problems for intervention not in the organisation of society as a whole, but in the attitudes or behavior of the suffering group itself. This is representation with a vengeance: representation not as subjects demanding redress, but at objects of external intervention. T h ere is a very large sociological literature on these forms of stigmatisation, especially of the deviant young. For a cultural development of this work, see Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: “Mugging,” the State and Law and Order (Macmillan, 1978). For more subtle forms of marginalization, see CCCS Media Group, “Fighting over peace: representations of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the media,” CCCS Steniclled Paper 72. For current treatment of the left and the trade unions in the British media, see the sequence of studies by the Glasgow Media Group, starting with Glasgow University Media Group, Bad News (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976). Stanley Cohen and Jock Young (eds), The Manufacture of News (Constable, 1973) was a pioneer collection.

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If space allowed it would be important to compare the different ways in which these processes may occur across the major relationships of class, gender, race and age-dependence. One further general mechanism is the construction, in the public sphere, of definitions of the public/private division itself. Of course, these sound quite neutral definitions: “everyone” agrees that the most important public issues are the economy, defence, law and order and, perhaps, welfare questions, and that other issues—family life, sexuality for example—are essentially private. The snag is that the dominant definitions of significance are quite socially specific and, in particular, tend to correspond to masculine and middle-class structures of “interest” (in both the meanings of this term). It is partly because they start fundamentally to challenge these dispositions that some feminisms, the peace movements and the Green parties are amongst the most subversive of modern developments. I have stressed these elements of power, at the risk of some diversion from the main argument, because cultural studies practices must be viewed within this context. Whether it takes as its main object the more abstracted public knowledges and their underlying logics and definitions, or it searches out the private domains of culture, cultural studies is necessarily and deeply implicated in relations of power. It forms a part of the very circuits which it seeks to describe. It may, like the academic and the professional knowledges, police the public-private relation, or it may critique it. It may be involved in the surveillance of the subjectivities of subordinated groups, or in struggles to represent them more adequately than before. It may become part of the problem, or a part of the solution. That is why as we turn to the particular forms of cultural study, we need to ask not only about objects, theories and methods, but also about the political limits and potentials of different standpoints around the circuit.

From the Perspective of Production This is a particularly wide and heterogeneous set of approaches. For I include under this head, approaches with very different political tendencies, from the theoretical knowledges of advertisers, persons involved in public relations for large organisations, many liberal-pluralist theorists of public communication and the larger part of writings on culture within the marxist and other critical traditions. As between disciplines, it is sociologist or social historians or political economists, or those concerned with the political organisation of culture, who have most commonly taken this viewpoint. A more systematic approach to cultural production has been a relatively recent feature of the sociology of literature, art or popular cultural forms. These concerns parallel debates about the mass media and were originally deeply influenced by the early experiences of state propaganda under the conditions of the modern media, especially in Nazi Germany. Crossing the more aesthetic and political debates has been the pervasive concern with the influence of capitalist conditions of production and the mass market in cultural commodities on the “authenticity” of culture, including the popular arts. Studies or production within these traditions have been equally varied: from grandiose critiques of the political economy and cultural pathology of mass communications (e.g. the early Frankfurt School) to close empirical inspections of the production of news or particular documentary series or soap operas on television.18 In a very different way still, much modern history has been concerned with “cultural production,” though Among the best close studies of this kind are Philip Elliott, The Making of a Television Series: A Case Study in the Sociology of Culture (Constable/Sage, 1972); Philip Schlesinger, Putting “Reality” Together: BBC News

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this time the cultural production of social movements or even whole social classes. It is important to accept E.P. Thompson’s invitation to read The Making of the English Working Class from this cultural standpoint; Paul Willis’ work, especially Learning to Labour, represents in many ways the sociological equivalent of this historiographical tradition. What unites these diverse works, however, is that they all take, if not the viewpoint of cultural producers, at least the theoretical standpoint of production. They are interested, first and foremost, in the production and the social organisation of cultural forms. Of course, it is here that marxist paradigms have occupied a very central place, even when continuously argued against. Early marxist accounts asserted the primacy of production conditions and often reduced these to some narrowly-conceived version of “the forces and the relations of production.” Even such reductive analysis had a certain value: culture was understood as a social product, not a matter of individual creativity only. It was therefore subject to political organisation, whether by the capitalist state or by parties of social opposition.19 In later marxist accounts, the historical forms of the production and organisation of culture—“the superstructures”—have begun to be elaborated. In Gramsci’s writing the study of culture from the viewpoint of production becomes a more general interest with the cultural dimensions of struggles and strategies as a whole. The longstanding and baneful influence of “high-cultural” or specialist definitions of “Culture” within marxism was also definitively challenged.20 Gramsci was, perhaps, the first major marxist theorist and communist leader to take the cultures of the popular classes as a serious object of study and of political practice. All the more modern features of culture organisation also start to appear in his work: he writes of cultural organisers/producers not just at little knots of “intellectuals” on the old revolutionary or Bolshevik model but as whole social strata concentrated around particular institutions—schools, colleges, the law, the press, the state bureaucracies and the political parties. Gramsci’s work is the most sophisticated and fertile development of a traditional marxist approach via cultural production. Yet I think that Gramsci remains much more the “Leninist” than is sometimes appreciated in new left or academic debates in Britain.21 From the work available in English, it seems to be he was less interested in how cultural forms work, subjectively, than in how to “organise” them, externally.

Limits of the Viewpoint of Production I find two recurrent limits to looking at culture from this viewpoint. The first difficultly is the familiar one of “economism,” though it is useful, I hope, to restate the problem in a different way. There is a tendency to neglect what is specific to cultural production in this model. Cultural production is assimilated to the model of capitalist (usually) production in (Constable/Sage, 1978); Jeremy Tunstall, Journalists at Work (Constable, 1971); Dorothy Hobson, Crossroads Methuen, 1982). T h e forms of “political organization” were often not specified in Marx or in the theorists who followed him, up to and including, in my view, Lenin. For Lenin, it seems to me, cultural politics remained a matter of organization and “propaganda” in quite narrow senses. 20 Althusser’s exceptions of “art” from ideology are an instance of the persistence of this view within marxism. It is interesting to compare Althusser’s and Gramsci’s views of “philosophy” here too, Althusser tending to the specialist academic or “high cultural” definition, Gramsci to the popular. 21 I think the predominant reception of Gramsci in Britain is “anti-Leninist,” especially among those interested in discourse theory. But it may be that CCCS appropriation underestimates Gramsci Leninism too. I am grateful to Victor Molina for discussions on this issue. 19

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general, without sufficient attention to the dual nature of the circuit of cultural commodities. The conditions of production include not merely the material means of production and the capitalist organisation of labour, but a stock of already existing cultural elements drawn from the reservoirs of lived culture or from the already public fields of discourse. This raw material is structured not only by capitalist production imperatives (i.e. commodified) but also by the indirect results of capitalist and other social relations on the existing rules of language and discourse, especially, class and gender-based struggles in their effects on different social symbols and signs. As against this, marxist political economy still goes for the more brutallyobvious “determinations”—especially mechanisms like competition, monopolistic control, and imperial expansion.22 This is why the claim of some semiologies to provide an alternative materialist analysis does have some semiologies to provide an alternative materialist analysis does have some force.23 Many approaches to production, in other words, can be faulted on their chosen grounds: as accounts of cultural production, of the production of subjective forms, they tell us at most about some “objective” conditions and the work of some social sites— typically the ideological work of capitalist business (e.g. advertising, the work of commercial media) rather than that of political parties, schools, or the apparatuses of “high culture.” The second difficulty is not economism but what we might call “productivism.” The two are often combined but are analytically distinct. Gramsci’s marxism, for instance, is certainly not economistic, but it is, arguably, productivist. The problem here is the tendency to infer the character of a cultural product and its social use from the conditions of its production, as though, in cultural matters, production determines all. The common sense forms of this inference are familiar: we need only trace an idea to its source to declare it “bourgeois” or “ideological”—hence “the bourgeois novel,” “bourgeois science,” “bourgeoise ideology” and, of course, all the “proletarian” equivalents. Most critics of this reduction attack it by denying the connection between conditions of origin and political tendency.24 I do not myself wish to deny that conditions of origin (including the class or gender position of producers) exercise a profound influence on the nature of the product. I find it more useful to question such identifications not as “wrong” but as premature. They may be true as far as they go, according to the logics of that moment, but they neglect the range of possibilities in cultural forms especially as these are realised in consumption or “readership.” I do not see how any cultural form can be dubbed “ideological” (in the usual marxist critical sense) until we have examined not only its origin in the primary production process, but also carefully analysed its

See, for instance, the work of Graham Murdock and Peter Golding on the political economy of the mass media: e.g. “Capitalism, communication and class relations” in Curran et al. (eds), Mass Communications and Society (Arnold, 1977); Graham Murdock, “Large corporations and the control of the communications industries” in Gurevitch et al. (eds), Culture, Society and the Media (Methuen, 1982); for a more explicitly polemical engagement with CCCS work, see Golding and Murdock, “Ideology and the mass media: the question of determination” in Barrett et al. (eds), Ideology and Cultural Production. For a reply, see I. Connell, “Monopoly capitalism and the media: definitions and struggles” in S. Hibbin (ed.), Politics, Ideology and the State (Lawrence & Wishart, 1978). 23 T h ese claims have their proximate origin in Althusser’s statement that ideologies have a material existence. For a classic English statement of this kind of “materialism,” see Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977). This is rather different from Marx’s argument that under particular conditions ideologies acquires a “material force” or Gramsci’s elaboration of this in terms of the conditions of popularity. 24 T h is applies to a wide range of structuralist and post-structuralist theories from Poulantzas’ arguments against class reductionist notions of ideology to the more radical positions of Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst and other theorists of “discourse.” 22

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textual forms and the modes of its reception. “Ideological,” unless deployed as a neutral term, is the last term to use in such analysis, certainly not the first.25 I still find the debate between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno about the tendency of mass culture a very instructive example.26 Adorno swept on in his majestic polemic identifying capitalist production conditions, tracing effects in the “fetishised” form of the cultural commodity and finding its perfect complement in the “regressive listening” of fans for popular music. There is a highly deductive or inferential element in his reasoning, often resting on some giant theoretical strides, plotted first by Lukacs. The conflations and reductions that result are well illustrated in one of his (few) concrete examples: his analysis of the British brewer’s slogan—“What We Want is Watneys.” The brand of the beer was presented like a political slogan. Not only does this billboard give an insight into the nature of the up to date propaganda, which sells its slogans as well as its wares . . . the type of relationship which is suggested by the billboard, by which the masses make a commodity recommended to them the object of their own action, is in fact found again in the pattern of reception of light music. They need and demand what has been palmed off on them.27

The first four lines of this are fine. I like the insight about the parallel courses of political propaganda and commercial advertising, forced on as it was by the German situation. The reading of the slogan is also quite interesting, showing how advertising works to produce an active identification. But the analysis goes awry as soon as we get to “the masses.” The actual differentiated drinkers of Watneys and readers of the slogan are assumed to act also as the brewer’s ventriloquists’ dummy, without any other determinations intervening. Everything specific to the enjoyment of slogans or the drinking of beer is abstracted away. Adorno is uninterested, for example, in the meaning of Watneys (or any other tipple) in the context of pub sociability, indexed by the “we.” The possibility that drinkers may have their own reasons for consuming a given product and that drinking has a social use value is overlooked.28 This is quite an extreme case of productivism but the pressure to infer effects or readings from an analysis of production is a constant one. It is a feature, for example, of a rich vein of In this respect I find myself at odds with many strands in cultural studies, including some influential ones, which opt for an expanded use of ideology rather in the Bolshevik sense or in the more Leninist of Althusser’s (several) uses. Ideology is applied, in Oxford’s important popular culture course, for instance, to the formation of subjectivities as such. If stretched thus, I would argue that the term loses its usefulness—“discourse,” “cultural form,” etc., would do quite as well. On the whole, I wish to retain the “negative” or “critical” connotations of the term “ideology” in classic marxist discourse, though not, as it happens, the usual accompaniment, a “hard” notion of marxism-as-science. It may well be that all our knowledge of the world and all our conceptions of the self are “ideological,” or less ideological, in that they are rendered partial by the operation of interests and of power. But this seems to me a proposition that has to be plausibly argued in particular cases rather than assumed at the beginning of every analysis. The expanded, “neutral” sense of the term cannot altogether lay to rest the older negative connotations. The issues are interestingly stated in the work of Jorge Larrain. See Marxism and Ideology (Macmillan, 1983) and The Concept of Ideology (Hutchinson, 1979). 26 See especially Theodor Adorno, “On the fetish character of music and the regression of listening” in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (eds), Frankfurt School Reader (Blackwell, 1978); T.W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialects of Enlightenment (Allen Lane, 1973); Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction” Illuminations (Fontana, 1973). 27 “Fetish character of music,” pp. 287-88. Later he gives slightly more rounded pictures of types of consumption of popular music, but even his fans’ dancing resembles “the reflexes of mutilated animals” (p. 292). 28 For more developed critiques, see Dick Bradley, “Introduction to the cultural study of music,” CCCS Stencilled Paper 61; Richard Middleton, “Reading popular music,” Oxford Popular Culture Course Unit, Unit 16, Block 4 (Open University Press, 1981). 25

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work in cultural studies which has mainly been concerned to analyse particular fields of public discourse. Among CCCS publications, Policing the Crisis and Unpopular Education29 both were analyses of our first two moments—of texts, in this case the fields of discourse about law and order and about public education—and of their conditions and histories of production—law and order campaigns, media cause celebre, the work of “primary definers” like judges and the police, the role of a new political tendency, “Thatcherism,” etc. Both studies proved to have considerable predictive value, showing the strengths and the popularity of new right politics before, in the case of Policing, Mrs Thatcher’s first electoral victory in 1979.30 Similarly, I believe that Unpopular Education contained what has turned out to be a percipient analysis of the fundamental contradictions of social-democratic politics in Britain and therefore of some of the agonies of the Labour Party. Yet, as political guides both studies are incomplete: they lack an account of the crisis of “1945-ism” in the lived culture of, especially, working-class groups, or a really concrete rendering of the popular purchase of new right ideologies. They are limited, in other words, by reliance upon, for the most part, the “public” knowledges of the media and of formal politics. Something more is required than this, especially if we are to go beyond critique to help in producing new political programmes and movements. This argument may be capped if we turn to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin certainly took a more open view of the potentialities of mass cultural forms than Adorno. He was excited by their technical and educational possibilities. He urged cultural producers to transform not only their works, but also their ways of working. He described the techniques of a new form of cultural production: Brecht’s “epic theatre.” Yet we can see that all of these insights are primarily the comments of a critic upon the theories of producers, or take the standpoint of production. It is here, still with the creator, that the really revolutionary moves are to be made. It is true that Benjamin also had interesting ideas about the potentiality of modern forms to produce a new and more detached relationship between reader and text, but this insight remained abstract, as optimistic, in the same rather a priori way, as Adorno’s pessimism. It was not rooted in any extended analysis of the larger experience of particular groups of readers. Our first case (production) turns out to be an interesting instance of an argument the general form of which will recur. Of course, we must look at cultural forms from the viewpoint of their production. This must include the conditions and the means of production, especially in their cultural or subjective aspects. In my opinion it must include accounts and understandings too of the actual moment of production itself—the labour, and its subjective and objective aspects. We cannot be perpetually discussing “conditions” and never discussing acts! At the same time, we must avoid the temptation, signalled in marxist discussions of determination, to subsume all other aspects of culture under the categories of production studies. This suggests two stages in a more sensible approach. The first is to grant independence and particularity to a distinct production moment—and to do the same for other moments. This is a necessary, negative, holding of the line against reductionisms of all kinds. But once the line is held in our analysis, another stage becomes quite evident. The different moments or aspects are not in fact distinct. There is, for instance, a sense in which (rather carefully) we can speak of texts as “productive” and a much stronger case for viewing reading or cultural consumption as a production process CCCS Education Group, Unpopular Education: Schooling and Social Democracy in England since 1944 (Hutchinson, 1981). 30 T h e analysis of Thatcherism has continued to be one of Stuart Hall’s major concerns. See the very important essays republished in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds). The Politics of Thatcherism (Lawrence & Wishart/ Marxism Today, 1983). “The Great Moving Right Show,” written before the 1979 election, proved to be especially perceptive. 29

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in which the first product becomes a material for fresh labour. The text-as-produced is a different object from the text-as-read. The problem with Adorno’s analysis and perhaps with productivist approaches in general is not only that they infer the text-as-read from the text-as-produced, but that also, in doing this, they ignore the elements of production in other moments, concentrating “creativity” in producer or critic. Perhaps this is the deepest prejudice of all among the writers, the artists, the teachers, the educators, the communicators and the agitators within the intellectual divisions of labour!

Text-Based Studies A second whole cluster of approaches are primarily concerned with cultural products. Most commonly these products are treated as “text”; the point is to provide more or less definitive “readings” of them. Two developments seem especially important: the separation between specialist critics and ordinary readers, and the division between cultural practitioners and those who practice, primarily, by commenting on the works of others. Both developments have much to do with the growth and elaboration of educational and especially academic institutions, but it is interesting that the “modernisms” which have so deeply influenced cultural studies, had their origins as producer’s theories, but are now discussed most intensively in academic and educational contexts. I am thinking particularly of the theories associated with Cubism and Constructivism, Russian formalism and film-making, and of course, Brecht on theatre.31 Much of what is known about the textual organization of cultural forms is now carried in the academic disciplines conventionally grouped together as the humanities or the arts. The major humanities disciplines, but especially linguistic and literary studies, have developed means of formal description which are indispensable for cultural analysis. I am thinking, for example, of the literary analysis of forms of narrative, the identification of different, genre, but also of whole families of genre categories, the analysis of syntactical forms, possibilities and transformations in linguistics, the formal analysis of acts and exchanges in speech, the analysis of some elementary forms of cultural theory by philosophers, and the common borrowings, by criticism and cultural studies, from semiology and other structuralisms. Looking at it from outside, the citation in the humanities and especially in literature seems to me very paradoxical: on the one hand, the development of immensely powerful tools of analysis and description, on the other hand, rather meagre ambitions in terms of applications and objects of analysis. There is a tendency for the tools to remain obstinately technical or formal. The example I find most striking at the moment is linguistics, which seems a positive treasure-chest for cultural analysis but is buried in a heightened technical mystique and academic professionalism, from which, fortunately, it is beginning to emerge.32 Other possibilities seem perpetually cooped up in the “need” to say something new about some well-thumbed text or much disputed author. This sometimes encompasses a free-ranging amateurism whose general cultural credentials Particularly useful introductions in English to these combined impacts are Sylvia Harvey, May 1968 and Film Culture (BFI, 1980); Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (New Accents, Methuen, 1979). 32 See, for instance, the work of a group of “critical linguists” initially based on the University of East Anglia, especially: R. Fowler et al., Language and Control (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). I am especially grateful to Gunther Kress, who spent some months at the Centre, and to Utz Maas of Osnabruck University for very fruitful discussions on the relationship of language studies and cultural studies. See also Utz Maas, “Language studies and cultural analysis,” paper for a Conference on Language and Cultural Studies at CCCS, December 1982. 31

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apparently sanction the liberal application of some pretty common sense judgments to almost everything. Yet the paradox is that humanities disciplines, which are preeminently concerned with identifying the subjective forms of life, are already cultural studies in embryo! Forms, regularities and conventions first identified in literature (or certain kinds of music or visual art) often turn out to have a much wider social currency. Feminists working on romance, for example, have traced the correspondences between the narrative forms of popular romantic fiction, the public rituals of marriage (e.g. the Royal weddings) and, if only through their own experience, the subjective tug of the symbolic resolutions of romantic love.33 Provoked by this still-developing model, a similar set of arguments and researchers are developing around conventional masculinity, the fighting fantasies of boy-culture, and the narrative forms of epic.34 As if on a prompter’s cue, the Falklands/Malvinas conflict crystallized both of these forms (and conjoined them) in a particularly dramatic and real public spectacle. There is no better instance, perhaps, of the limits of treating forms like romance or epic as merely literary constructions. On the contrary, they are among the most powerful and ubiquitous of social categories or subjective forms, especially in their constructions of conventional feminity and masculinity. Human beings live, love, suffer bereavement and go off and fight and die by them. As usual, then, the problem is to appropriate methods that are often locked into narrow disciplinary channels and use their real insights more widely, freely. What kinds of text-based methods, then, are most useful? And what problems should we look for and try to overcome?

The Importance of Being Formal Especially important are all the modernist and post-modernist influences, particularly those associated with structuralism and post-Saussurean linguistics. I include the developments in semiology here, but would also want to include, as a kind of cousinhood, once-removed, some strands in “Anglo-American” linguistics.35 Cultural studies has often approached these strands quite gingerly, with heated battles, in particular, with those kinds of text analysis informed by psycho-analysis,36 but the fresh modernist infusions continue to be a source of developments. As someone coming from the other historical/sociological side, I am often surprised and uncritically entranced by the possibilities here.

Much of this work remains unpublished. I very much hope that one of the next CCCS books will be a collections on romance. In the meantime, see English Studies Group, “Recent development” in Culture, Media, Language, Rachel Harrison, “Shirley; romance and relations of dependence” in CCCS Women’s Studies Group, Women Take Issue; Angela McRobbie, “Working-class girls and feminity.” ibid.; Myra Connell, “Reading and romance,” unpublished MA dissertation (University of Birmingham, 1981); Christine Griffin, “Cultures of feminity: romance revisited,” CCCS Stencilled paper 69; Janice Winship, “Woman becomes an individual: feminity and consumption in women’s magazines,” CCCS Stencilled Paper 65; Laura di Michele, “The Royal Wedding,” CCCS Stencilled Paper, forthcoming. 34 Much of this work is in connection with the work of the Popular Memory Group in CCCS towards a book on the popularity of Conservative nationalism. I am especially grateful to Laura di Michele for her contribution in opening up these Questions in relation to “epic,” and to Graham Dawson for discussions on masculinity, war, and boy culture. 35 Especially those developing out of the work of M.A.K. Halliday which includes the “critical linguistics” group. For Halliday, see Gunther Kress (ed), Halliday: System and Function in Language (Oxford University Press, 1976). 36 See especially the long, largely unpublished critique of Screen by the CCCS Media Group, 1977-78 Parts of this appear in Stuart Hall et al. (eds), Culture, Media, Language, 157-73. 33

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Modern formal analysis promises a really careful and systematic description of subjective forms, and of their tendencies and pressures. It has enabled us to identify, for example, narrativity as a basic form of organisation of subjectivities.37 It also gives us leads—or more—on the repertoire of narrative forms existing contemporaneously, the actual storyforms characteristic of different ways of life. If we treat these not as archetypes but as historically-produced constructions, the possibilities for fruitful concrete study on a wide range of materials is immense. For stories obviously come not merely in the form of bookish or filmic fictions but also in everyday conversation, in everyone’s imagined futures and daily projections, and in the construction of identities, individual and collective, through memories and histories. What are the recurrent patterns here? What forms can we abstract form these texts most commonly? It seems to me that in the study of subjective form, we are at the stage in political economy which Marx, in the Grundrisse, saw as necessary but primitive: “when the forms had still to be laboriously peeled out from the material.” There are a number of inhibitions here. One powerful one is an opposition to abstract categories and a terror of formalism. I think that this is often quite misplaced. We need to abstract forms in order to describe them carefully, clearly, noting the variations and combinations. I am sure that Roland Barthes was right when he argued against the quixotic rejection of “the artifice of analysis”: Less terrorized by the spectre of “formalism,” historical criticism might have been less sterile; it would have understood that the specific study of forms does not in any way contradict the necessary principles of totality and History. On the contrary; the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism. To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it.38

Admittedly Barthes’ “History” is suspiciously capitalized and emptied of content: unlike marxism, semiology does not present us with a practice (unless it be Barthes’ little essays) for reconstituting a complex whole from the different forms. But I am sure we do end up with better, more explanatory, histories, if we have comprehended, more abstractedly, some of the forms and relations which constitute them. In some ways, indeed, I find Barthes’ work not formal enough. The level of elaboration in his later work sometimes seems gratuitous: too complex for clarity, insufficiently concrete as a substantive account. In these and other semiological endeavours do we mainly hear the busy whir of self-generating intellectual systems rapidly slipping out of control? If so, this is a different noise from the satisfying buzz of a really “historical” abstraction!

I take this to be the common message of a great range of work, some of it quite critical of structuralist formalism, on the subject of narrative in literature, film, television, folk tale, myth, history and political theory. I am in the middle of my own reading list, delving into this material from a quite unliterary background. My starting points are theories of narrative in general—compare Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives” in Stephen Heath (ed.), Barthes on Image, Music, Text (Fontana, 1977) and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially-Symbolic Act (Methuen, 1981), but I am most interested in work, at a lesser level of generality, that specifies the types of genres of narrative. Here I have found much stimulus in work on filmic or televisual narratives, see especially the texts collected in Tony Bennett et al. (eds), Popular Television and Film (BFI/Open University, 1981), but also on “archetypal” genre forms—epic, romance, tragedy, etc.—as in Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957). My particular concern is with the stories we tell ourselves individually and collectively. In this respect the existing literature is, so far, disappointing. 38 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paladin, 1973), p. 112. 37

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Radical structuralisms excite me for another reason.39 They are the furthest reach of the criticism of empiricism which, as I suggested earlier, founds cultural studies philosophically. This radical constructivism—nothing in culture taken as given, everything produced—is a leading insight we cannot fall behind. Of course, these two excitements are closely related, the second as a premise of the first. It is because we know we are not in control of our own subjectivities, that we need so badly to identify their forms and trace their histories and future possibilities.

What Is a Text Anyway? But if text analysis is indispensable, what is a text? Remember the Mini-Metro as an example of the tendency of “text” to a polymorphous growth: Tony Bennett’s example of the James Bond genres is an even better case.40 The proliferation of allied representations in the field of public discourses poses large problems for any practitioner of contemporary cultural studies. There are, however, better and worse ways of coping with them. Often, I think, it is a traditional literary solution that is reached for: we plump for an “author” (so far as this is possible), a single work or series, perhaps a distinctive genre. Our choices may now be popular texts and perhaps a filmic or electronic medium, yet there are still limits in such quasi-literary criteria. If, for example, we are really interested in how conventions and the technical means available within a particular medium structure representations, we need to work across genre and media, comparatively. We need to trace the differences as well as the similarities, for example, between literary romance, romantic love as public spectacle and love as a private form or narrative. It is only in this way that we can resolve some of the most important evaluative questions here: how far, for instance, romance acts merely to seal women into oppressive social conditions, and how far ideologies of love may nonetheless express utopian conceptions of personal relations. We certainly do not have to bound our research by literary criteria; other choices are available. It is possible for instance to take “issues” or periods as the main criterion. Though restricted by their choice of rather “masculine” genre and media, Policing the Crisis and Unpopular Education are studies of this kind. They hinge around a basically historical definition, examining aspects of the rise of the new right mainly from the early 1970s. The logic of this approach has been extended in recent CCCS media-based studies: a study of a wide range of media representations of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in October 198141 and a study of the media in a post-Falklands’ holiday period, from Christmas 1982 to New Year 1983.42 This last approach is especially fruitful since it allows us to examine the construction of a holiday (and especially the play around the public/private division) according to the possibilities of different media and genre, for example, television soap opera and the popular daily press. By capturing something of the contemporaneity and combined “effects” of different systems of representations, we also hope to get nearer to the commoner experience of listening, reading and viewing. This form of study, based upon a conjuncture which in this case is both historical (the post-Falklands moment of

By which I mean “post-structuralism” in the usual designation. This seems to be a rather misleading tag since it is hard to conceive of late semiology without early, or even Foucault without Althusser. Tony Bennett, “James Bond as popular Hero,” Oxford Popular Culture Course Unit, Unit 21, Block 5; “Text and social process: the case of James Bond,” Screen Education 41 (Winter/Spring, 1982). 41 “Fighting over peace: representations of CND in the media,” CCCS Stencilled Paper 72. 42 T h is project is not yet completed; provisional title: “Jingo bells: the public and the private in Christmas Media 1982.” 39

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December 1982) and seasonal (the Christmas holiday), is premised on the belief that context is crucial in the production of meaning. More generally, the aim is to decentre “the text” as an object of study. “The text” is no longer studies for its own sake, nor even for the social effects it may be thought to produce, but rather for the subjective or cultural forms which it realises and makes available. The text is only a means in cultural study; strictly, perhaps, it is a raw material from which certain forms (e.g. of narrative, ideological problematic, mode of address, subject position, etc.) may be abstracted. It may also form part of a larger discursive field or combination of forms occurring in other social spaces with some regularity. But the ultimate object of cultural studies is not, in my view, the text, but the social life of subjective forms at each moment of their circulation, including their textual embodiments. This is a long way from a literary valuing of texts for themselves, though, of course, the modes in which some textural embodiments of subjective forms come to be valued over others, especially by critics or educators—the problem especially of “high” and “low” in culture—is a central question, especially in theories of culture and class. But this is a problem which subsumes “literary” concerns, rather than reproducing them. A key issue is how criteria of “literariness” themselves come to be formulated and installed in academic, educational and other regulative practices.

Structuralist Foreshortenings How to constitute the text is one problem; another is the tendency of other moments, especially of cultural production and reading, but more generally of the more concrete, private aspects of culture, to disappear into a reading of the text. Around this tendency, we might write a whole complicated history of formalisms, using the term now in its more familiar critical sense. I understand formalism negatively, not as abstraction of forms from texts, but as the abstraction of texts from the other moments. For me this distinction is critical, marking the legitimate and excessive concerns with form. I would explain formalism in the negative sense in terms of two main sets of determinations: those that derive from the social location of “critic” and the limits of a particular practice, and those that derive from particular theoretical problematics, the tools of different critical schools. Although there is a clear historical association, especially in the twentieth century, between “criticism” and formalism, there is no necessary connection. The particular formalisms that interest me most—because there is the most to rescue—are those associated with the various structuralist and post-structuralist discussions of text, narrative, subject positions, discourses and so on. I include here, in a necessarily compressed way, the whole sequence that runs from Saussure’s linguistics and Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology to early Barthes and what is sometimes called “semiology mark 1”43 to the developments set in train by May 1968 in film criticism, semiology and narrative theory, including the complicated intersection of Althusserian marxism, later semiologies and psycho-analysis. Despite their variations, these approaches to “signifying practices” share certain paradigmatic limits which I term the “structuralist foreshortening.” They are limited, in a very fundamental way, by staying within the terms of textual analysis. In so far as they go beyond it, they subordinate other moments to textual analysis. In particular they tend to neglect questions of the production of cultural forms or their larger social organisation, T his term has been used to distinguish “structuralist” and “post-structuralist” semiologies, with the incorporation of emphases from Lacanian psycho-analysis as an important watershed.

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or reduce questions of production to the “productivity” (I would say “capacity to produce”) of the already existing systems of signification, that is the formal languages or codes. They also tend to neglect questions of readership, or subordinate them to the competencies of a textual form of analysis. They tend to derive an “account” of readership, in fact, from the critic’s own textual readings. I want to suggest that the common element in both these limits is a major theoretical lack—the absence of an adequate post-structuralist (or should I say post-post-structuralist) theory of subjectivity. This absence is one that is stressed within these approaches themselves; in fact, it is a major charge against old marxisms that they lacked “a theory of the subject.” But the absence is supplied most unsatisfactorily by twinning textual analysis and psycho-analysis in an account of subjectivity which remains very abstract, “thin” and un-historical and also, in my opinion, overly “objective.” To sum up the limitations, there is not really an account or accounts here, of the genesis of subjective forms and the different ways in which human beings inhibit them.

The Neglect of Production This is the easier point to illustrate. It is the difference, for example, between cultural studies in the CCCS tradition, and especially the CCCS appropriation of Gramsci’s accounts of hegemony and, say, the main theoretical tendency in the magazine of film criticism associated with the British Film Institute, Screen. In the Italian context the comparison might be between the “pure” semiological and cultural studies traditions. While cultural studies at Birmingham has tended to become more historical, more concerned with particular conjunctures and institutional locations, the tendency of film criticism in Britain has been, rather, the other way. Initially, an older marxist concern with cultural production, and, in particulars with cinema as industry and with conjunctures in cinematic production was common both in Britain and France. But like the French film magazines, Screen became in the 1970s, increasingly preoccupied less with production as a social and historical process, and more with the “productivity” or signifying systems themselves, in particular, with the means of representation of the cinematographic medium. This move was very explicitly argued for, not only in the critiques of realist theories of the cinema and of the realist structures of conventional film itself, but also in the critique of the “super-realism” of (honoured) marxist practitioners like Eisenstein and Brecht.44 It formed part of a larger movement which placed increasing emphasis on the means of representation in general and argued that we had to choose between the virtual autonomy and absolute determinancy of “signification” or return to the consistency of orthodox marxism. As the elegant one-sided exaggeration put it, it is the myths that speak the myth-maker, the language which speaks the speaker, the texts which read the reader, the theoretical problematic which produces “science,” and ideology or discourse that produces “the subject.” There was an account of production in this work, but a very attenuated one. If we think of production as involving raw materials, tools or means of production, and socially-organised forms of human labour, Screen’s accounts of film, for instance, focussed narrowly on some of the tools or means of production/ representation. I say “some” because semiologically-influenced T h e relation of Screen’s theory to Brecht and Eisenstein is rather odd. Characteristically, quotations from Brecht were taken as starting-points for adventures which led to quite other destinations than Brecht’s own thinking. See, for example, Colin MacCabe, “Realism and the cinema: notes on some Brechtian theses” in Bennett et al. (eds), Popular Television and Film.

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theories have tended to invert the priorities of older marxist approaches to production, focusing only on some of the cultural means, those, in fact, which political economy neglects. Film theory in the 1970s acknowledged that “dual” nature of the cinematic circuit, but was mainly concerned to elaborate cinema as “mental machinery.”45 This was an understandable choice of priorities, but often pursued in a hyper-critical and non-accumulative way. More serious was the neglect of labour, of the actual human activity of producing. Again this may itself have been an exaggerated reaction against older fashions, especially, in this case auteur theory, itself an attenuated conception of labour! The neglect of (structured) human activity and especially of conflicts over all kinds of production seems in retrospect the most glaring absence. Thus, although the conception of “practice” was much invoked (e.g. “signifying practice”) it was practice quite without “praxis” in the older marxist sense. The effects of this were especially important in the debates, which we shall come to, about texts and subjects. This criticism can be pushed, however, one stage further: a very limited conception of “means.” In Screen’s theory there was a tendency to look only at the specifically cinematographic “means”—the codes of cinema. The relations between these means and other cultural resources or conditions were not examined: for example, the relation between codes of realism and the professionalism of film-makers or the relation between media more generally and the state and formal political system. If these elements might be counted as means (they might also be thought of as social relations of production), the raw materials of production were also largely absent, especially in their cultural forms. For cinema, like other public media, takes its raw materials from the pre-existing field of public discourses—the whole field that is, not just from the bit called “cinema”—and, under the kind of conditions we have examined, from private knowledges too. A critique of the very notion of representation (seen as indispensable to the critique of realism) made it hard for these theorists to pull into their accounts of film any very elaborate recognition of what an older, fuller theory might have called “content.” Cinema (and then television) were treated as though they were, so to speak, only “about” cinema or television, only reproducing or transforming discourses first produced elsewhere. In this way the cinematic text was abstracted from the whole ensemble of discourses and social relations which surrounded and formed it. One further major limitation in much of this work was a tendency to refuse any explanatory move that went behind the existing means of representation, whether this was the language system, a particular “signifying practice” or, indeed, the political system. The account was foreshortened to textual means and (just) textual “effects.” The means were not conceived historically, as having their own moment of production. This was not a local difficulty in particular analyses, but a general theoretical absence, to be found in the earliest influential models of the theory. The same difficulty haunts Saussurean linguistics. Although the rules of language systems determine speech acts, the everyday deployment of linguistic forms appears not to touch the language system itself. This is partly because its principles are conceived so abstractly that historical change or social variation escapes detection, but it is also because there is no true production moment of the language system itself. Crucial insights into language and other systems of signification are therefore foreclosed: namely, that languages are produced (or differentiated), reproduced and modified by socially-organised human practice, that there can be no language (except a dead one) without speakers, and that language is continually fought over in its words, syntax and discursive deployments. In order to recover these insights, students “The cinematic institution is not just the cinema industry (which works to fill cinemas, not to empty them), it is also the mental machinery—another industry—which spectators ‘accustomed to the cinema’ have internalized historically and which has adapted them to the consumption of films.” C. Metz, “The imaginary signifier,” Screen 16 (2) (Summer, 1975), p. 18.

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of culture who are interested in language have had to go outside the predominantly French semiological traditions, back to the marxist philosopher of language Voloshinov or across to particular researches influenced by the work of Bernstein or Halliday.

Readers in Texts; Readers in Society The most characteristic feature of later semiologies has been the claim to advance a theory of the production of subjects. Initially, the claim was based on a general philosophical opposition to humanist conceptions of a simple, unified “I” or subject, standing unproblematically at the centre of thought or moral or aesthetic evaluation. This feature of structuralism had affinities with similar arguments in Marx about the subjects of bourgeois ideologies, especially about the premises of political economy, and with Freud’s anatomization of the contradiction of human personality. “Advance semiology” presents several layers of theorization of subjectivity which are difficult to unravel.46 This complicated set of fusions and tangles combined fine leading insights with theoretical disasters. The Key insight, for me, is that narratives or images always imply or construct a position or positions from which they are to be read or viewed. Although “position” remains problematic (is it a set of cultural competences or, as the term implies, some necessary “subjection” to the text?), the insight is dazzling, especially when applied to visual images and to film. We cannot perceive the work which cameras do from a new aspect, not merely presenting an object, but putting us in place before it. If we add to this the argument that certain kinds of texts (“realism”) naturalise the means by which positioning is achieved, we have a dual insight of great force. The particular promise is to render processes hitherto unconsciously suffered (and enjoyed) open to explicit analysis. Within the context of my own argument, the importance of these insights is that they provide a way of connecting the account of textual forms with an exploration of intersections with readers’ subjectivities. A careful, elaborated and hierarchised account of the reading positions offered in a text (in narrative structure or modes of address for instance) seems to me the most developed method we have so far within the limits of text analysis. Of course, such readings should not be taken to negate other methods: the reconstruction of the manifest and latent themes of a text, its denotative and connotative moments, its ideological problematic or limiting assumptions, its metaphorical or linguistic strategies. The legitimate object of an identification of “positions” is the pressures or tendencies of subjective forms, the directions in which they move us, their force—once inhabited. The difficulties arise—and they are very numerous—if such tendencies are held to be realized in the subjectivities of readers, without additional and different forms of inquiry. The intoxications of the theory make such a move very tempting. But to slip from “reader in the text” to “reader in society” is to slide from the most abstract moment (the analysis of forms) to the most concrete object (actual readers, as they are constituted, socially, historically, culturally). This is conveniently to miss—but not explicitly as a rational abstraction—the huge number of fresh determinations or pressures of which we must now take account. In disciplinary terms we move from a ground usually covered by literary approaches to one more familiar to historical or sociological competences, but the common new elements here is the ability to handle a mass of co-existing determinations, operating at many different levels.

What follows owes much to the CCCS Screen critique cited above (note 36).

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It would take us into a long and complicated exploration of “reading” to try and gauge the full enormity of the leap.47 There is only room to stress a few difficulties in treating reading, not as reception or assimilation, but as itself an act of production. If the text is the raw material of this practice, we encounter, once again, all the problems of textual boundaries. The isolation of a text for academic scrutiny is a very specific form of reading. More commonly texts are encountered promiscuously; they pour in on us from all directions in diverse, co-existing media, and differently-paced flows. In everyday life, textual materials are complex, multiple, overlapping, coexistent, juxta-posed, in a word, “inter-textual.” If we use a more agile category like discourse, indicating elements that cut across different texts, we can say that all readings are also “interdiscursive.” No subjective form ever acts on its own. Nor can the combinations be predicted by formal or logical means, nor even from empirical analysis of the field of public discourse, though of course this may suggest hypotheses. The combinations stem, rather, from more particular logics—the structured life-activity in its objective and subjective sides, of readers or groups of readers: their social locations, their histories, their subjective interests, their private worlds. The same problem arises if we consider the tools of this practice, or the codes, competences and orientations already present within a particular social milieu. Again these are not predictable from public texts. They belong to private cultures, in the way that term has usually been used in cultural studies. They are grouped according to “ways of life.” They exist in the chaotic and historically-sedimented ensembles which Gramsci referred to as common sense. Yet these must determine the longer and shorter-range results of particular interpellative moments, or, as I prefer, the forms of cultural transformations which always occur in readings. All this points to the centrality of what is usually called “context.” Context determines the meaning, transformations or salience of a particular subjective form as much as the form itself. Context includes the cultural features described above, but also the contexts of immediate situations (e.g. the domestic context of the household) and the larger historical context or conjuncture. Yet an account would remain incomplete without some attention to the act of reading itself and an attempt to theorise its products. The absence of action by the reader is characteristic of formalist accounts. Even those theorists (e.g. Brecht, Tel Quel, Barthes in S/Z) who are concerned with productive, deconstructive or critical reading ascribe this capacity to types of text (e.g. “writable” rather than “readable” in Barthes’s terminology) and not at all to a history of real readers. This absence of production in reading parallels the ascription of productivity to signifying systems which we have already noted. At best particular acts of reading are understood as a replaying of primary human experiences. Just as an older literary criticism sought universal values and human emotions in the text, so the new formalisms understand reading as the reliving of psycho-analytically-defined mechanisms. Analysis of the spectator’s gaze, based on Lacanian accounts of the mirror phase, identify some of the motions of the ways men use images of women and relate to heroes.48 Such analyses do bridge text and reader. There is a huge potentiality, for cultural studies, in the critical use of Freudian categories, as critical that is, as the use of marxist T h ere seem to be two rather distinct approaches to reading or “audiences,” the one an extension of literary concerns, the other more sociological in approach and often growing out of media studies. I find David Morley’s work in this area consistently interesting as an attempt to combine some elements from both sets of preoccupations, though I agree with his own assessment that the Centre’s early starting-points, especially the notions of “hegemonic,” “negotiated” and “alternative” readings were exceedingly crude. See David Morley, The Nationwide Audience (BFI, 1980); “The Nationwide audience: a postscript,” Screen Education 39 (Summer, 1981). 48 See the famous analysis in terms of “scopophilia” in Laura Mulvey; “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema,” Screen 16(3) (Autumn, 1975). 47

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categories has become or is becoming. Yet present uses often bridge text and reader at a cost: the radical simplification of the social subject, reducing him or her to the original, naked, infant needs. It is difficult on this basis to specify all the realms of difference which one wishes to grasp, even, surprisingly, gender. At worst the imputations about real subjects come down to a few universals, just as it is now only a few basic features of the text which interest us. There are distinct limits to procedure which discovers, in otherwise varied phenomena, the same old mechanisms producing the same old effects. One lack in these accounts is an attempt to describe more elaborately the surface forms—the flows of inner speech and narrative—which are the most empirically obvious aspect of subjectivity. Perhaps it is thought humanist to pay attention to consciousness in this way? But we all are (aren’t we?) continuous, resourceful and absolutely frenetic users of narrative and image? And these uses occur, in part, inside the head, in the imaginative or ideal world which accompanies us in every action. We are not merely positioned by stories about ourselves, stories about others. We use realist stories about the future to prepare or plan, acting out scenarios of dangerous or pleasurable events. We use fictional or fantastical forms to escape or divert. We tell stories about the past in the form of memory which construct versions of who we presently are. Perhaps all this is simply pre-supposed in formalist analysis, yet to draw it into the foreground seems to have important implications.49 It makes it possible to recover the elements of self-production in theories of subjectivity. It suggests that before we can gauge the productivity to new interpellations, or anticipate their popularity, we need to know what stories are already in place. All this involves a move beyond what seems to be an underlying formalist assumption: that real readers are “wiped clean” at each textual encounter to be positioned (or liberated) a new by the next interpellation. Post-structuralist revisions, stressing the continuous productivity of language or discourse as process, do not necessarily help here, because it is not at all clear what all this productivity actually produces. There is no real theory of subjectivity here, partly because the explanandum, the “object” of such a theory, remains to be specified. In particular there is no account of the carry-over or continuity of self-identities from one discursive moment to the next, such as a re-theorisation of memory in discursive terms might permit. Since there is no account of continuities or of what remains constant or accumulative, there is no account of structural shifts or major re-arrangements of a sense of self, especially in adult life. Such transformations are always, implicitly, referred to “external” text-forms, for example revolutionary or poetic texts, usually forms of literature. There is no account of what predisposes the reader to use such texts productively or what conditions, other than the text-forms themselves, contribute to revolutionary conjunctures in their subjective dimensions. Similarly, with such a weight on the text, there is no account of how some readers (including, presumably, the analysts) can use conventional or realist texts critically. Above all, there is no account of what I would call the subjective aspects of struggle, no account of how there is a moment in subjective flux when social subjects (individual or collective) produce accounts of who they are, as conscious political agents, that is, constitute themselves, politically. To ask for such a theory is not to deny the major structuralist or post-structuralist insights: subjects are contradictory, “in process,” fragmented, produced. But human beings and social movements also strive to produce some coherence and continuity, and through this, exercise some control over feelings, conditions and destinies. Is it significant, for instance, that Barthes does not mention “internal” narrative in his view of the omnipresence of the narrative form, Image-Music-Text (Routledge, 1977), p. 79. Does this absence suggest a larger structuralist difficulty with inner speech?

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This is what I mean by a “post-post-structuralist” account of subjectivity. It involves returning to some older but reformulated questions—about struggle, “unity,” and the production of a political will. It involves accepting structuralist insights as a statement of the problem, whether we are speaking of our own fragmented selves or the objective and subjective fragmentation of possible political constituencies. But it also involves taking seriously what seems to me the most interesting theoretical lead: the notion of a discursive self-production of subjects, especially in the form of histories and memories.50

Social Inquiries—Logic and History I hope that the logic of our third cluster of approaches, which focus on “lived culture,” is already clear. To recapitulate, the problem is how to grasp the more concrete and more private moments of cultural circulation. This sets up two kinds of pressures. The first is towards methods which can detail, recompose and represent complex ensembles of discursive and non-discursive features as they appear in the life of particular social groups. The second is towards “social inquiry” or an active seeking out of cultural elements which do not appear in the public sphere, or only appear abstracted and transformed. Of course, students of culture have access to private forms through their own experiences and social worlds. This is a continuous resource, the more so if it is consciously specified and if its relativity is recognized. Indeed, a cultural self-criticism of this kind is the indispensable condition for avoiding the more grossly ideological forms of cultural study.51 But the first lesson here is the recognition of major cultural differences, especially across those social relationships where power, dependence and inequality are most at stake. There are perils, then, in the use of a (limited) individual or collective self-knowledge where the limits of its representativeness are uncharted and its other sides—usually the sides of powerlessness—are simply unknown. This remains a justification for forms of cultural study which take the cultural worlds of others (often reverse sides of one’s own) as the main object. We have to keep a discomforted eye on the historical pedigrees and current orthodoxies of what is sometimes called “ethnography,” a practice of representing the cultures of others. The practice, like the word, already extends social distance and constructs relations of knowledgeas-power. To “study” culture forms is already to differ from a more implicit inhabitation of culture which is the main “common-sense” mode in all social groups. (And I mean all social groups—“intellectuals” may be great at describing other people’s implicit assumptions, but are as “implicit” as anyone when it comes to their own).

T h e ideas of the last few paragraphs are still in the process of being worked out in the CCCS Popular Memory Group. For some preliminary considerations about the character of oral-historical texts, see Popular Memory Group, “Popular memory: theory, politics, method” in CCCS, Making Histories. I have found some of the essays in Daniel Berfaux, Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences (Sage,1981) useful to argue with, especially Agnes Hankiss, “Ontologies of the self: on the mythological rearranging of one’s life history.” 51 Some of the best and most influential work in cultural studies has been based on personal experience and private memory. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy is the most celebrated example, but, in general, students of culture should have the courage to use their personal experience more, more explicitly and more systematically. In this sense cultural studies is a heightened, differentiated form of everyday activities and living. Collective activities of this kind, attempting to understand not just “common” experiences but real diversities and antagonisms, are especially important, it they can be managed, and subject to the caveats which follow. 50

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The early years of new left research in particular—the 1940s, 50s and early 60s—involved a new set of relations between the subject and objects of research, especially across class relations.52 Intellectual movements associated with feminism and the work of some black intellectuals have transformed (but not abolished) these social divisions too. Experiments in community-based authorship have also, within limits achieved new social relations of cultural production and publication.53 Even so it seems wise to be suspicious, not necessarily of these practices themselves, but of all accounts of them that try to minimize the political risks and responsibilities involved, or to resolve magically the remaining social divisions. Since fundamental social relations have not been transformed, social inquiry tends constantly to return to its old anchorages, pathologising subordinated cultures, normalizing the dominant modes, helping at best to build academic reputations without proportionate returns to those who are represented. Apart from the basic political standpoint—whose side the researchers are on—much depends on the specific theoretical forms of the work, the kind of ethnography.

Limits of “Experience” There seems to be a close association between ethnographies (or histories) based on sympathetic identification and empiricist or “expressive” models of culture. The pressure is to represent lived cultures as authentic ways of life and to uphold them against ridicule or condescension. Research of this kind has often been used to criticise the dominant representations, especially those influencing state policies. Researchers have often mediated a private working-class world (often the world of their own childhood) and the definitions of the public sphere with its middle-class weighting. A very common way of upholding subordinated cultures has been to stress the bonds between the subjective and objective sides of popular practices. Working-class culture has been seen as the authentic expression of proletarian conditions, perhaps the only expression possible. This relation or identity has sometimes been cemented by “old marxist” assumptions about the proper state of consciousness of the working-class. A similar set of assumptions can be traced in some feminist writings about culture which portray and celebrate a distinct feminine culture world reflective of women’s condition. The term which most commonly indexes this theoretical framework is “experience,” with its characteristic fusing of objective and subjective aspects. Such frameworks produce major difficulties, not least for researchers themselves. Secondary analysis and re-presentation must always be problematic or intrusive if “spontaneous” cultural forms are seen as a completed or necessary form of social knowledge. The only legitimate practice, in this framework, is to represent an unmediated chunk of authentic life experience itself, in something like its own terms. This form of cultural empiricism is a dead hand on the most important of cultural studies practices, and is one of the reasons why it is also the most difficult to deliver at all. There is also a systematic pressure towards presenting lived cultures primarily in terms of their homogeneity and distinctiveness. This theoretical pressure, in conceptions like “whole way of life,” becomes startlingly clear when issues of nationalism and racism are taken into account. T h is is forcefully argued by Paul Jones in “‘Organic’ Intellectuals and the Generation of English Cultural Studies,” Thesis Eleven 5/6, 1982, 85-124. 53 See Dave Morley and Ken Worpole (eds), The Republic of Letters: Working Class Writing and Local Publishing (Comedia, 1982). For a more external and critical view, see “Popular memory” in Making Histories. Also instructive is the debate between Ken Worpole, Stephen Yeo and Gerry White in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 52

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There is a discomforting convergence between “radical” but romantic versions of “workingclass culture” and notions of a shared Englishness or white ethnicity. Here too one finds the term “way of life” used as though “cultures” were slabs of significance always humped around by the same set of people. In left ethnography the term has often been associated with an underrepresentation of non-class relations and of fragmentations within social classes.54 The main lack within expressive theories is attention to the means of signification as a specific cultural determination. There is no better instance of the divorce between formal analysis and “concrete studies” than the rarity of linguistic analysis in historical or ethnographic work. Like much structuralist analysis, then, ethnographies often work with a foreshortened version of our circuit, only here it is the whole arc of “public” forms which is often missing. Thus the creativity of private forms is stressed, the continuous cultural productivity of everyday life, but not its dependence on the materials and modes of public production. Methodologically, the virtues of abstraction are eschewed so that the separate (or separable) elements of lived cultures are not unravelled, and their real complexity (rather than their essential unity) is not recognized.

Best Ethnography I do not wish to imply that this form of cultural study is intrinsically compromised. On the contrary, I tend to see it as the privileged form of analysis, both intellectually and politically. Perhaps this will be clear if I briefly review some aspects of the best ethnographic studies at Birmingham.55 These studies have used abstraction and formal description to identify key elements in a lived cultural ensemble. Cultures are read “textually.” But they have also been viewed alongside a reconstruction of the social position of the users. There is a large difference here between a “structural ethnography” and a more ethnomethodological approach concerned exclusively with the level of meaning and usually within an individualistic framework. This is one reason, for instance, why feminist work in the Centre has been as much preoccupied with theorising the position of women as with “talking to girls.” We have tried to ally cultural analysis with a (sometimes too generalized) structural sociology, centering upon gender, class and race. Perhaps the most distinctive feature has been the connections made between lived cultural ensembles and public forms. Typically, studies have concerned the appropriation of elements of mass culture and their transformation according to the needs and cultural logics of social groups. Studies of the contribution of mass cultural forms (popular music, fashion, drugs of motor bikes) to sub-cultural styles, of girls’ use of popular cultural forms, and of the lads’ resistance to the knowledge and authority of school are cases in point. In other words the best studies of lived culture are also, necessarily, studies of “reading.” It is from this point of view—the intersection

Some CCCS work is not exempt from this difficulty. Some of these criticisms apply, for instance, to Resistance through Rituals, especially parts of the theoretical overviews. 55 What follows is based, in rather too composite a way perhaps, on the work of Paul Willis, Angela McRobbie, Dick Hebdige, Christine Griffin, and Dorothy Hobson and on discussions with other ethnographic researchers in the Centre. See especially Paul Willis, Learning to Labour, Paul Willis, Profane Culture (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Angela McRobbie, “Working-class girls and femininity” and Dorothy Hobson, “Housewives: isolation as oppression,” in Women Take Issue: Dick Hebdige, Subculture Routledge, 1979); Christine Griffin, CCCS Stencilled Papers 69 and 70. For an all-too-rare discussion of method in this area, see Paul Willis, “Notes on method” in Hall et al., Culture Media, Language. 54

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of public and private forms—that we have the best chance of answering the two key sets of questions to which cultural studies—rightly—continually returns. The first set concerns “popularity” pleasure and the use value of cultural forms. Why do some subjective forms acquire a popular force, become principles of living? What are the different ways in which subjective forms are inhabited—playfully or in deep seriousness, in fantasy or by rational agreement, because it is the thing to do or the thing not to do? The second set of questions concerns the outcomes of cultural forms. Do these forms tend to reproduce existing forms of subordination or oppression? Do they hold down or contain social ambitions, defining wants too modestly? Or are they forms which permit a questioning of existing relations or a running beyond them in terms of desire? Do they point to alternative social arrangements? Judgments like these cannot be made on the basis of the analysis of production conditions or text alone; they can best be answered once we have traced a social form right through the circuit of its transformations and made some attempt to place it within the whole context of relation of hegemony within the society.

Future Shapes of Cultural Studies: Directions My argument has been that there are three main models of cultural studies research: productionbased studies, text-based studies, and studies of lived cultures. This division conforms to the main appearances of cultural circuits, but inhibits the development of our understandings in important ways. Each approach has a rationality in relation to that moment it has most closely in view, but is quite evidently inadequate, even “ideological” as an account of the whole. Yet each approach also implies a different view of the politics of culture. Productionrelated studies imply a struggle to control or transform the most powerful means of cultural production, or to throw up alternative means by which a counter-hegemonic strategy may be pursued. Such discourses are usually addressed to institutional reformers or to radical political parties. Text-based studies, focusing on the forms of cultural products, have usually concerned the possibilities of a transformative cultural practice. They have been addressed most often to avant-garde practitioners, critics and teachers. These approaches have appealed especially to professional educators, in colleges or schools, because knowledge appropriate to radical practice have been adapted (not without problems) to a knowledge appropriate to critical readers. Finally, research into lived cultures has been closely associated with a politics of “representation” upholding the ways of life of subordinated social groups and criticizing the dominant public forms in the light of hidden wisdoms. Such works may even aspire to help to give hegemonic or non-corporate turns to cultures that are usually privatized, stigmatized or silenced. It is important to stress that the circuit has not been presented as an adequate account of cultural processes or even of elementary forms. It is not a completed set of abstractions against which every partial approach can be judged. It is not therefore an adequate strategy for the future just to add together the three sets of approaches, using each for its appropriate moment. This would not work without transformations of each approach and, perhaps our thinking about “moments.” For one thing there are some real theoretical incompatibilities between approaches; for another, the ambitions of many projects are already large enough! It is important to recognize that each aspect has a life of its own in order to avoid reductions, but, after that, it may be more transformative to rethink each moment in the light of the others, importing objects and methods of study usually developed in relation to one moment into the next. The moments,

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though separable, are not in fact discrete, therefore we need to trace what Marx would have called “the inner connections” and “real identities” between them. Those concerned with production studies need to look more closely, for example, at the specifically cultural conditions of production. This would include the more formal semiological questions about the codes and conventions on which a television programme, say, draws, and the ways in which it reworks them. It would also have to include a wider range of discursive materials—ideological themes and problematics—that belong to a wider social and political conjuncture. But already, in the production moment, we would expect to find more or less intimate relations with the lived culture of particular social groups, if only that of the producers. Discursive and ideological elements would be used and transformed from there too. “Already” then, in the study of the production moment, we can anticipate the other aspects of the larger process and prepare the ground for more adequate account. Similarly we need to develop, further, forms of text-based study which hook up with the production and readership perspectives. It may well be, in the Italian contexts, where semiological and literary traditions are so strong, that those are the most important transformations. It is possible to look for the signs of the production process in a text: this is one useful way of transforming the very unproductive concern with “bias” that still dominated discussion of “factual” media. It is also possible to read texts as forms of representation, provided it is realised that we are always analysing a representation of a representation. The first object, that which is represented in the text, is not an objective event or fact, but has already been given meanings in some other social practice. In this way it is possible to consider the relationship, if any, between the characteristic codes and conventions of social groups and the forms in which they are represented in a soap opera or comedy. This is not merely an academic exercise, since it is essential to have such an account to help establish the text’s salience for this group or others. There is no question of abandoning existing forms of text analysis, but these have to be adapted to, rather than superseding, the study actual readerships. There seem to be two main requirements here. First, the formal reading of a text has to be as open or as multi-layered as possible, identifying preferred positions or frameworks certainly, but also alternative readings and subordinated frameworks, even if these can only be discerned as fragments, or as contradictions in the dominant forms. Second, analysts need to abandon once and for all, both of the two main models of the critical reader: the primarily evaluative reading (is this a good/bad text?) and the aspiration to text-analysis as an “objective science.” The problem with both models is that by de-relativising our acts of reading they remove from self-conscious consideration (but not as an active presence) our common sense knowledge of the larger cultural contexts and possible readings. I have already noted the difficulties here, but want also to stress the indispensability of this resource. The difficulties are met best, but not wholly overcome, when “the analyst” is a groups. Many of my most educative moments in cultural studies have come from these internal group dialogues about the readings of texts across, for example, gendered experiences. This is not to deny the real disciplines of “close” reading, in the sense of careful, but not in the sense of confined. Finally, those concerned with “concrete” cultural description cannot afford to ignore the presence of text-like structures and particular forms of discursive organisation. In particular we need to know what distinguishes private cultural forms, in their basis modes of organisation, from the public forms. In this way we might be able to specify, linguistically, for example, the differential relation of social groups to different media forms, and the real processes of reading that are involved. Of course, the transformation of particular approaches will have effects on others. If linguistic analysis takes account of historical determinations, for example, or provides us with ways of

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analysing the operations of power, the division between language studies and concrete accounts will break down. This goes for the associated politics too. At the moment there are few areas so blocked by disagreement and incomprehension as the relationship between avant-garde theorists and practitioners of the arts and those interested in a more grass-roots entry through community arts, working-class writing, women’s writing and so on. Similarly, it is hard to convey, just how mechanical, how unaware of cultural dimensions, the politics of most left fractions remain. If I am right that theories are related to viewpoints, we are talking not just of theoretical developments, but about some of the conditions for effective political alliances as well.

3

Cultural Studies An Introduction John Storey

Preliminary Definitions Colin Sparks (Chapter 1) highlights the difficulties involved in trying to define cultural studies with any degree of precision: It is not possible to draw a sharp line and say that on one side of it we can find the proper province of cultural studies. Neither is it possible to point to a unified theory or methodology which are characteristic to it or of it. A veritable rag-bag of ideas, methods and concerns from literary criticism, sociology, history, media studies, etc., are lumped together under the convenient label of cultural studies.

Although Sparks’s essay dates from 1977, problems of definition still remain for an author writing almost 20 years later. Therefore, although it is possible to point to degree programmes, to journals, to conferences and to associations, there is no simple answer to the question, “what is cultural studies?” . . . Traditionally, an academic discipline is defined by three criteria: first, there is the object of study; secondly, there are the basic assumptions which underpin the method(s) of approach to the object of study; and thirdly, there is the history of the discipline itself. John Fiske (Chapter 6) maintains that “culture” in cultural studies “is neither aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but political.” What he means by this is that the object of study in cultural studies is not culture defined in the narrow sense, as the objects of aesthetic excellence (“high art”); nor culture defined in an equally narrow sense, as a process of aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual development; but culture understood, in Raymond Williams’s famous appropriation from anthropology, as “a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group” (1976, 90). This is a definition of culture which can embrace the first two definitions but also, and crucially, it can range beyond the social exclusivity and narrowness of these to include the study of popular culture. Although cultural studies cannot (or should not) be reduced to the study of popular culture, it is certainly the case that the study of popular culture is central to the project of cultural studies. As Cary Nelson (Chapter 16) points out, “people with ingrained contempt for popular culture can never fully understand the cultural studies project.” But it is also the case, as argued by Richard Johnson (Chapter 5), that “all social practices can be looked at from a cultural point of view, for the work they do, subjectively.” Johnson defines cultural studies as the study of “historical forms of consciousness or subjectivity.” Defined in this way, it must

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decentre “the text” as an object of study. “The text” is no longer studied for its own sake, nor even for the social effects it may be thought to produce, but rather for the subjective or cultural forms which it realises and makes available. The text is only a means in cultural studies; strictly, perhaps, it is a raw material from which certain forms (e.g. of narrative, ideological problematic, mode of address, subject position, etc.) may be abstracted. . . . But the ultimate object of cultural studies is not. . . the text, but the social life of subjective forms at each moment of their circulation, including their textual embodiments.

John Frow and Meaghan Morris (Chapter 22) take a slightly different view: There is a precise sense in which cultural studies uses the concept of text as its fundamental model. . . . Rather than designating a place where meanings are constructed in a single level of inscription (writing, speech, film, dress . . .), it works as an interleaving of “levels.” If a shopping mall [for example] is conceived on the model of textuality, then this “text” involves practices, institutional structures and the complex forms of agency they entail, legal, political, and financial conditions of existence, and particular flows of power and knowledge, as well as a particular multilayered semantic organisation; it is an ontologically mixed entity, and one for which there can be no privileged or “correct” reading. It is this, more than anything else, that forces cultural studies’ attention to the diversity of audiences for or users of the structures of textuality it analyses—that is, to the open-ended social life of texts—and that forces it, thereby, to question the authority or finality of its own readings.

Moreover, as Frow and Morris make clear, texts exist only within networks of intertextual relations. To study a “text” means to locate it across a range of competing moments of inscription, representation and struggle. In other words, cultural studies seeks to keep in equilibrium the different moments of cultural production—material production, symbolic production, textual production, and the “production in use” of consumption. To narrow one’s focus to one moment only, and think this will adequately account for the others, is to think and act (to borrow a phrase from the good old days of certainty) “ideologically.” Cultural studies also regards culture as political in a quite specific sense, one which reveals the dominant political position within cultural studies. Typically, Frow and Morris (Chapter 22) conceive of culture “not as organic expression of a community, nor as an autonomous sphere of aesthetic forms, but as a contested and conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with the processes of formation and re-formation of social groups.” Perhaps the best-known elaboration of this conception of culture comes from Stuart Hall (1981, 239). He describes popular culture, for example, as “an arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture—already fully formed—might be simply ‘expressed.’ But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why ‘popular culture matters.’” Others within cultural studies might not express their attitude to popular culture quite in these terms, but they would certainly share Hall’s concern to think culture politically. Johnson (Chapter 5) explains this in terms of three main premises regarding culture: The first is that cultural processes are intimately connected with social relations, especially with class relations and class formations, with sexual divisions, with the racial structuring of social relations and with age oppressions as a form of dependency. The second is that culture involves power and helps to produce asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and

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Tony Bennett (Chapter 19) makes the case for cultural studies to change its understanding of culture. Central to his argument for the introduction of “policy” into cultural studies is a changed definition of culture, from one which defines it in semantic terms to one that sees it as a governmental practice for transforming both mental and physical behaviour. All the basic assumptions of cultural studies are Marxist. This is not to say that all practitioners of cultural studies are Marxists, but that cultural studies is itself grounded in Marxism. Marxism informs cultural studies in two fundamental ways. First, to understand the meanings of culture we must analyse it in relation to the social structure and its historical contingency. Although constituted by a particular social structure with a particular history, culture is not studied as a reflection of this structure and history. As Williams (Chapter 8) makes clear, history and culture are not separate entities. It is never a question of reading a text against its historical background or using the text to illustrate an already-formulated account of a historical moment—history and text are inscribed in each other and are embedded together as a part of the same process. Cultural studies insists that culture’s importance derives from the fact that it helps constitute the structure and shape the history. As Hall (Chapter 21) explains, “what cultural studies has helped me to understand is that the media [for example] play a part in the formation, in the constitution, of the things that they reflect. It is not that there is a world outside, ‘out there,’ which exists free of the discourses of representation. What is ‘out there’ is, in part, constituted by how it is represented.” Second, cultural studies assumes that capitalist industrial societies are societies divided unequally along ethnic, gender, generational and class lines. It contends that culture is one of the principal sites where this division is established and contested: culture is a terrain on which takes place a continual struggle over meaning, in which subordinate groups attempt to resist the imposition of meanings which bear the interests of dominant groups. It is this which makes culture ideological. Ideology is without doubt the central concept in cultural studies. James W. Carey (Chapter 4) even suggests that “British cultural studies could be described just as easily and perhaps more accurately as ideological studies.” There are many competing definitions of ideology, but it is the formulation established by Hall (1982) which is generally accepted as the dominant definition within cultural studies. Working within a framework of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Hall developed a theory of “articulation” to explain the processes of ideological struggle (Hall’s use of “articulation” plays on the term’s double meaning: to express and to join together). He argues that cultural texts and practices are not inscribed with meaning, guaranteed once and for all by the intentions of production; meaning is always the result of an act of “articulation” (an active process of “production in use”). The process is called “articulation” because meaning has to be expressed, but it is always expressed in a specific context, a specific historical moment, within a specific discourse(s). Thus expression is always connected (articulated) to and conditioned by context. Hall also draws on the work of the Russian theorist Valentin Volosinov. Volosinov (1973) argues that meaning is always determined by context of articulation. Cultural texts and practices are “multiaccentual”; that is, they can be articulated with different “accents” by different people in different contexts for different politics. Meaning is therefore a social production; the world has to be made to mean. A text or practice or event is not the issuing source of meaning, but a site where the articulation of meaning—variable meaning(s)—can take place. And because different meanings can be ascribed to the same text or practice or event, meaning is always a

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potential site of conflict. Thus the field of culture is for cultural studies a major site of ideological struggle; a terrain of “incorporation” and “resistance”; one of the sites where hegemony is to be won or lost. According to Hall’s influential account (Chapter 2) of the formation and development of British cultural studies, the key point to understand is that “there are no ‘absolute beginnings’ and few unbroken continuities. . . . What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes.” Hall charts the history of cultural studies from its “founding” in the late 1950s, through its institutionalization at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in 1964, and the subsequent theoretical moments of culturalism, structuralism and Gramscian Marxism.1 Other essays collected here elaborate and extend this history to include the moments of poststructuralism and postmodernism (see, for example, Franklin et al., Chapter 15). Others extend the account geographically, charting the movement of cultural studies from Birmingham to Australia and the USA.

Cultural Studies: A Political Project Johnson (Chapter 5) argues that cultural studies is political, “but not in an immediate pragmatic sense.” Nelson (Chapter 16) makes a similar point: although “cultural studies allies itself with and helps theorize political action . . . political action and cultural studies are not interchangeable.” Nevertheless, as Alan O’Connor (Chapter 10) contends, “The tradition of cultural studies is not one of value-free scholarship but of political commitment.” Frow and Morris (Chapter 22) make a similar point: “cultural studies . . . is partisan in its insistence on the political dimension of knowledge. . . . [T]he intellectual project of cultural studies is always at some level marked . . . by a discourse of social involvement.” In the early days of the Birmingham CCCS, cultural studies was regarded, at least by Hall (1990a, 12), as “politics by other means.” Part of, or perhaps central to, the project of cultural studies (at least from the 1970s) was the production of what Gramsci (1971) calls “organic intellectuals.” According to Hall (1992, 281), “there is no doubt in my mind that we [at the CCCS] were trying to find an institutional practice in cultural studies that might produce an organic intellectual.” Bennett (Chapter 19) is more than a little sceptical of Hall’s reading of cultural studies as a political project to establish organic intellectuals. According to Bennett, “to attribute such a function to an intellectual project which has and continues to be based primarily in the academy suggests a degree of misrecognition of its relations to the real conditions of its existence that can only be described as ideological.” Frow and Morris (Chapter 22) suggest that “In Australian conditions . . . Bennett’s judgment may be too harsh.” Nevertheless, the change in cultural studies from postgraduate area of research to undergraduate teaching (students take undergraduate degrees in cultural studies—are taught cultural studies) may mean that many of the grander claims made in the 1970s are no longer applicable or relevant in the 1990s. Rather than ask “what is cultural studies?” perhaps the more pressing question is “whom is cultural studies for?” For another version of this history, with particular reference to popular culture, see Storey (1993) and Storey (1994).

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According to Michael Green (Chapter 3), it is a question of locating the nearest appropriate constituency: Inside the Centre [for Contemporary Cultural Studies], groups attempted to think of their work in relation to the problems of the nearest appropriate constituency, which might not always be that of teachers in higher or secondary education. For example, there could be a connection between media research and the interests of media workers; between research on popular literature and alternative publishers and bookshops, or the Federation of Worker Writers; between studies of the cultural formation of teenage working-class girls and strategies of feminist “youth work.”

In a response to a paper by Hall (1992, 294), bell hooks argued that, ultimately, the politics of cultural studies are to be found in its pedagogy: Really responding to students who go see Do the Right Thing and come back and say “Look, we took your class, we understand this feminist standpoint, but we also think Spike Lee is a down brother so how do we deal with what we feel we saw in this particular cultural production?” To me, that’s the exciting dimension of cultural studies, that it can take place, not as me writing a privatized article, but as a response to students asking what type of critical thinking allows them to engage this cultural production in a way that informs our political practice.

Williams (Chapter 8) contends that the future of cultural studies (at least in Britain) should be to intervene in 16–18 education to challenge “a definition of industrial training which would have sounded crude in the 1860s.” Henry A. Giroux (1994), however, argues that cultural studies needs to rethink the practice of pedagogy; to engage in what he calls “critical pedagogy.” Giroux’s point is that cultural studies frequently fails to take seriously questions of pedagogy. Too often, according to Giroux, those working in the field of cultural studies adhere to “the notion of pedagogy as a transparent vehicle for transmitting truth and knowledge” (1994, 130). But pedagogy does not represent a neutral site, free from the operations of power and politics. Far from being the simple transmission of ready-made information, pedagogy is for Giroux a site of struggle, a terrain where the complex relations between knowledge and power are worked over. As part of his project, Giroux distinguishes between a pedagogy of theory and a pedagogy of theorizing. Put simply, this is the difference between theory as a body of knowledge to be learnt and theory as an activity to be practised. In the former, theory is taught as a means of understanding the world; in the latter, theorizing is encouraged as a pedagogical practice in which students become actual participants in the use of theory. Although both are crucial to the production of “critical pedagogy,” too often it is only the former which actually happens.

Post-Marxism: A Crisis in Cultural Studies? “Crisis,” as Lidia Curti (1992, 134) points out, “has been the password of the field from Hoggart to . . . Hebdige.” Angela McRobbie (1992, 719) agrees: “The word crisis is one which appears with alarming regularity in the discourses of cultural studies.” For McRobbie (ibid.), the current

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crisis is perhaps better understood as a “panic” engendered by an undermining of the Marxist paradigm: Marxism, a major point of reference for the whole cultural studies project in the UK, has been undermined not just from the viewpoint of the postmodern critics who attack its teleological propositions, its meta-narrative status, its essentialism, economism, Eurocentrism, and its place within the whole Enlightenment project, but also, of course, as a result of the events in Eastern Europe, with the discrediting of much of the socialist project.

As McRobbie points out (ibid.), the debate about Marxism in cultural studies has yet to take place. The role of Marxism in cultural studies is still uncertain, but what does seem to be the case is that the return to a pre-postmodern Marxism as marked out by critics like Fredric Jameson (1984) and David Harvey (1989) is untenable because the terms of that return are predicated on prioritizing economic relations and economic determinations over cultural and political relations by positioning these latter in a mechanical and reflectionist role. However, there is a sense in which cultural studies was always-already post-Marxist. As Hall (1992, 279) makes clear, There was never a prior moment when cultural studies and Marxism represented a perfect theoretical fit. From the beginning . . . there was always-already the question of the great inadequacies, theoretically and politically, the resounding silences, the great evasions of Marxism—the things that Marx did not talk about or seem to understand which were our privileged object of study: culture, ideology, language, the symbolic. These were alwaysalready, instead, the things which had imprisoned Marxism as a mode of thought, as an activity of critical practice—its orthodoxy, its doctrinal character, its determinism, its reductionism, its immutable law of history, its status as a metanarrative. That is to say, the encounter between British cultural studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement with a problem—not a theory, not even a problematic.

Therefore, although speaking of cultural studies as a political project is to articulate, sooner or later, its relationship with Marxism, and while it is clear that virtually all its founding assumptions are Marxist, it is not the case that cultural studies is “simply” Marxism in disguise—what Green (Chapter 3) calls “a ‘cover’ for a revised and qualified marxism.” Marxism was one of the things it struggled against. As Green points out, cultural studies was born in a double refusal. On the one hand, it “refused the elitism of high culture and the great tradition” and, on the other, “it was equally opposed to the reductions of marxism understood as a hard determinism of the economic.”

Uses and Abuses of Cultural Studies Jim McGuigan (1992) claims that the real “crisis” in cultural studies is that it has narrowed its focus to questions of consumption without situating such questions within the context of the material relations of production. To reverse the trend, he advocates a dialogue between cultural studies and the political economy of culture. He fears that for cultural studies to remain separate

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is for it to remain politically ineffective as a mode of explanation, and to risk becoming complicit with the prevailing forces of exploitation and oppression.2 McGuigan (ibid., 85) identifies Fiske’s work as “indicative of the critical decline of British cultural studies.” Now McGuigan may be right about Fiske, but this does not make him right about cultural studies. Put simply, Fiske is not cultural studies (and nor would he claim to be). Others, from within cultural studies, have made similar criticisms of Fiske’s work—for example, Ien Ang (Chapter 14), Martin Barker (1990), Martin Barker and Anne Beezer (1992), Lawrence Grossberg (1992) and Morris (Chapter 7). To establish Fiske as cultural studies requires their exclusion—it requires a reified and reduced field of study. David Harris’s critique of cultural studies operates in much the same way. For example, in his discussion of what he regards as the inadequacies of youth studies at the CCCS, he uses the contributions of Jenny Garber and McRobbie to highlight the gender-blindness of much of this early work. But he conveniently fails to acknowledge, for the telling moment of his critique, that both Garber and McRobbie make their criticisms not only from within cultural studies but also in one of the Birmingham Centre’s own publications. In other words, the fact that their argument (their work) is also cultural studies is bracketed out of the argument in order for it to function as a critique of cultural studies. Whatever else cultural studies is, it is certainly not the monolithic unity conjured up by both McGuigan and Harris. As Green (Chapter 3) points out, “cultural studies has been resolutely ‘impure.’” Frow and Morris (Chapter 22) also refer to the “methodological impurity” of cultural studies. Hall (1992, 278) makes this very clear: Cultural Studies has multiple discourses; it has a number of different histories. It is a whole set of formations; it has its own different conjunctures and moments in the past. It included many different kinds of work. I want to insist on that! It always was a set of unstable formations. It was “centred” only in quotation marks. . . . It had many trajectories; many people had and have different theoretical positions, all of them in contention. Theoretical work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was more appropriately called theoretical noise. It was accompanied by a great deal of bad feeling, argument, unstable anxieties, and angry silences.

For example, the centrality of class in cultural studies was disrupted first by feminism’s insistence on the importance of gender, and then by black students raising questions about the invisibility of race in much cultural studies analysis. Women Take Issue (Women’s Studies Group, 1978, 15) is a telling example: “Our initial reason for wanting to produce the book was fundamental: the continued absence from CCCS of a visible concern with feminist issues.” The Empire Strikes Back (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982, 7) announces: There are many reasons why the issues raised by the study of “races” and racisms should be central to the concerns of cultural studies. Yet racist ideologies and racial conflicts have been ignored, both in historical writing and in accounts of the present. If nothing else, this book should be taken as a signal that this marginalization cannot continue.

Paul Gilroy (1987, 12) makes a similar point in There Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack: “The book . . . related to its origins in cultural studies . . . seeks to provide . . . a corrective to the more ethnocentric dimensions of that discipline.” For an informed and polemical debate between cultural studies and the political economy of culture, see Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995).

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Cultural studies has always been an unfolding discourse, responding to changing historical and political conditions and always marked by debate, disagreement and intervention. Now this does not mean that cultural studies is a completely open disciplinary field. One cannot simply rename as cultural studies what one already does in order to impress publishers or to salvage a declining area of academic work. Cultural studies does mean something. There can be no doubt that cultural studies has been experiencing great success recently. While success is to be welcomed, there are suspicions that it might not be all that it seems. Nelson et al. (1992, 10–11), for example, claim that “Too many people simply rename what they were already doing to take advantage of the cultural studies boom.” Grossberg (1992, 404) makes a similar point: “Many of those now describing their work as cultural studies were attacking cultural studies only a few years ago although they have not changed their project in the interim. Many of those who now appropriate the term want to read only very selectively in the tradition.”

Hegemony Theory Revisited McRobbie’s (1994) response to the so-called “crisis” in cultural studies is to argue for a return to neo-Gramscian hegemony theory. McRobbie accepts that cultural studies has been radically transformed as debates about postmodernism and postmodernity have replaced the more familiar debates about ideology and hegemony. Cultural studies, she claims, has responded in two ways. On the one hand, it has prompted a return to economic reductive forms of analysis; and on the other, it has given rise to an uncritical celebration of consumerism, in which consumption is understood too exclusively in terms of pleasure and meaning-making. McRobbie argues for a return to the concept of “reproduction” to enable consumption to be seen in its broader context of political and social relations. She rejects a return “to a crude and mechanical base-superstructure model, and also the dangers of pursuing a kind of cultural populism to a point at which anything which is consumed and is popular is also seen as oppositional” (ibid., 39). Instead, she calls for “an extension of Gramscian cultural analysis” (ibid.) and for a return to ethnographic cultural analysis which takes as its object of study “[t]he lived experience which breathes life into [the] . . . inanimate objects [of popular culture]” (ibid., 27). Such work would be situated in a context of reproduction. Ang (Chapter 14) also calls for “a return to the problematic of hegemony”: To avoid the “banality” in cultural studies that Morris [Chapter 7] points to . . . the ethnographic perspective on audiences needs to be placed in a broader theoretical framework, so that it ceases to be just a sophisticated empirical audience research, but becomes part of a more encompassing understanding, both structural and historical, of our contemporary cultural condition.

Neo-Gramscian hegemony theory at its best insists that there is a dialectic between the processes of production and the activities of consumption. The consumer always confronts a text or practice in its material existence as a result of determinate conditions of production. But in the same way, the text or practice is confronted by a consumer who in effect produces in use the range of possible meaning(s)—these cannot just be read off from the materiality of the text or practice, or the means or relations of its production.

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Cultural studies would also insist that making popular culture (“production in use”) can be empowering to subordinate and resistant to dominant understandings of the world. But this is not to say that popular culture is always empowering and resistant. To deny the passivity of consumption is not to deny that sometimes consumption is passive; to deny that the consumers of popular culture are not cultural dupes is not to deny that the culture industries seek to manipulate. But it is to deny that popular culture is little more than a degraded landscape of commercial and idealogical manipulation, successfully imposed from above, to make profit and secure social control. The best of cultural studies insists that to decide these matters requires vigilance and attention to the details of the production, distribution and consumption of culture. These are not matters that can be decided once and for all (outside the contingencies of history and politics) with an elitist glance and a condescending sneer. Nor can they be read off from the moment of production (locating meaning, pleasure, ideological effect, etc., in, variously, the intention, the means of production or the production itself): these are only aspects of the contexts for “production in use,” and it is, ultimately, in “production in use” that questions of meaning, pleasure, ideological effect, etc. can be (contingently) decided. Moreover, it is important to distinguish between the power of the culture industries and the power of their influence. Too often the two are conflated, but they are not necessarily the same. The trouble with the political economy approach is that too often it is assumed that they are the same. While it is clearly important to locate the texts and practices of popular culture within the field of their economic determinations, it is clearly insufficient to do this and think you have also analysed important questions of audience appropriation and use. As Hall (Chapter 2) points out, the problem with the political economy of culture approach is that “It tends to conceive the economic level as not only a ‘necessary’ but a ‘sufficient’ explanation of cultural and ideological effects.” There are different ways of thinking, different ways of using what Hall calls “the enormously productive metaphor of hegemony” (1992, 280). Hegemony theory in cultural studies operates not always quite as formulated by Gramsci. The concept has been expanded and elaborated to take into account other areas of struggle. Whereas for Gramsci the concept is used to explain and explore relations of power articulated in terms of class, recent formulations in cultural studies have extended the concept to include, for example, gender, race, meaning and pleasure. What has remained constant (or relatively constant under the impact of political and theoretical change, from the left-Leavisism of Richard Hoggart to the postmodernism of, for example, McRobbie, Fiske and Grossberg) is a particular guiding principle of cultural analysis. It is first found in what Green (Chapter 3) quite rightly calls “Hoggart’s remarkably enduring formulation”: “Against this background may be seen how much the more generally diffused appeals of the mass publications connect with commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes and how they are meeting resistance” (my italics, Hoggart, 1957, 19). In the 1960s it is given a culturalist accent by Hall and Whannel: “Teenage culture is a contradictory mixture of the authentic and the manufactured: it is an area of self-expression for the young and a lush grazing pasture for the commercial providers” (my italics, 1964, 276). In the 1970s it is found in the Gramscian tones of John Clarke et al.: “Men and women are . . . formed, and form themselves through society, culture and history. So the existing cultural patterns form a sort of historical reservoir—a pre-constituted ‘field of possibilities’—which groups take up, transform, develop. Each group makes something of its starting conditions—and through this ‘making’, through this practice, culture is reproduced and transmitted” (my italics, 1976, 11). In the 1980s we hear it in the Foucauldian analysis of Mica Nava: “Consumerism is far more than just economic activity: it is also about dream and consolation, communication and confrontation, image and identity. . . . Consumerism is a discourse through which disciplinary power is both exercised and contested” (my italics, 1987, 209–10). In the 1990s it

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is located by Angela McRobbie in the “new times” of postmodernism: “Finally we need a mode of analysis which is connective and integrative and which tracks the social and ideological relations which prevail at every level between cultural production and consumption . . . from where it is socially constructed to where it is socially deconstructed and contested, in the institutions, practices and relationships of everyday life” (my italics, 1994, 41). In every decade in the history of cultural studies, the point has been made and repeated. It is the “Gramscian insistence” (before, with and after Gramsci), learnt from Marx, that we make culture and we are made by culture; there is agency and there is structure. It is not enough to celebrate agency; nor is it enough to detail the structure(s) of power—we must always keep in mind the dialectical play between resistance and incorporation. The best of cultural studies has always been mindful of this.

Where Is Cultural Studies? Things have certainly changed a great deal since the early days of cultural studies. Hall (Chapter 21) remembers: “When I first went to the University of Birmingham in 1964 to help Professor Richard Hoggart found the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, no such thing as cultural studies yet existed. . . . Today cultural studies programs exist everywhere, especially in the United States.” During the course of the last 15–20 years, the location of cultural studies has shifted from Britain to Australia, the USA and beyond.3 The internationalization of cultural studies can be easily demonstrated by an examination of the editorial board of the journal, Cultural Studies. Of its 47 members, 19 are from the USA, nine from Australia, nine from the UK, five from Canada, two from Italy, and one each from Germany, Finland and Taiwan.4 Morris (Chapter 7) tells us that “cultural studies in Australia has been for some time in the state that the Japanese call a boom.” What she means by this is not just that cultural studies is developing quickly in Australia but “that the marketing of cultural studies is beginning to define and restrict what it is possible to do and say in its name.” Graeme Turner (Chapter 20) makes a similar point: In Australia . . . the influence of British cultural studies has been profound. Most of us are aware that, as it establishes itself ever more securely within the academy, and as it becomes increasingly comfortable in its relations with the disciplines it originally interrogated, British cultural studies is in danger of becoming a pedagogic rather than a critical or political enterprise.

Hall (1992, 285) also speaks of danger. It is the USA rather than Australia which is his concern. His focus is what he calls the enormous explosion of cultural studies in the US, its rapid professionalization and institutionalization, is not a moment which any of us who tried to set up a marginalized Centre in a university like Birmingham could, in any simple way, regret. And yet I have to See Bill Schwarz’s essay, “Where is cultural studies?” (1989). The essay has a double focus: on the one hand, it poses the question in the sense that cultural studies has gone missing and, on the other, in terms of the new geographic locations of cultural studies. 4 T h e readings collected here are divided among Australia (Chapters 7, 14, 19, 20 and 22), Britain (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 15 and 21) and the USA (Chapters 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17 and 18). 3

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What concerns Hall is that the institutionalization of cultural studies in America will follow the same pattern as the institutionalization of French deconstruction; it will “formalize out of existence the critical questions of power, history, and politics” by reducing them to “exclusively matters of language and textuality” (ibid., 286). But Hall does not advocate the cultural studies equivalent of a “back to basics” policy (in this instance, a return to British origins). As he explains, “It has nothing to do with [American] cultural studies making itself more like British cultural studies, which is I think, an entirely false and empty cause to try to propound” (ibid.). O’Connor’s (Chapter 10) worry is slightly different. He contends that in the USA cultural studies is in danger of becoming “synonymous with various types of postmodern theorizing.” But worse still, “Cultural studies in the United States is being sponsored by scholars who rarely have any connection to existing political and cultural movements and are somewhat surprised that this might even be possible.” Nelson (Chapter 16) is concerned that “Of all the intellectual movements that have swept the humanities in America since the seventies, none will be taken up so shallowly, so opportunistically, so unreflectively, and so ahistorically as cultural studies.” In a Gramscian move (“pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”), Nelson, on the one hand, wishes to encourage other academics to help “make American institutions nervous about cultural studies” while, on the other, remaining resigned to the fact that “The depoliticizing of cultural studies will no doubt pay off, making it more palatable at once to granting agencies and to conservative colleagues, administrators, and politicians, but only at the cost of blocking cultural studies from having any critical purchase on this nation’s social life.” Elizabeth Long (Chapter 11) argues for the need to prevent the marginalization of British feminist cultural studies (an “exclusion” she already detects taking place) as it is this tradition that has “the best chance of maintaining a critical stance in its appropriation by feminist scholars in America, both because of their connections with a broad social movement and because of the nature of their practices within the academy.” For these reasons “feminism is central for developing the critical potential of cultural studies.” Ellen Rooney (Chapter 12) makes much the same argument, pointing to the fact that the absence of a political constituency outside the university (unlike, say, women’s studies or African-American studies) makes cultural studies “peculiarly vulnerable to political neutralization within the university.” Manthia Diawara (Chapter 18) focuses on the way African-American studies should respond to the import of cultural studies. He distinguishes between two traditions in British cultural studies, the Birmingham School (CCCS) and what he calls the “Black British School,” consisting of London-based black artists and writers. In the USA, African-American studies must embrace both schools, not in order to replicate what they have already done but to make cultural studies grounded in the material conditions of American life, to produce what he calls “performance studies,” “the study of ways in which black people, through communicative action, created and continue to create themselves within the American experience.” Finally, it seems appropriate to close with Hall’s demand (Chapter 21) for a deeper commitment within cultural studies (regardless of its geographic location) to the analysis of racism: the work that cultural studies has to do is to mobilize everything that it can find in terms of intellectual resources in order to understand what keeps making the lives we live, and the societies we live in, profoundly and deeply antihumane in their capacity to live with difference. Cultural Studies’ message is a message for academics and intellectuals but,

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fortunately, for many other people as well. In that sense, I have tried to hold together in my own intellectual life, on the one hand, the conviction and passion and the devotion to objective interpretation, to analysis, to rigorous analysis and understanding, to the passion to find out, and to the production of knowledge that we did not know before. But, on the other, I am convinced that no intellectual worth his or her salt, and no university that wants to hold up its head in the face of the twenty-first century, can afford to turn dispassionate eyes away from the problems of race and ethnicity that beset our world.

It is not possible to be in cultural studies and to not agree with Hall’s claim on the future of cultural studies.

References BARKER, M. (1990) “Review,” Magazine of Cultural Studies 1. BARKER, M. and BEEZER, A. (1992) Reading into Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1982) The Empire Strikes Back. London: Hutchison. CLARKE, J. et al. (1976) “Subculture, Cultures and Classes” in Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Sub-cultures in Post-war Britain. London: Hutchinson. CURTI, L. (1992) “What is real and what is not: female fabulations in cultural analysis.” In Grossberg, L. et al. (eds), Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. GILROY, P. (1987) There Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack. London: Hutchinson. GIROUX, H. (1994) Disturbing Pleasures. London: Routledge. GRAMSCI, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebook (ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith). London: Lawrence and Wishart. GROSSBERG, L. (1992) We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. London: Routledge. HALL, S. (1981) “Notes on deconstructing “the popular”“ in Samuel, R. (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. HALL, S. (1982) “The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of the repressed in media studies.” In Gurevitch, M et al. (eds), Culture, Society and the Media. London: Methuen. HALL, S. (1990a) “The emergence of cultural studies and the crisis of the humanities,” October 53, 11–90. HALL, S. (1992) “Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies.” In Grossberg, L. et al. (eds), Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. HALL, S. and WHANNEL, P. (1964) The Popular Arts. London: Pantheon Books. HARVEY, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. HOGGART, R. (1957; rpt 1990) The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. JAMESON, F. (1984) “Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism,” New Left Review 165, 53–92. McGUIGAN, J. (1992) Cultural Populism. London: Routledge. McROBBIE, A. (1992) “Post-Marxism and cultural studies: a post-script.” In Grossberg, L. et al. (eds), Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. McROBBIE, A. (1994) Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London: Routledge. NAVA, M. (1987) “Consumerism and its Contradictions,” Cultural Studies 1, 2. NELSON, C. et al. (1992) “Cultural studies: an introduction.” In Grossberg, L. et al. (eds), Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. SCHWARZ, B. (1989) “Popular culture: the long march,” Culture Studies 8.

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STOREY, J. (1993) An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. STOREY, J. (ed.), (1994) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. VOLOSINOV, V.N. (1973) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. London: Seminar Press. WILLIAMS, R. (1976) Keywords. London: Fontana. (Second edition, 1983.) Women’s Studies Group, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1978) Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women’s Subordination. London: Hutchison.

4

Introduction In Debt to the Censor Roland Boer

For many readers what I do in this book may seem entirely arbitrary, an example of chronic misreading. For others it may appear as nothing more than a theoretical justification for my baser instincts. While there is a certain willfulness about the sheer anachronism of the exercise I undertake here, as well as moments of caricature of biblical criticism in certain of its more ludicrous manifestations, I do not want to leave the theoretical discussion at the level of arbitrariness, misreading, basic instincts, anachronism and caricature. The starting point for this volume is a pair of fetishes, two items that entice, engage, obsess: the Hebrew Bible and popular culture. While an autobiographical dimension unavoidably makes its presence felt with such a statement—is not writing inevitably autobiographical?—there is a particular theoretical problem that is raised by the very conjunction of biblical studies and cultural studies. Thus, after considering the critical context within which I labour, I focus directly on the problem itself, which is how one comes to make use of cultural theory or criticism in the space of biblical criticism. In other words, what might conceivably justify the intersection of cultural criticism and biblical criticism, especially across the vast reach of time that separates the respective corpuses on which critical energy is exerted? Inevitably, there is a broadening critical context for the conjunction of cultural and biblical studies. This context is characterized by two major trends: those religious and biblical scholars who interpret contemporary cultural products, seeking out implicit religious and theological themes1 and the ways the Bible is represented in such products,2 and those who interpret the Bible using elements of cultural criticism.3 And then there are the crossover works that combine these elements in various ways.4 Of all these efforts, mine comes closest to the final group. At the same time, this still small flush of publication raises some crucial theoretical questions, given the highly exploratory nature of much of the work. My effort in this book does not seek See Bach (1996), Marsh and Ortiz (1997), Martin and Ostwalt (1995), May and Bird (1982), Scott (1994). These volumes also have a more popular dimension in the regular reviews found in journals and magazines like Sojourners, Christian Century and The Fourth R. 2 T h e bulk of these studies has been on film; see Cheryl Exum (1996) and Babington and Evans (1993) on biblical epics, Kreitzer (1993; 1994) on representation in general, and Bach (1996). 3 Many of the essays in the series of volumes edited by Aichele and Pippin (1992; 1997; 1998) follow this approach, making use of fantasy theory to interpret the Bible. See also Biblical Interpretation (2(1), 1994), edited by Alice Bach. 4 Some of the essays in Aichele and Pippin (1992; 1997; 1998) do this, as well as an issue they edited of Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts (8(2), 1997). See also Moore (1998). 1

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biblical dimensions in contemporary cultural products as such, nor does it restrict itself to the application of cultural theories to the Bible, nor is it interested in explicit representations of the Bible in contemporary culture. Rather, it juxtaposes biblical and other cultural texts and it does so from the perspective of dialectical Marxism. What are the implications? The reader will encounter the use of a range of terms and concepts that are part of the constellation of Marxist theory. This is not merely due to the fact that cultural studies remains indebted to Marxism for both its original formation and its continued conceptual and critical apparatus, but also because Marxism is very much part of the intellectual heritage from which I draw inspiration. Apart from Marx and Engels, and apart from the Hegel who peers over their shoulders, Fredric Jameson and George Lukács (the focus of two earlier books—Jameson and Jeroboam (1996a) and Novel Histories (1997) have most strongly influenced the critical and political stance taken in this work. Others also play a role—Henri Lefebvre in theorizing everyday life, Louis Marin on utopia, Darko Suvin on science fiction, Alan Soble on pornography, Jacques Attali on noise and music—but the strongest legacy of Hegelian Marxism lies in the practice of dialectical thinking and reading. It is not often enough in biblical studies that the psychological moment appears, let alone that it is sustained for any acceptable length of time. Fortunately, given my bent for dialectics, the work of Slavoj Žižek provides a source for dialectical psychoanalysis, either when I am on the couch or when I put the text on the couch, seating myself calmly in the half-gloom, asking questions, taking notes, voicing the occasional “hmmm.” But Žižek’s work is not merely dialectical psychoanalysis; it is more specifically dialectical Lacanianism, if I may use such an ugly descriptor. Through a series of spectacular studies Žižek has placed himself at the forefront of those who both interpret and transform Lacan’s works. For Žižek the ingredients of such a development include involvement in the transformation of Yugoslavia, an appreciation of the Marxist heritage, and a predilection for popular culture. Behind Žižek and Lacan, of course, stands Freud, whose shadow looms over the whole of this work. Dialectical Marxism and dialectical Lacanianism are then two of the main foods on which my mind feeds. There is, however, a third that comes from the agglutinate known as cultural criticism. In this case, it is the work of Meaghan Morris and, through her, the inaugural efforts of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, who, with their concept of everyday life as an item worthy of intellectual study, must be part of any consideration of cultural criticism.5 Indeed, it is from this final three that a crucial theoretical problem arises: what role, if any, does cultural criticism have in the domain of biblical criticism; or rather, what is the relation, if any, between these two apparently discrete disciplines?

Bad Debts In response, I have recourse specifically to Lefebvre and de Certeau, although the argument that I derive from their work is a dialectical one. As for Lefebvre, the originator of the idea of “everyday life,” the point that interests me comes from his “Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside,” a chapter of the Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre 1991). Religion is normally an I have consciously chosen de Certeau and Lefebvre since their crucial contribution to cultural criticism is often overshadowed by the—often less inspiring and softly Marxist—work of Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg and the Birmingham School. Morris of course has close connections with Grossberg, but her preference is for de Certeau.

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item of attack for Lefebvre, heretical communist that he was, since it is tied up with philosophical and cultural forms, such as surrealism, that are opposed to everyday life, the life of the lower classes (1991: 127–9). Catholicism and, especially, Protestantism are complex ideologies that produce over-repressive, and eventually terrorist, societies where conflict and opposition are not tolerated (see Lefebvre 1971: 145–7). Yet, the power of religion—for de Certeau the church in France—is such that it permeates everyday life. Although dead, its form infiltrates and continues to influence. Theological faith is dead, metaphysical reason is dead. And yet they live on, they take on new life—insanely, absurdly—because the situation and the human conflicts from which they were born have not been resolved. Now these conflicts are not in the realm of thought alone, but in everyday life. (Lefebvre 1991: 141)

As one whose faith is now past, who discarded a commitment that was part of his rural youth, Lefebvre marks here also the continued power of religion over his own life. The church is that which held him strongest, evokes some deep longing for that lost commitment, and yet also makes him line up the church as an enemy of everyday life. It is, in short, that from which he has come, to which he no longer belongs but which still influences him. So also, the forms of religion are everywhere in daily life—“The ritual gesture when a funeral procession goes by, words of insult, an ‘A-Dieu’ when we part, a wish, a propitious phrase of greeting or thanks . . . they are really religious, or potentially so” (1991: 226). De Certeau exhibits a similar logic, albeit on a different level. My focus is the suggestion concerning the birth of the various disciplines of western scholarship. This may best take its designation from a volume of de Certeau’s, Le christianisme éclaté (de Certeau and Domenach 1974), the dispersal or shattering of Christianity. The idea takes two major forms, one well trodden by sociologists, the other less used but with much greater potential. To begin with the less threatening argument: after noting, in Le christianisme éclaté, the dissipation of Christian discourse into society at large, and the appropriation of religious material by secular institutions and disciplines for “civil religion,” de Certeau traces a similar pattern with the interpretation of the Bible. Initially the church controlled interpretation of the Bible, so that interpretation—signalled by footnotes and marginal glosses—became more important than the biblical text itself. However, with the advent of capitalism, the modes of investigation appropriate to capitalism were used on the Bible. This begins with the claim that the individual is free to interpret the text as he or she likes, and then moves on to methods that are theatrical and scientific. This means that in the very process of modern interpretation of the Bible there is modelled the dispersal of religious functions outside the religious institutions themselves (see de Certeau and Domenach 1974: 19–20). Not a new idea, and if this is all de Certeau can say, then it is not particularly remarkable. A stronger form of the argument, however, is that religion—specifically Christian theology, since de Certeau, himself a theologian (as well as historian, psychoanalyst and cultural critic), focuses on Europe—is the originary discipline that engendered the “secular” disciplines that grew up and hived off after the Enlightenment, when Christianity is both abandoned and unveiled (de Certeau 1988: 179).6 Historiography, sociology, psychology, philosophical ethics, and so on, all T h is is also the time of the transformation of the Church by new, secular, political forms and the corresponding rise of “mystics” in response (see Ahearne 1995: 30–1).

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fall under this same logic, the same initial impetus from theology itself. This is a massive and important thesis, with its own curious contradiction: In every study devoted to it since the eighteenth century, religion has always presented this ambiguity of its object: for example, its past is by turns explained through the very sociology it has none the less organized, and offered as the explanation for this sociology which has replaced it. More generally, every society born and issued forth from a religious matrix (are there any other kinds of society?) must affront the relation that it keeps with its archeology. This problem is inscribed within contemporary culture by dint of the fact that religious structures have been peeled away from religious contents in organizing rational forms of behavior. In this respect, the study of religion is tantamount to reflecting on what its contents have become in our societies (that is, “religious phenomena”), in the name of what its formalities have also become in our scientific practice. (de Certeau 1988: 176)

The identification of such a contradiction is not to be read as a lament, as a desire for a lost Christendom, but rather as a dialectical religious historicizing of western scientific disciplines. It is no longer possible to think of the methods and formalities—“the ways in which concepts or forms are constituted or conceived by an act of human thinking” (Brammer 1992: 28)—as religious, “since they have precisely ceased to be such” (de Certeau 1988: 175). The forms have been “re-employed,” as Ahearne points out (1995: 29), so that what appear to be similar formal elements between theology and the modern disciplines now operate in terms of other practices and systems.7 As non-religious disciplines that once began in theology, it is now possible to study religion and theology as though from “outside.” Thus, sociology analyses a form of religion or theology through its organization, the nature of its hierarchy, its doctrinal themes and so on, as a type of society; sociolinguistics interprets theological language as indices of sociocultural transformations; individual religious affirmations become representations of psychological categories, and so on—in short, religious claims are understood as symptoms of something else, whether social, historical or psychological, rather than truth claims relating to belief (de Certeau 1987: 192–3). Another way of marking this shift is that religious content hides the conditions of its production. The end result is a “science des religions” (de Certeau 1987: 195), study of religion that is no longer religious, an adjective which itself becomes enigmatic. Not only does such a change signal the transitions in “formalities” from their originally religious content, but there is something simultaneously enlightening and inadequate about such post-religious approaches to religion. However, in a characteristic twist, de Certeau notes in regard to such disciplines: “In a certain way we might consider the time of their religious ‘filling’ as a moment in the history of these cultural forms” (1988: 175–6). A more particular version of this thesis (and here I pursue the logic of de Certeau’s argument beyond his own text) is possible as well: do not contemporary methods of literary and cultural criticism derive ultimately from biblical interpretation? As with religion, whose content is now studied with the methods that originated in theology, so also is the Bible’s content now studied with methods that are no longer biblical but have their seeds in biblical studies. That is, the “formalities” of structuralism, Russian formalism, new historicism, deconstruction, poststructuralism, Marxist literary criticism, ideological criticism, cultural criticism, and so on, are those which derive from biblical criticism, although their content is anything but biblical. Similarly, mystic motifs appear now in historiography, philosophy, psychiatry, and so on (see de Certeau 1992: 16).

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If this is granted, then any new discipline, any new approach to the Bible is always already contained in the closed system, since these ways of reading owe their ultimate logic to theology and biblical studies. It seems that there is an element of the return of the repressed—an idea and methodological option important for de Certeau—in the model of the dispersal of theology and the rise of scientific disciplines. With the suggestion that it is appropriate for these new methods to be used to study religion and the Bible it is as though a whole series of cheques are now waiting to be cashed. Biblical studies has for too long hidden from the consequences of the methods it unwittingly unleashed. And so now it is the revenge on biblical studies that must be enacted. It is this logic that supplies the theoretical justification for what I do in this book—a reprisal, as it were, via cultural criticism on the Bible and biblical criticism, an accounting of old debts that reluctantly need to be paid.

Under the Sign of the Censor There is, however, a second point of contact between biblical studies and cultural criticism that forms an underlying leitmotif of this work. For this “point de capiton,” this quilting point, to borrow a phrase from Lacan and Žižek, I rely on the work of Meaghan Morris and de Certeau, once again. Although Meaghan Morris’s claim to fame is through a series of studies on Sydney tower, shopping centres, television events, a country motel, and other sites where the everyday lives of people—especially women—intersect, I am interested in one particular paper and in one particular argument. In “Banality in Cultural Studies” (1990) she breaks through the habitual reference to de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life in nearly every piece of work she has written to offer a more sustained theoretical reflection.8 And she gets to de Certeau through a dual annoyance in cultural studies itself: one embodied in the “fatal charm” of Baudrillard’s apocalyptic texts, in which everything in its hyper form ends up being its other, in which everything seems to disappear in the whorl of modernity or postmodernity. The other (“vox pop”) is the “banal seduction” of endless cultural studies papers and monographs that seem to rehash the same theme—the subversive promise of even the most degraded activities of popular culture. In order to get beyond her annoyance at both “fatalistic theory” and “cheerily ‘making the best of things’” (1990: 26), Morris turns to de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). Like Fredric Jameson (someone whom Morris rarely cites) in his now famous chapter “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1990: 9–34), Morris likes de Certeau’s text because it argues “for a double process of mobilizing the ‘weighty apparatus’ of theories of ordinary language to analyze everyday practices and seeking to restore to those practices their logical and cultural legitimacy” (Morris 1990: 26). That is to say, popular culture needs more than its prophets of doom (a sort of elitism that insists on the depravity of mass culture) and its cheer-leaders (those swept away by the anti-intellectualism and populism of popular culture itself). Morris mobilizes a number of key elements from de Certeau’s book—polemological and utopian spaces, strategies and tactics, writing and orality—and she notes some difficulties—his “Everyman” is too much a man (but see Buchanan’s criticism of essentializing the subject (1997: 185)) and his reliance on space betrays See also the reflection on this paper of Morris by Chambers (1994–5).

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assumptions of permanency—yet she finds immense promise in the argument that popular culture is a way of operating, of making do. Thus, the most interesting thing cultural studies can do is see how lives are lived and how sites are constructed in the interstices of the vast socioeconomic systems. However, there is a particular thesis of de Certeau that Morris notes and on which I want to focus for a few moments, a thesis that is the dialectical twist at the heart of cultural studies itself. Curiously, this particular argument appears not in The Practice of Everyday Life but in “The Beauty of the Dead: Nisard,” co-written with Jacques Revel and Dominique Julia (1986).9 The argument here is that the repression of popular or mass culture has, from a historical perspective, been that which has provided the very conditions for the study of popular culture itself. Further, it is precisely what has been repressed—the “other” of popular culture—that may transform the analytical procedures that have been generated out of the repression of that same popular culture. Charles Nisard, with his Histoires des livres populaires et de la littérature de colportage (1854), provides the historical condition and continued possibility for the study of popular culture. Appointed as under-secretary in the Ministry of Police, he was to collect, study, censor, and, where needed, proscribe and destroy the “street literature” everywhere available in France. In the very process of censorship and policing, the study of popular culture is enabled. It is not only that Nisard used his position to gain access to the literature—it was not merely a ruse—for he maintained the moral condemnation with which the censorship was justified. The “Commission for the Examination of Chapbooks” was to determine whether these books were contrary to “order, morality, and religion.” Yet the learned, such as Nisard, would be able to resist their evil influence, thus enabling their preservation, at least as an object of study. All of which leads to the hypothesis: “these strategies of popular culture take as their object their own origin. They pursue across the surface of texts, before their eyes, what is actually their own condition of possibility—the elimination of a popular menace” (de Certeau, Revel and Julia 1986: 128). Yet this inaugural “murder,” the primal violence, is present only as a figure or a trace, as lost origin or “as the unfound reality,” forgotten as an “object or result of rigorous procedures” (1986: 128). Popular culture, then, becomes a corpse, a body over and through which the scalpel of the coroner/critic incises its own patterns and pictures.10 Nevertheless, as a result of Nisard’s purge, and many others like it that followed, a select amount of literature and other items of popular culture remained in circulation (those banned would also be highly sought after). On the basis of such material de Certeau, Revel and Julia track a process of idealization of the popular and its connection with the category of “folklore” (see Schirato 1993: 284). There developed a “learned nostalgia” (Ahearne 1995: 133) for a constructed realm of the popular. The corpse had now been beautified, sanitized; thus “the beauty of the dead.” The popular is therefore valorized by those who have constructed the object of study,11 ignoring and forgetting the more dangerous cultural products that people such as T h e English translation of this appeared in Heterologies (1986: 119–136), although when collated in French, it appeared as chapter 3 in La Culture au Pluriel (1994, originally 1974). It was not included in the English translation of Culture in the Plural (1997b), although, as in some senses the precursor to The Practice of Everyday Life, this is its proper place. 10 Anthropology follows a similar pattern: “The Bororos of Brazil sink slowly into their collective death, and LéviStrauss takes his seat in the French Academy. Even if this injustice disturbs him, the facts remain unchanged. This story is ours as much as his. In this one respect (which is an index of others that are more important), the intellectuals are still borne on the backs of the common people” (de Certeau 1984: 25). 11 It then easily becomes “mass culture,” the popularization of the conceptions of an elite. Mass culture was, for some two centuries, that which was spread by education for the benefit of the political and economic elite (de Certeau 1997b: 119). 9

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Nisard collected and that remained available. Yet, it is the return of these “other” elements that interests de Certeau in his work, and this is then the programme of The Practice of Everyday Life which may be read, as Kinser suggests (1992: 81), as a reaction against half a century of gloom about ordinary pursuits. There is also a specific historical dimension to this argument by de Certeau: Nisard’s task of censorship and writing took place in the shadow of the 1848 revolutions, the republican days of February and June, and the restoration of the Empire in 1852. Nisard began his task on the last day of November of that year. In fact, the commission headed by Nisard was in response to the political concerns such literature generated, the lampooning of the rich and the divisions such literature would exacerbate. “The collector’s interest is a correlate of the repression used to exorcise the revolutionary danger which, as the days of June 1848 had demonstrated, was still very close, lying dormant” (de Certeau, Revel and Julia 1986: 124). The repression of popular culture is part of the repression of popular revolutionary currents. Eliminate the danger, censor and then study the body preserved. In another place (Boer forthcoming) I trace this motif of birth-in-death throughout de Certeau’s work, the pattern of preservation and study that arises from repression, of the veneration and reverence for a body preserved, and occasionally cut up and eaten: it appears in de Certeau’s study of popular culture, linguistics, orality and writing, heterology, possession and mysticism, in the responses to hagiography by establishment religion, and in the effect of the absent body of Jesus on the church itself. And of course the generation of scientific disciplines and literary criticism that I noted in the previous section have their triggers in the Enlightenment’s repression and removal of theology from its position of intellectual and cultural dominance. In each case the pattern differs to some degree, taking on the contours of the issue in question, but the underlying logic remains the same. If the moment of the censor is that which enables cultural studies, then I would suggest that a similar logic underlies the possibility of biblical studies, although de Certeau himself does not make the connection. Initially, a small selection of religious material is approved and canonized, while the bulk is simultaneously tolerated as useful and censored as a source of error. What was all “hagiography” to begin with is selected and repressed. Here, once again, is the logic of Nisard: the problem of (religious) literature is that its study is at the same time a process of censorship. So it is that biblical studies is born. The very process of selecting a sacred canon from a wider range of material, the proscription, and at times destruction, of that which is left over is the ground for a discipline like biblical studies. It arises from the simultaneous selection of some literature and repression of the rest. What has been preserved is a little like the dangerous chapbooks kept by Nisard: now that part at least is left and preserved, it may be studied. Here, then, lies the “point de capiton,” the convergence between biblical studies and the study of popular culture, both of which operate under the sign of the Censor. For cultural studies the moment of censorship is the originating and empowering moment itself: popular culture lives under the proscription of intellectuals, the police—in short, those who set the dominant ideological agenda. It is a proscription that is the reason for study. Similarly, religious literature—hagiography, apocrypha, superstition and so on—operates under a comparable proscription. Here the clerics censor such literature, but in the process they enable its study, preserving some as canon and banning the rest. In this context biblical studies arises. But this also applies to the topics of the individual chapters that follow; in each it is possible to locate censorship as an inevitable and enabling context—for queer studies, Hitchcock and graphic violence, pornography, sex work, heavy metal and prophecy, science fiction and Lamentations, and fast food.

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Of course, although de Certeau and I partake of such censorship in our very acts of criticism, we also subscribe to the vital Freudian notion of le retour de refoulé the “return of the repressed,” the primal murder and its perpetual guilt, the repression of sexuality and its return in dreams. While this may of course apply to the argument I have traced regarding the possibility of both biblical studies and cultural studies, it is more germane to the tale of what is repressed. For the social sciences have analyzed in terms of “popular culture” the functionings that are fundamental to our urban and modern culture, but that are held to be illegitimate or negligible in the official discourses of modernity. Just as sexuality repressed by bourgeois morality returned in the dreams of Freud’s patients, these functions giving structure to human sociality, denied by the stubborn ideology of writing, of production, and of specialized technologies, are returning in our social and cultural space (which they never left in the first place) under the cover of “popular culture.” (de Certeau 1997a: 101)

Terminology It remains to deal with a few items of clarification and terminology: Bible, culture, popular or mass culture, high or serious culture, and cultural criticism. A dilemma around which much of my discussion turns is the question of Bible and culture. My theoretical starting point is that the Bible is one dimension of (mostly “western”) culture, and that it is a crucial subunit of the wider cultural phenomenon of Christianity. My understanding of culture is influenced by Marxist thought, in which culture, politics, ideology and the legal system are related in a host of complex ways with each other and then as a block with economics, mediated through the question of social relationships. In this book, “culture” refers to capitalist culture, or the culture that is characteristic of capitalism. The products of culture that I will consider are more obviously items from capitalist culture, but I also take the Bible as a literary text that has its place in, that is now read as an item of, this culture (and not, say, of feudalism). Having assumed this basic framework, the book may be regarded as an effort to explore the various ways in which the Bible is a part of culture (or at least of those cultures in which it has played a part). Therefore, these essays treat the biblical texts and the texts of contemporary culture in the following terms: an “application” of features of one part of contemporary culture in order to interpret the Bible, which is now understood as another part of present culture (“Queer Heroes,” “Pawing through Garbage”); an approach to both the Bible and a cultural product using the same methods, which then serves to put both on an even level (“Cows with Guns,” “Ezekiel’s Axl,” “Graves of Craving”); the possible foundational role of the Bible, which may now be read as a subtext of culture (“Night Sprinkles,” “Stolen Water”). In other words, I cover three possibilities in the relationship between the biblical texts and other cultural products—the primacy of those other products, the equality of the two poles, and the primacy of the Bible. While cultural criticism is often used in the broadest sense of the study of culture as such, it seems to me that what is known as cultural criticism, particularly that which has arisen following the pioneering work of de Certeau and Lefebvre, but also Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg, is interested in popular or mass culture. By “popular culture” I refer in the first instance to working class culture: it is the collection of cultural products that has traditionally been produced and consumed by working class people. In this respect it is part of the class consciousness of the working class. There is a second sense that overlaps with this primary one: the production of material by the ruling classes, giving voice to ruling class ideas and beliefs, for popular consumption.

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The most obvious forms of this material are those of a nationalist or patriotic odour. Since the material I consider is often part of the overlap between these two senses of popular culture, my reading is less populist than critical. The use of “mass” or “popular” for both types of material indicates that these particular cultural products have the largest audience or consumption rate in comparison to other cultural products. It is, in short, what most people consume, including vast sections of the middle class (even though this may be denied). “High culture,” by contrast, is that which has been claimed by the middle class, at least officially. Here belong “serious” literature, artistic films, and a range of institutions such as the opera, museum, art gallery and so on. (In proper dialectical fashion it is of course the case that critical socialist possibilities sometimes arise from this realm as well.) The terminology of high and serious versus mass and popular signifies a whole range of value judgements that come from the side of high culture. Given these class connections, it is not for nothing that cultural studies, the study of popular culture, arose out of a strong Marxist background. In western capitalism the Bible has by and large been claimed as a major item of “serious” culture, a constitutive document of the canon of high literature. In the conjunction of biblical texts and those of popular culture, and the theoretical runover between them, I will be breaching the distinction between serious and popular culture. Indeed, Fredric Jameson has argued time and again that the distinction between high and mass culture is a modernist one, and that the collapse of the two is distinctly postmodern. As for the organization of this volume, the relation between the essays is less one of a consistent argument than multiple connections and overlaps that may be linked in a variety of ways, a description for which the term “rhizome” is most appropriate (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 3–25). Thus, themes such as film, sex, gender, violence, death, food, utopia, and the possibility of revolution, recur in different places, somewhat like a rabbit warren or mouse holes. This study is then less like a tree and its roots, or a genetic axis, and more like the subterranean systems of bulbs and tubers, or the relations of rats and ants. “Queer Heroes” is first, pursuing the queer logic of heroes, sending a trajectory from Hollywood action films through to biblical heroes. In doing so, I seek out the implications of queer theory for biblical studies, as well as ask a few questions of that theory itself. There follows “Cows With Guns,” an interweaving of biblical and Hitchcock texts on graphic violence, interpreted by means of the ideas of sadistic identification and hegemony. “Night Sprinkles” attempts a small rereading of the Song of Songs as hard core pornography, whereas as “Stolen Water Is Sweeter, Stolen Bread Tastes Better” searches out the whore stigma in contemporary sex work and Proverbs 1–9. The fifth chapter, “Ezekiel’s Axl,” juxtaposes heavy metal and Israelite prophecy by means of anarchism, carnival, ecstasy and hegemony. Science fiction appears in “Pawing Through Garbage,” where the dystopian logic of both the Strugatsky brothers and Lamentations is pursued for its utopian glimpses. Finally, I come to rest at my local Maccas, reflecting on fast food in capitalism and in the Bible with the assistance of Lévi-Strauss. Yet, alongside the rhizomatic, there is an alternative cohesion to my argument, in that I have organized the chapters in terms of an unfolding, somewhat allegorical, story . . .

The Exploding Elephant Part of what Freud was repressing in his embrace of Oedipus were fantasies that structured his sentiments for Fliess—fantasies of male menstruation, and penetration, and homosexual impregnation. (Fuss 1995: 7)

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(Lacan 1994: 198)

(I pulled the jacket close to my bare skin, pressed the studs together and thrust my hands in its pockets. Although worn and a little grimy from overuse, the wool was still rough and coarse enough to itch and scratch, sending painfully pleasurable sensations through the nerve endings just off my skin’s surface. As usual, my nipples enjoyed it the most, scraped and irritated and yearning for more of the crude wool fibres. Lost for a moment in an old pleasure—why did it ever have to end?—I made the most of the walk up the hill, pushing against the westerly wind with my cap peak down to prevent the wind whipping it away. Some of the August westerly squeezed through the openings between the studs in the front, fingering my chest and stomach with cold nails, standing the fine hairs there on end, puckering the follicles in goose bumps. A rare pair of woolen pants clung to my legs. Soon the wind was on my left as I turned right on Windsor Road, the traffic producing its usual roar, although the fumes were torn protesting off into the east. Murphy’s Garage appeared, the weathered vehicle doors on the battered green building hanging as though they had retired a century ago. The welcome sight of the dilapidated building was marred by the jumble of cop cars, plain and marked, as well as an ambulance. I drew near to a familiar face. “Michal,” I called, “what’s going on?” She stood back to let me look in through what used to be a fly door. “Four dead,” she said, “Old Murphy here, and there’s a body, a teenager, behind the baseball reserve, and then two over on Redbank Road, in their thirties, we think.” “Any connection?” “None that we can make out, but that’s your job.”)

References Ahearne, Jeremy. 1995. Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other. Cambridge, England: Polity. Aichele, George, and Tina Pippin, eds. 1992. Semeia 60. Fantasy and the Bible. Atlanta, GA: Scholar’s Press. ——. 1997. The Monstrous and the Unspeakable. Playing the Text, 1. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. ——. 1998. Violence, Utopia and the Kingdom of God: Fantasy and Ideology in the Bible. London: Routledge. Babington, B., and P. W. Evans. 1993. Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bach, Alice, ed. 1996. Semeia 74. Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz. Atlanta, GA: Scholar’s Press. Bekkencamp, Jonneke, and Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes. 1993. “The Canon of the Old Testament and Women’s Cultural Traditions,” In A Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs, ed. Athalya Brenner. The Feminist Companion to the Bible 1. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, pp. 67–85. Brammer, Marsanne. 1992. “Thinking Practice: Michel de Certeau and the Theorization of Mysticism,” Diacritics 22 (Summer): 26–37. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. ——. 1987. La Faiblesse de Croire, ed. Luce Giard. Collection Esprit/Seuil. Paris: Éditions Du Seuil. ——. 1988. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. ——. 1992. The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Religion and Postmodernism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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——. 1997a. The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings. Trans. and afterword by Tom Conley. ed. and introduction by Luce Giard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——. 1997b. Culture in the Plural Trans. and afterword by Tom Conley. ed. and introduction by Luce Giard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Certeau, Michel, and Jean-Marie Domenach. 1974. Le Christianisme éclaté. Paris: Éditions Du Seuil. de Certeau, Michel, Jacques Revel, and Dominique Julia. 1986. “The Beauty of the Dead: Nisard,” In Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, foreword by Wlad Godzich. Theory and History of Literature, vol. 17. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 119–36. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. and foreword by Brain Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Exum, J. Cheryl. 1996. Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women. Gender, Culture, Theory 3. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Fuss, Diana. 1995. “Pink Freud,” GLQ: Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 2:1–9.Futurist (The). 1985. “Fast Food Workers Have It Their Way,” The Futurist 19 (February): 74–5. Kinser, Samuel. 1992. “Everyday Ordinary,” Diacritics 22 (Summer):70–82. Kreitzer, Larry J. 1993. The New Testament in Fiction and Film. Sheffield: JSOT Press. ——. 1994. The Old Testament in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1994. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Introduction by David Macey. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lefebvre, Henri. 1971. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Trans. Sacha Rabinovitch. London: Allen Lane/Penguin. ——. 1991. Critique of Everyday Life: Volume One: Introduction. Trans. John Moore. Preface by Michel Trebitsch. London: Verso. Marsh, Clive, and Gaye Ortiz, eds. 1997. Explorations in Theology and Film: Movies and Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell. Martin, Joel W., and Conrad E. Ostwalt Jr., eds. 1995. Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. May, John R., and Michael Bird, 1982. Religion in Film. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Moore, Stephen, and Janice Capel Anderson. 1998. “Taking It Like a Man: Masculinity in 4 Maccabees,” Journal of Biblical Literature 117 (Summer):249–73. Morris, Meaghan. 1990. “Banality in Cultural Studies.” In Logics of Television, ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 14–43. Schirato, Tony. 1993. “My Space or Yours? de Certeau, Frow and the Meanings of Popular Culture,” Cultural Studies 7(2):282–91. Scott, Bernard Brandon. 1994. Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress.

5

Graves of Craving Fast Food, or, Manna and McDonald’s Roland Boer

After all, one must eat—when the pantry is empty, one tucks into one’s fellow being. (Lacan 1991: 232) Short of death, of eternal unconsciousness, any bit, piece, lump, chunk. morsel or bite will do, to suck, chew and hold. The nourishment in question having nothing to do with a homeostasis of health or with the organism’s survival . . . The mouth’s pleasure and the mind’s escape lead to fatal excesses, revealing the incompatibility, indeed the opposition, between enjoyment and health. (Ames 1988: 20, 21) If only we had flesh to eat!

(Numbers 11:4)

And so I turn, finally, to food: neither death, nor sex, nor violence—only food remains. It is a return to Freud’s primary stage of infantile development—the oral. (Zara smelled it first with the change in the wind. “Food’s being cooked,” she said, prodding us awake. Sunlight came in through the broken east window. The wind was gusting from the north-east, and soon we caught it too. “It can’t be,” I said. I sniffed patties grilling in their fat, eggs baking, coffee brewing, the bitter mayonnaise, the deep fried fries and the sweet apple pies. Saliva surged in my mouth and my stomach felt cavernous. “Come on,” I beckoned, “I thought Zeke had hit them all.”)

But the oral has its own subtle forms of censorship, especially of a class nature. For nothing is perhaps so culturally un-chic, so proletarian, so anti-bourgeois, so “westie,”1 as to desire breakfast at McDonald’s, especially hotcakes, syrup and juice. I am even prepared, in an early morning rush, to buy hotcakes on a drive-through and eat them on the way, rolling up each to “Westie” is a very local term, designating an inhabitant of western Sydney. Used variously with pride and derision, it is primarily a class signifier, since western Sydney is the city’s working-class heartland, shunned by the middle class sectors of north and east and championed by westies themselves. Parramatta is distinctly westie, as is Northmead. Class consciousness shows its presence in clothing, language, patterns of daily life, and, of course, eating habits.

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cake and dipping it in the syrup, held between my legs, which constantly threatens to tip and run all over the seat and my crotch. The (fat) saturated ambiance of McDonald’s is my desire. And of course in the profound contradiction of globalization it is my local McDonald’s that beckons most strongly, crying out for yet another customer with its characteristic smells of Big Macs, coffee and fries. If you were to happen past Northmead McDonald’s, pausing only for a piss and a soft serve, you might glimpse me in the corner, a tray of half-eaten food before me, note paper scattered over the table, a copy of Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked in one hand and a volume of the Hebrew Bible in the other. Not only is Lévi-Strauss my constant companion (in the same way that Benjamin’s Arcades project is in my hip-pocket whenever I descend upon Westfield, Parramatta, the largest shopping mall in the southern hemisphere), but so also is Marx. I can visualize them sitting in the empty chairs opposite me, squaring each other off before absorbing the ambiance that is McDonald’s. What possible theoretical justification can I have for this? It is certainly not healthy food, nor is it particularly au fait with the sort of middle class resistance to fast food and multinationals that bedevils academics, nor it is exceptionally good for the environment, nor are the executives of McDonald’s noted for their social conscience, economic justice or left politics. So, in terms of health, environment, economics and politics, McDonald’s loses out. Why am I here? To explode the idea that fast food is purely capitalist; or rather, to see what fast food signifies in different periods of time. For other socio-economic formations have at various points in their culinary repertoire what may be termed fast food. I am thinking in particular here of the stories of manna and quail in the Hebrew Bible, stories with a distinctly mythical component that Lévi-Strauss enjoys, especially the presence of Yahweh as the provider of fast food (even McDonald’s cannot claim this).2

Hamburgerology3 I think there’s a place for junk sex—it would be: very fast and quick like McDonald’s food . . . (Sprinkle 1991: 28) Two-a​ll-be​ef-pa​tties​-spec​ial-s​auce-​lattu​ce-ch​eese-​pickl​es-on​ion-o​n-a-s​esame​-seed​-bud.​ (McDonald’s advertising campaign) . . . when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread.

(Exodus 16:3)

(Cars had been rendered useless by Zeke’s work, so people were out walking mainly, but also riding bicycles and scooters. They seemed to have overcome their fear of possible explosions—at least the few who were out—to talk, speculate and see what the new world looked like. Nearly all of them were heading in the same directions as us. It was November: the bright purple of T h is is not to say that it hasn’t been tried. Ray Kroc (founding CEO of McDonald’s): “I’ve often said that I believe in God, family, and McDonald’s—and in the office that order is reversed” (quoted in Leidner 1993a: 52–3). Hamburger University, McDonald’s training institute, teaches about 3,500 students every year, most taking the Advanced Operations Course. Upon completion they receive diplomas proclaiming them Doctors of Hamburgerology, often with a minor in Fries (Leidner 1993a: 57). Burger King’s equivalent is Burger King University, formerly Whopper College (Reiter 1991: 70–1).

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The Bible and Cultural Studies the jacarandas was everywhere, as though some vast hand had spattered the ruined city with purple paint. The heat rose with the sun and so did the cicadas, uncertain at first and then with a pulsating crescendo of noise. Having noted the changes, they were keen to get on with things.)

Perhaps the greatest success of McDonald’s4 has been the expansion of the hamburger as the basic item of the meal: the combination of dead cow, with various pieces of vegetation, sauce, sometimes cheese, and a bun have become the basic components of a ubiquitous meal. Indeed, Mac and Dick McDonald—owners of the first McDonald’s in Pasadena in 1937 and then on the corner of Fourteenth and E Streets in San Bernadino in 1940—made the first step in the early 1940s, focusing on hamburger production after seeing that the burger accounted for 80 per cent of their sales (Love 1986: 14). Before the arrival of McDonald’s on Australian shores, the hamburger was an item bought at the Australian equivalent of the diner, the “fish and chip shop.” Usually run by immigrants from Kithera (a small island off Greece), it made and sold, apart from fish and potato chips, hamburgers. Each one was made to order and you were able to watch it being made. These places still exist,5 but the explosion of the hamburger has gone beyond them, perhaps the most obvious signal of this being the presence of the hamburger in nearly every food establishment’s menu. The more recent drive to making the hamburger a breakfast item has had the usual McDonald’s success, although now of course it has egg and bacon in the bun—the bacon and egg McMuffin, a twist on the dreadful English practice of having bacon and eggs for breakfast. The hamburger has then become a basic signifier of food, first in European, especially English, derived locales, but increasingly in other places throughout the world, so much so that it has remade culture and social relations in its own interests and, in the process, redefined community life.6 One of the conversation partners sitting at my table speaks up, the one with the confident bearing, stern look and firm mouth with which Lévi-Strauss greeted the world. In his opinion one of the most significant items in the new dispensation is that the very symbol of food has now become a collection of fast food items, usually the hamburger and a container of soft drink to its side. In silhouette these two items now signify “food” virtually anywhere one goes, although usually as a negative: the silhouette is surrounded by a red circle with a diagonal line going through it to indicate that no food is to be taken in or consumed here. Occasionally the positive sign is found, but even in the prohibition the very signifier of food makes its presence felt. (The structural significance of this is not only that fast food has become ubiquitous in western society, not only that McDonald’s and its many emulators are a part of capitalist society, but that in many respects they are crucial to it, especially its late capitalist mutation. Food then acts as a central signifier for socio-economics itself.) But, I respond to Claude, my conversation and meal partner, surely there are other symbols of food that function in a similar way to the burger and coke. Indeed, the verbal slogans of other times and places have their own currency. And perhaps one of the most common in western traditions has been the “bread from heaven” (Exodus 16:4), of which the manna of Exodus 16 is but the first instance. Its opposite, the equally pervasive “fleshpots of Egypt” (Exodus 16:3), may Every second study of fast food in general and McDonald’s in particular feels obliged at the beginning to trot out the latest available figures of sales, profits, number of stores, percentage increase, food eating patterns, share of the market. In resisting such a trend, all that interests me is that there seems to be twice as many adult book stores as McDonald’s. 5 My personal favourite is “Fly Point Take Away,” hard by the trawling run near Little Beach, about 200 km north of Sydney. Surviving against the odds, it continues to serve food even more unhealthy than Maccas. Much of this book was pondered there. 6 On manipulation of diet and taste see Kinsella (1982: 61, 64). 4

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function either as a negative, the slashed red circle over the manna, or the fleshpot stands slightly behind the manna cake, in silhouette of course, and we have something comparable to the coke and burger shadow. “Bread from heaven” takes on a life of its own, moving via the Wisdom of Solomon into the New Testament and from there through to the patristics. Appearing in Wisdom (see especially 16:15–29) as God’s food for mortals, as part of creation, a source of teaching, of prayer and immortality (see Dumoulin 1994), it transforms into the profoundly cannibalistic Eucharist, where bread is (human) flesh, where one tucks, salvifically, into one’s fellow being, one’s primary being. (“It’s probably useless information by now, but the scraps of paper pinned to the left nipples with an ‘M’ scrawled on them probably mean more than one thing . . .” I didn’t finish, for Northmead Maccas loomed around the corner. It looked as though it had not been touched. Recently bull-dozed and then completely remodelled, Northmead Maccas was one of the earliest in Australia. Its first design presented a vast car park to the commuters on Windsor Road, with a barely discernible building at the back of the block; the only signal that a multinational had landed being the obligatory arches overlooking the road. Only a few weeks ago and many thousands of global franchises later, designers and consumer advisers gave the word and the old Northmead Maccas was a pile of untimely rubble overnight, a harbinger of Zeke’s grand day. The new building angled its glassed front to greet southbound travellers; tables and chairs on a reconstructed sidewalk café out front, leading in to an internal server and eating area that was immediately visible from the road. A multicoloured children’s gym slightly to the left, parked cars strategically hidden and a drive through around the back completed the new Maccas in a little over three weeks. Zeke has been planting his devices for some six months, so it probably went out with the rubble. Now it survived, replete with outdoor eatery, open front, shrubs, flowers and a beautiful jacaranda out the front.)

One of the extraordinary features of fast food is its studied blandness—something a Frenchman, especially one who writes about exotic dishes produced while on anthropological fieldwork (Lévi-Strauss 1989:420–2), would notice acutely. Such blandness is not accidental, nor from a laxness in food production, but rather the result of careful market research and implementation of the results of that research.7 People will object less to food that has no exotic tastes, that does not challenge one’s accustomed palate. Indeed, there are minor variations in McDonald’s menu items depending on the locale in which they are found—here, at Northmead Maccas, muffins and salads are not to be found, while they are in the USA, and a Hungry Jack’s (a franchise of Burger King) there is an Oz Burger. Most older Australians avoid salads, commonly known as “rabbit food.” Initially on the menu here, there were removed after market research showed a low demand. But, as with the symbolization of food, McDonald’s does not have a monopoly on blandness either. For the manna from Yahweh, the bread from heaven, is also studiously bland, a “fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground” (Exodus 16:13). It is “like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey” (Exodus 16:31), although in Numbers “its colour was like the colour of gum resin” (Numbers 11:7). After being ground up, beaten and boiled, “it was like the taste of cakes baked with oil” (Numbers 11:8). Fine for a snack every now and then, but as a staple diet they were to eat it for “forty years” (Exodus 16:35), as the text, in a moment of On the stereotyped and predigested nature of popular culture and fast food see the bland article by Kinsella (1982: 62, 64–6).

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surveying hindsight, narrates. As if to reinforce the enslavement of such a diet, the text repeats in a sort of prose parallelism “the Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a habitable land; they ate manna, until they came to the border of the land of Canaan” (Exodus 16:35). This chronic narrative routinization of diet, producing the outcry for flesh in Numbers 11, finally comes to closure in Joshua 5:10–12, when they celebrate the passover in Canaan and eat the produce of the land: “the manna ceased,” reads the text in a parallelism comparable to Exodus 16:35, “on the day they are the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manner; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year” (Joshua 5:12). And what do they get? The vastly different diet of “unleavened cakes and parched grain” (Joshua 5:11)! Yet blandness is not the preserve of mythic stories about nomadic Israelites circling about in the deserts, for in contemporary fast food blandness is of course the culinary partner to routinization. Routine food requires routine workers, and the focus of sociological studies of the fast food industry is precisely on the workers themselves.8 Thus, in Reiter’s study (1991), based on field work in a Canadian Burger King outlet, the main issues are employment and management rather than the food itself or the customers. Leidner’s study (1993a), which compares fast food and insurance sales people, is concerned with routinization of both worker and customer/client. (We weaved a broken path around the tables and chairs out front. To our great surprise, everyone was behaving in an orderly fashion. “I was expecting a scene of people run amok, pillaging and plundering,” Zara said, somewhat disappointed. I thought I heard a French accent from the far corner where a weird guy sat amidst a pile Maccas debris and books. We couldn’t understand why we did as everyone else did, walking through the glass doors, lining up, reading the menu. Even though I knew that menu, I insisted on reading it once again—McQuail burgers, Manna McMuffins, and Massah water, spurting out of the obligatory rock and into paper containers full of ice.)

Marx’s comments on the profound effect of the machine upon the worker’s body, time and daily life—reshaped from the feudal rhythms to which it had been accustomed for centuries—take on a new meaning in the context of McDonald’s apparent success in the routinization of all activities carried out by McDonalds’s’ employees. Thus, already in the 1940s, Dick and Mac McDonald applied the Taylorized “labour-saving” devices that Henry Ford had applied to automobile manufacturing. By limiting the work of employees to simple, specific tasks, they were able to employ untrained cooks at lower wages, reduce training, and make faster hamburgers (see Love 1986: 18). In today’s McDonald’s every task for employees is specified in the Operations and Training Manual—dubbed “The Bible” by managers—whose 600 pages include colour photos to show the placement of ketchup, mustard and pickle slices on each type of hamburger (Leidner 1993a: 49). “The hamburger has become the acclaimed Model T of catering” (Gabriel 1985: 8). This is by no means read always as a negative: for some (Leidner 1993a: 134–47, 220–1; see also Worden 1995: 524) routinization has its good points, understood here in terms of confidence boosting, comfort with the job, and psychic protection from difficult aspects of the job.9 While workers find themselves in simple stations—patties, buns, fries, cashier and so on— customers undergo a comprehensive effort at routinization, “Environmental manipulations” are T h e work is, however, belated and still quite thin. Social scientific studies tend to prefer studies of manufacturing and production rather the service industry (so Leidner 1993b; Parcel and Sickmeier 1988: 44). 9 Ritzer (1996: 225, n. 255) disagrees, suggesting that people may merely accept McDonaldization as part of their work. 8

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supposed to produce “desired behaviours” (Foster, Aamodt, Bodenmiller et al. 1988: 201–2).10 Considerable attention is directed to customers in order to make them conform to expected behavior patterns, at least while on the premises and in the restaurant. McDonald’s customers are taught how to behave and respond through the perpetual television advertisements for Maccas, and in the store the various needs of these customers are already pre-arranged and predetermined. Yet McDonald’s is not unique in all of this, since they are merely at the forefront of a profound routinization of every sector of life under late capitalism. Routinization is closely tied in with uniformity: during the major growth period under Ray Kroc, McDonald’s distinguished itself from its competitors by its absolute commitment to uniformity through all its franchises. And that uniformity lay in QSC: quality, service and cleanliness.11 This extended well beyond the stores to the whole production and supply system for the food. McDonald’s inaugurated a massive reshaping of food production and supply—in potatoes, beef, milk and bread. From the 1950s an exorbitant amount of effort was devoted to developing a uniform french fry, thick shake, hamburger patty and bun (see Love 1986: 119–32, 325–56). Close behind the routinization and uniformity comes speed. According to Mac and Dick McDonald “[o]ur whole concept was based on speed, lower prices, and volume” (Love 1986: 14). They cut their menu to nine items (hamburger, cheeseburger, three soft drink flavours in one twelve ounce size, milk, coffee, potato chips and a slice of pie), prepared food beforehand and handed out food in paper wrappers. Speed has remained a crucial factor in the very notion of fast food, although it also highlights a contradiction of capitalism between the individual and routinization. For speed clashes with the other stated aims of fast food that include quality, customer interaction, individual attention and so on (see Leidner 1993a: 134–47; Waldrop 1988). But the contradiction is consciously acknowledged; Leidner reports a slogan from Hamburger University: “[w]e want to treat each customer as an individual, in sixty seconds or less” (1993a: 178). (We started to notice that things were different. An out-of-uniform middle-aged woman took our orders, there were many more people milling about the preparation area, although the burgers seemed to come out as fast as ever, with all sorts of interesting variations such as triple cheese, no patties, buns anywhere between raw and crisped. And no money was taken for the orders. The food was free.)

As I ponder the tightly controlled way in which the burgers, fries and coke I am ingesting have come off the production line, I point out to Lévi-Strauss that this is not the first time the production and consumption of food has been routinized. For in Exodus 16, Moses reports Yahweh’s detailed commands for the collection, preparation, consumption and (non)preservation of the manna. Like the specifications for sesame-seed buns at Maccas, each person is to gather an omer each (which equals, as Exodus 16:36 helpfully states, a tenth of an ephah), taking account not for different metabolic rates but for the various numbers of people in each tent (16:16). They were to consume it all on the same day (16:19), although such a law is based on its assumed transgression (16:20). In a division between the raw/rotten and cooked to which I will return T h is study is concerned with the function of signs in fast food stores and the effect on ordering time and errors. It makes the astonishing finding that one sign produces an average of 23.82 seconds to order with .26 errors, while two signs lead to an average 6.48 seconds to order and .08 errors. 11 Burger King swears allegiance to VAST for its property decisions—visibility, accessibility, signage and traffic. Taco Bell professes FACT: fast food, accurate orders, cleanliness, and right temperature (Kasdan 1996). 10

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below, the whole arrangement reverses on the sabbath: that which would have been rotten on the next day if kept is not rotten on the sabbath, while there is none to gather on the sabbath (16:22–6). More blatantly now is an increasingly arbitrary law based on its transgression (16:27– 9). Finally, there is a complete overturning of the initial rule about immediate consumption, for one omer is placed “before Yahweh, to be kept throughout your generations” (16:33). Claude is of course itching to put a structuralist throw on this, but I hold him back, indicating of course that the preserved omer has been read Christologically, for Christ is the bread from heaven, preserved, pickled perhaps, and then eventually torn open and devoured at the Eucharist. But, as manna, he was tasted, chewed and ingested by the Israelites before ever the Church got its teeth into him. It is necessarily a big body, for the Israelites fed off him for forty years, and the church has been doing so for some 2,000 years. Like father, like son, it seems (on God’s gigantic body see Stephen Moore 1996: 86–91). While routinization is good for business,12 both it and blandness act as figures for what I termed neutralization in Chapter 6. There is something radically levelling about such routinization, something with a utopian flavor that is more than the grease and the coke and that makes McDonald’s a pleasant experience despite itself. By utopian I refer not to the vision of futurists, in which the globe is covered in fast food outlets as a solution to world hunger (Molitor 1984). Rather, routinization and blandness act both as figures—not so much in terms of the explicit content but in what alternatives are suggested by that content and its form—of collective alternatives and as a profound neutralization of liberalism itself. In the very realization of the ultimate logic of late capitalism, fast food shows up the deep contradiction in which the socio-economic dimensions of capitalism contradict one of the central tenets of its ideological elaboration—the individual. (By the trash bin were a couple of crumpled uniforms. “Hey,” I said to Zara and Hokhma, “look at that.” I bent over the uniform to fold out the left breast of one of the shirts. It confirmed my suspicions, for upon it was embroidered a dirty “M.” Zara paused, “So, here we are in the middle of the last Maccas and it turns out they took out the other four last night and Zeke this morning.” “Wouldn’t it give you the shits?”13 I said.)

Graves of Craving The turd slides into his mouth, down to his gullet. He gags, but bravely clamps his teeth shut. Bread that only would have floated in porcelain waters somewhere unseen, unrasted—risen For this reason, most of the studies on fast food have been quantitative, attempting to assess its success, economic impact, employee motivation and how it might be improved: thus Card and Krueger (1994) and Katz and Krueger (1992) are concerned with the minimum wage; Krueger (1991) with franchising; Ihlanfeldt and Young (1994) with incomes, wage variation, urban/suburban and racial differences; Van Giezen (1994) with employment patterns; Waldersee (1991) with management/employee relations; Waldersee and Luthans (1991) with the perenniel problem of employee motivation; Ekelund and Watson (1991) with the relation between income and time (convenience) in household meal production; Brown (1990) with the competition between restaurants and fast food; Fass (1995) with the comparison in the demand for fast food between poor (Haiti) and rich (USA) countries (they are the same!); Juni, Brannon and Roth (1988) with sexual preference/ discrimination in service provision and customer preference for service; Schori (1996) with the use of the total image in order to maximize sales; and Wagner and Winett (1988) with the use of signs and flyers to get customers to reduce fat and increase a low-fat, high fibre diet (a self-defeating enterprise). 13 A colloquial Australian expression, denoting annoyance and anger. 12

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now and baked in the bitter intestinal Oven to bread we know, bread that’s light as domestic comfort, secret as death in bed. (Pynchon 1973: 235–6) You shall eat not only one day, or two days, or five days, or ten days, or twenty days, but for a whole month—until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you . . . (Numbers 11:19–20)

The other half of the fast food equation is the food itself, the focus of intense energy, much time and endless money. Contrary to the impression of a stable staple, a basic menu, McDonald’s food has undergone perpetual change. For instance, the infamous Big Mac was invented in 1968, copied by McDonald’s franchisee Jim Delligatti from Bob Wian’s “Big Boy” of the 1950s Big Boy chain. After a string of failures in finding a desert that would sell, another franchisee, Litton Cochrane, hit upon the apple pie in 1969. And the Egg McMuffin came from the mind and hands of Herb Petersen in 1971 (on these, see Love 1986: 295–300). The simple french fry took a number of years to develop, for what was sought was a product with consistent colour, texture, moisture and one that came out the same from the cooking process every time. The final product became highly specialized: Idaho Russets grown under specific conditions were found to have the right consistency and moisture content, sugar and salt coating ensured a brown colour, and the frying vats were found to cook the fries to the same specifications if the temperature of the oil after the immersion of the fries rose three degrees, no matter what (within reason) the initial temperature was. Similarly, the move from the old milkshake—labour intensive and time consuming—to the shake, with its combination of vegetable gum and dairy fats, enabled prior preparation and storage in bulk, awaiting its dispensation in stores. These sorts of expectations have forced McDonald’s to establish complete structures, or expect local providers to do so, for the basic items of the McDonald’s production line—patties, buns, potatoes, pickles, sauce. For example, in the former Yugoslavia, it took three seasons to develop conditions for the production of Idaho Russets before they were found to be acceptable (The Economist 1988b), whereas the store in Moscow relies on a huge processing plant that provides patties, fries, rolls and milk. The plant still needs to import bull semen and Russet potatoes (The Economist 1989b). Further, one of the major battlegrounds for the fast food industry has been nutrition. The designation “junk food” and attacks about the high content of fat, salt and sugar have generated continual efforts to “prove” that fast food is good for one. According to studies commissioned by McDonald’s, a burger, fries and a shake (the “three-corner” meal) comprises a larger part of the daily requirements (Love 1986: 369). Apart from the leaflet, entitled McDonald’s Nutrition Facts and available in any contemporary McDonald’s, the web site (www​.mcdonalds​.com) contains detailed nutrition menus for all its products, as well as the Nutritionist’s page (replete with photo of aforesaid person) and advice about “eating right.” (I felt an urge to crap, so I slipped into the toilet, which had clearly not been cleaned since yesterday. The turd slid quietly into the water, and I reached for the paper, only to find the dispenser empty. A pile of papers were stacked on the cistern for precisely such an emergency. The first one, with nutrition information, was a bit harsh, but the soft one on Maccas’ concern for the environment was much more pleasant.)

Food itself is also at the centre of Exodus 16, Numbers 11, and Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked. In the biblical texts there are in fact two comparable stories/myths that deal with the

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rapid production of food. In Exodus 16 the interest is, alongside a number of other things, in an early morning deposit that meets one’s needs in a functional sort of way and allows one to get on with the business of the day (like to Bacon and Egg McMuffin, or hotcakes and syrup). Numbers 11, by contrast, is a more substantial affair (although the story is also a vegetarian’s delight), being concerned with the dinner order, the quail, that kills. By Joshua 5:10–12, the time of poor diets while on the run, of divine (state) handouts, was over. Indeed, each account is strategically placed: Exodus 16 at the beginning of the wilderness wandering, after the crossing of the Re(e) d Sea and the Song of Miriam and Moses in Exodus 15; Numbers 11 at the moment before the abortive effort to enter Canaan and the condemnation to more wandering; Joshua 5: 10–12 at the final entry into Canaan. In Exodus 1614 the first mention of food concerns the “fleshpots” of Egypt in 16:3: “If only we had died,” say the people, “by the hand of Yahweh in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate or fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” The issue, then, is hunger in the desert. There follows some dialogue between Yahweh and Moses, or rather, Yahweh speaks to Moses and he and Aaron speak to the people. As always with these transferred speeches and instructions, there is some alteration. Yahweh begins (and I am focusing only on the food) by promising to rain “bread from heaven” (16:4), with some instructions on how it is to be gathered in order to test the people. Moses, however, mentions “flesh to eat in the evening and your fill of bread in the morning” (16:8). Then, after the glory of Yahweh appears in a cloud, he speaks again to Moses, now mentioning the flesh at “twilight” and the fill of bread in the morning (16:12). It is as though Moses has triggered the inclusion of flesh, which turns out to be quails, who are not mentioned again until Numbers 11. (I made my way back to the counter to pick up my order. During my absence, an argument had broken out and someone had climbed a step ladder and was plastering some paper over the McDonald’s sign. On it she wrote “Graves of Craving.” Now I felt at home. As she did this she talked with Hokhma and Zara. “This is Miriam,” Zara said. Before I could reply, Ben Moses came over from the grill station to argue with Miriam about the sign. The rag-tag revolutionary group was trying to sort its directions out, it seemed.)

As for the themes of Numbers 11,15 here we meet again the grumbling people, although this time the “alien rabble” (11:4) is at least partly to blame, for they had “cravings” (11:4) not satisfied by the manna. Here the (literally) burning anger of Yahweh features strongly, held to the fringes of the camp in 11:1–3, but breaking out again at the close of the story in 11:35–5. The quail (burgers?) were not quite what everyone imagined—a massive plague breaks out. Hence the name Kibrothhattaavah, Graves of Craving. One can picture the scene: the people have journeyed for a long time, eating what they can scrounge from empty burger wrappers and discarded fries, when one calls aloud: “Look, hinneh, the golden K and H!” All of them rush forward, inciting Yahweh to anger. He retaliates by giving them some plagued meat to feed the hungry hordes. What comes Exodus 16 is curiously surrounded by water stories: the Re(e)d Sea before, and then the story of bitter water at Massah and Meribah (Exodus 17:1–7). A little like the coke one must have with a burger, perhaps? Historical critical efforts focus, as expected, on the origins and pieces of the story. For Van Seters (1994: 187–8), Exodus 16: 1a, 2–3, 4–7, 13b-15, 21, 27–31, 35a comprises the original J story which functions as an etiology for the sabbath, as well as a test of obedience. P modifies this, since it already has such an etiology in Genesis 1, and extends the miraculous. 15 Van Seters argues for two stories in Numbers 11, one of divine provision and the other of leadership (1994: 227–34). I deal with the leadership question later. 14

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through in Numbers 11 is the punishment of Yahweh:16 in Exodus 16 the food is the occasion for a test; in Numbers 11 the test turns to punishment for greed. In one food is for discipline, in the other for punishment and death. If McDonald’s were to choose a myth for itself, then it would hardly be Numbers 11. For Lévi-Strauss, half-way through an apple pie, the role of food in these stories is a little different, particularly its various stages from fresh as the dew in the morning, to its function as immediate (and nomadic) gratification, to worms, rottenness and death-dealing meat. But it is not his moment just yet. In both stories there is an enabling tension, a conflict between the people and the leadership, a dissatisfaction that is finally directed at Yahweh. In Exodus 16 they “murmured (lwn) against Moses and Aaron” (16:2; see also 15:24), which is then thrown back at the people by Moses and Aaron (16:7) and then by Moses on his own (16:8). And in Numbers 11:1, “when they complained (‘nn) in the hearing of Yahweh about their misfortunes (r’),” then Yahweh responded immediately with fire. Both acts, or murmuring and complaining, function as narrative triggers for the stories that follow, one a test, the other punishment. But the tension remains, for the test in Exodus 16 becomes more complex, while the punishment in Numbers 11 continually breaks out, barely contained. The friction between Yahweh and the people now feeds into the distinctions between raw, cooked and rotten, for it seems that what is blessed by Yahweh may be eaten, but what is not becomes rotten or leads to death. (Not wanting to get involved in any conflict, I moved away from the counter and surveyed the walls. The usually spotless tiles on the walls were a little dusty and grimy, since there was still a lot of air-borne grit from Zeke’s efforts. The photographs were still there: picture of dirt roads, trams, cottages, old hotels, wool trains, orange orchards, children with grimy faces, worn mothers and bearded men, all in sepia and black and white. Northmead more than a century ago, in whose history the former Maccas, in proper multinational identification with the local environment, had attempted to reconstruct itself. The photos said more about the aesthetics of photography than anything else.)

But there has been murmuring within and without McDonald’s as well. Internally, a large revolt was led by the McDonald’s Operators Association (MOA) in the mid 1970s. The key here was market saturation and competition between McDonald’s restaurants (The Economist 1990). Even though McDonald’s appointed an ombudsman and a National Operators Advisory Board was established, there was a raft of court cases (see Love 1986: 382–412). Sporadic conflict and court cases still happen around this issue, particularly with expansion into new outlets, such as hospitals, universities, aeroplane flights, in-store snack bars and prisons (The Economist 1993; Reiter 1991:59). However, tired of criticism from disgruntled franchisees, environmentalists and nutritionists, McDonald’s launched what has become known as the McLibel case in 1996 (it was still in progress during the writing of this book). While Exodus 16 is not overly concerned with these questions, the issue of franchise relations is found in Numbers 11. Moses uses Yahweh’s fiery response to the people’s complaint to launch his own tirade against his franchise boss: “Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favour in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me?” (Numbers Culley (1990) sees two punishment stories: Numbers 11:1–3 concerns punishment by fire; Numbers 11:4–25 punishment by quails. The second has two variations, one through the “apparent rescue” by the quails that becomes the punishment, and the other through the mitigation of the punishment by Moses.

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11:11). He rants on for a few more verses, giving vent to a transgendered wish: “Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child’, to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors?” (Numbers 11:12). Yahweh realizes that this solitary franchisee is highly strung and that he needs some more franchisees, so he suggests the appointment of seventy branch managers upon whom he puts some of his spirit (Numbers 11:16–17, 24–5). However, two—Eldad and Medad—are not present for the training course at the tent, but they set up branches anyway, infringing on Joshua’s franchise (Numbers 11:26–28). Moses tells Joshua to stop his whining (Numbers 11:29), and the problems are solved. The other form of conflict for McDonald’s—opposition to its global expansion—has been more widespread and more difficult to contain. Indeed, a favourite topic of popular economics magazines, such as The Economist or the Far Eastern Economic Review, or the economics pages or newspapers, is the effect of the expansion of McDonald’s into ever new areas (along with stories about prostitution). Thus, before the events of 1989 in eastern Europe, and before the global economic crisis of 1998, the arrival of McDonald’s in communist countries was celebrated, as with the first one in Belgrade in 1988 and the Moscow McDonald’s on 31 January 1989 on Gorky Street, Pushkin Square (The Economist 1989b). Growing that “Communist Europe, however, has millions of frustrated fast-food freaks” (The Economist 1988b: 54), the desire for fast food was understood in the ideologically bereft West as part of the cause of the events of 1989. The Cold War aside, other conflicts include those with local culinary traditions, which either begin to erode, such as the Spanish siesta (The Economist 1984b), or respond by developing fast food versions of their own food, as in China (Yang Ji 1996; Huang Wei 1993; Beijing Review 1985) and Japan (The Economist 1989a; Noguchi 1994). Of course, in over-developed capitalist countries, McDonald’s is a raging success, as in England (The Economist 1984a) and Hong Kong (The Economist 1988a), although opposition in all forms continues to dog the corporation. For instance, in Australia and Ireland there was strong union pressure, as well as rebuttals of sponsoring offers (as with the Ronald McDonald House at Royal Melbourne Children’s Hospital) and early losses. It took eight years to begin making a profit in Australia (see Love 1986: 445-7).17 (I sat down with my odd-smelling bundle. They weren’t going to make any more money in this store. The fixed aluminium chair and hard plastic table were as uncomfortable as ever. The weird blond guy in the corner, talking to himself in French, had rolled a cigarette and lit up. I breathed in the smoke with relish. But my own meal had a similar aroma.)

However, the conflicts I have been tracing also have a deeper resonance with the ideology of liberalism and capitalism itself. For liberalism, the ambivalence of admiration at economic success alongside opposition to McDonald’s is based on the tension between routinization and individual choice, multi-national expansion and the viability of small business and local cultures, as well as exploitation and benevolence (they are doing the world a favour while making piles of money). For McDonald’s embodies the profound contradiction at the heart of such an ideology: the paradox is that as customers are treated more and more in terms of a fundamental routinization, they demand more personal services from employees; the inviolability of the individual conflicts with the collective drive of capitalism itself. By contrast, Unions seem to share their opposition with old money, although the nature of the opposition differs: for unions, it is the denial of adequate worker representation, while for old money nostalgia for an artificial past has kept burger outlets out of Suffolk County, NY, and Windsor County, VT (see Edmondson 1994).

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a dialectical Marxist perspective sees the extraordinary collective potential of what Ritzer (1996; 1998) calls the “McDonaldization” of society: here, as nowhere else—as yet—in late capitalism is there such a large scale effort at a collective imagination. To be sure, it leaves much to be desired in terms of the narrowness of that imagination, but the very act of thinking about, planning for and attempting to influence the collective behavior of so many people must have a profound fascination for any concept of collective life. Of course, the possibility that McDonald’s might be the precursor of socialism is anathema to liberals and socialists alike, but it is more the figure of collectivism that McDonald’s signals rather than any specific content of such a collective experience that interests me here.

The Raw and the Cooked Fired chicken is a comfort food. When life is rough, a bargain bucket of fried chicken and biscuits can soothe stressed-out souls. (Bill Roanigk, vice president of the National Broiler Council, USA, quoted by Crawford 1992) . . . and it bred worms and became foul.

(Exodus 16:20)

Fast food is, as I have argued, primarily concerned with food and its ingestion. And this is where I pick up Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked from among the increasing debris of my meal. There is still some coke left (I could really do with a cigarette, so I roll one despite the prohibition), but I feel a craving for apple pie and shake coming on. For Lévi-Strauss the language of food is an mythical language, one that finds itself expressed as central elements of the myths that a society produces. Thus, in The Raw and the Cooked, he traces 187 myths (numbered from M1) from South American indigenous tribes, relating them all in an extraordinary structuralist performance to the myth with which he begins, “The macaws and their nest” (1994: 35-7). It is a Bororo myth about a young man who rapes his mother, is sent on dangerous expeditions by his father, is left behind by this father while hunting macaws, has his buttocks and anus eaten out by vultures, which results in an inability to keep in his food, shapes another behind out of clay, returns to his village where he lodges with his grandmother (the only one to have fire after a violent wind), kills his father during a hunting expedition by taking on the form of a deer, and then returns to the village to take revenge on his father’s wives. This is the key myth, to which all the others are related: I propose to show that M1 (the key myth) belongs to a set of myths that explain the origin of the cooking of food (although this theme is, to all intents and purposes, absent from it); that cooking is conceived of in native thought as a form of mediation; and finally, that this particular aspect remains concealed in the Bororo myth, because the latter is in fact an inversion, or a reversal, of myths originating in neighbouring communities which view culinary operations as mediatory activities between heaven and earth, life and death, nature and society. (Lévi-Strauss 1994: 64-5) (“I suspect there’s more to the stapled ‘M’s than Maccas hit squads,” I said to Zara as she sat down opposite me.

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The Bible and Cultural Studies “They can sort out their own problems,” she said, referring to the argument she had left about the new sign. “Why, what are you thinking?” she asked. “There are endless possibilities: Maccas, the myth of the revolution, myths themselves, the desire for mammaries . . .” “It looks like they shouldn’t try to pin down their signifiers too quickly,” she replied.)

What is so attractive about this book, apart from the pure systemic brilliance it displays, is that not only is a whole series of apparently unrelated items connected with food and eating— jaguars, crocodiles, lizards, birds, and so on—but the language of food, its preparation and ingestion, is what may be termed a master narrative (despite the unpopularity of such a term at the present moment). Food speaks of society as a whole and is central to the myths by which a society perceives itself. In fact, the process of food preparation, from raw food to cooked, is a fundamental transitional moment for social inauguration and formation. However, while the process from raw to cooked is a mark of culture, of social formation, there is another transition that belongs to nature—that from fresh to rotten. If food, and especially its preparation and eating, is structurally tied up with social inauguration and self-perception (more notably in some societies than others, such as a Chinese and French—Lévi-Strauss’s own ethnic identity must play a rule here as well), what then of fast food? What does the Lévi-Strauss sitting across from me think? I assume of course that he is highly intrigued, although perhaps not overjoyed, to occupy a seat for a few minutes at my McDonald’s restaurant. What sort of socially significant messages would he read at Maccas, especially given his inspiration from Marx in the development of his own work and theories? McDonald’s may be regarded as an inaugural moment for what is now termed late capitalist society, giving its own particular name to a whole process of food production in, first, the USA and then throughout the world. Ritzer (1996; 1998) has of course provided a term—McDonaldization— that signals such an inauguration. But this inauguration inevitably takes concrete forms: McDonald’s, and the host of those who follow in the same path, is the first step in the job market for many young people—in fact, it is probably one of the few growing areas for young people to begin work in late capitalism. One estimate suggests that one out of fifteen first-time job seekers in the USA starts at McDonald’s (Leidner 1993a:46; Wildavsky 1989: 32).18 The fast food industry is something like a vast transitional space, operating at the minimum wage level (see Card and Krueger 1994; lhlanfeldt and Young 1994; Katz and Krueger 1992), into which an increasing number of school leavers, older and semi-retired people, mothers, the long term unemployed, impoverished and “illegal” immigrants for whom no insurance and tax needs to be paid (Dawson 1992), now move before passing on to other forms of (un)employment.19 It is not merely the crucial, it somewhat dubious, role that the fast food industry plays in job production that connects with Lévi-Strauss’s argument; in addition, the extraordinarily massive, long and detailed procedure from seeding to mastication and digestion is perhaps the longest and most prodigious for the process of “cooking” food in any society. In other words, not only is Maccas a marker of the commencement of late capitalism (its initial establishment and surge In the USA, McDonald’s employs more people that the steel industry (Gabriel 1985: 8). Writing in 1989, Wildavsky notes that many of the 18 million new jobs generated since the 1982 recession are in the fast food industry (1989: 31). 19 T h e benefits and drawbacks of jobs at McDonald’s are debated by advocates such as the unknown writer in The Futurist (1985) and Wildavsky (1989) and opponents like Gabriel (1985), Van Giezen (1994) and Reiter (1991: 70–1, 164). The debate turns on issues such as job skills, turnover, satisfaction, union presence and whether the jobs are used as sources of extra cash or as main incomes. Of course, the crucial question is whether McDonald’s will lead to salvation or doom. 18

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took place in the 1950s), but the phenomenal process of food production, or “cooking,” signifies the highly mediated form of social interaction and industrial production that constitutes late capitalism. Fast food production has usurped the place of traditional production-line industries in the present mutation of capitalism (Reiter 1991: 75-6), taking on the mutant characteristics of both a core and peripheral industry (Parcel and Sickmeier 1988). (I opened the grease-stained wrapper. Inside was a burnt bun piled up with lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle and, strangely, beetroot. Everything bar the lettuce was also burnt. “Charcoal is good for your teeth,” I said to Zara, hopefully. The fries were also dark brown to black at the tips and had a distinctly crispy texture.)

Even though all about me I hear, in many languages, my local McDonald’s reverberating with “what is it?” (Exodus 16:15) as customers look inside their burgers, this is not, as Lévi-Strauss in quick to tell me, the only connection with the story of the manna (Exodus 16:15, 31). Let us return, he continues, to some of the threads of our earlier discussion. The manna appears with the dew in the morning, or rather, when the dew dries (Exodus 16:13–14; Numbers 11:9). It is small, flake-like, “like coriander seed” (Exodus 16:31; Numbers 11:7). It may be eaten on the same day, as is, or ground, boiled and baked into cakes (Numbers 11:8). However, it only lasts one day, for in the morning there is a new batch, while any that is kept becomes rotten, full of worms and foul (Exodus 16:20)20—apparently any preparation does not prolong the life of the manna. There are two exceptions to this: the manna gathered for the sabbath on the sixth day lasts for two days instead of one (Exodus 16:23-6), and the omer of manna that is collected and placed “before the testimony” (‘eduth, Exodus 16:34). What is interesting about the various stages of the food is the relation between what is fresh, or “raw,” and that which rots or has worms in it, and then that which escapes becoming rotten. Although there is not an explicit reference to preparation and cooking in Exodus 16, except by way of comment on sabbath practices (Exodus 16:23), Numbers 11 assumes that this is a daily practice (Numbers 11:8). This is, however, significant, for the main concern of Exodus 16 is the role of food in human obedience to the divine, whereas fire, food and anger are the concerns of Numbers 11. In fact in Exodus 16 cooking does not affect the longevity of the food: it still rots and becomes wormy. The raw food is fine if eaten hand-to-mouth, on a daily basis. The lesson here seems to be a reliance upon Yahweh, for when people try to store up things for the future they come adrift. Yet, it is only when Yahweh commands differently that the food does not rot. In both cases—sabbath and memorial—the food comes into sacred territory or time. That is to say, only Yahweh’s presence does the food keep (like some sort of divine refrigerator or preservative). The difference, then, between what is raw and rotten is the connection with the divine: although Yahweh gives the bread, it is only Yahweh’s connection with it that prevents its putrefaction, either on the sabbath or before the testimony. For Lévi-Strauss, this is a fresh/decayed axis, to be distinguished from the raw/cooked axis.21 In Numbers 11 it is the turn of the quail, who appear and then disappear in Exodus 16:13. Indeed, in Numbers 11 the people have become sick of the daily fare of manna, groaning about McDonald’s has not been without its own putrefaction scares. In the fall of 1976 the famous rumour began that McDonald’s was adding worms to its hamburger meat. It was a media disaster for McDonald’s, despite Ray Kroc’s disavowal–“We couldn’t afford to grind worms into our meat. Hamburgers cost a dollar and a half a pound, and night crawlers cost six dollars” (Love 1986: 358). In 1982 the federal Center for Disease Control linked rare bacteria and intestinal illness to McDonald’s in the Miami area. As usual McDonald’s defended this accusation vigorously. 21 T h is also means that the resurrection of Christ may be read as divine preservation of his body so that it may be eaten. To avoid putrefaction, God removes Jesus’ body, but does this mean that the body is also cooked? 20

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its blandness, developing an indiscriminate desire for flesh (Numbers 11:4). Yahweh burns some of the aforesaid people with fire, a crucial item of this story. Curiously, the fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic that they used to eat in Egypt (Numbers 11:5) do not quite constitute “flesh.” These are not really the “fleshpots” of Exodus 16:3. Could it be that the flesh they desire is that of Moses himself, or their fellow beings, or Yahweh? The questions of Numbers 11:21-3 throw up precisely this problem: Moses suggests that, with 600,000 on foot, there is no resource for flesh, not enough herds, flocks or fish, except that of the people themselves. Like the human sacrifice of Genesis 22, Yahweh intervenes with the quail, which soon arrive in abundance, a day’s journey in any direction and two cubits deep. Given the small size of quail, this is a significant amount. Yet, what is notable about this account of the quail is that there is no reference to the preparation or cooking of the birds. It is as though the people eat them from the ground, tearing out feathers, ripping out the crop, squeezing out the blood and picking the scarce meat from each bird. But, while “the flesh was still between their teeth” (Numbers 11:33), Yahweh afflicts them and they die. The raw meat is now full of disease.22 For Lévi-Strauss disease and rottenness signify the same thing—raw food that has undergone a natural process to putrefaction.23 (Apart from the lettuce, the only other thing not burnt was the patty, the compressed dead cow. In fact, it did not even look as though it had been near the grill. I picked it up by a corner and held it up for Zara to see. “It’s squirming,” she said, with relish. I dropped it on the table and looked closer. “I think you are right,” I said, “it seems to be moving of its own accord.” There were little white moving parts all over it. I decided to leave to its own devices and eat the rest.)

Thus far, I have touched on only one part of the equation mapped out by Lévi-Strauss: It is thus confirmed that the Ge myths about the origin of fire, like the Tupi-Guarani on the same theme, function in terms of a double contrast: on the one hand, between what is raw and what is cooked, and on the other, between the fresh and the decayed. The raw/cooked axis is characteristic of culture; the fresh/decayed one of nature, since cooking brings about the cultural transformation of the raw, just as putrefaction is its natural transformation. (Lévi-Strauss 1994: 142)

This means that so far Exodus 16 and Numbers 11 follow the fresh/decayed axis of nature, and the raw/cooked axis is absent. However, before pursuing this axis, I want to focus for a few moments on the depiction of Yahweh.24 Yahweh’s presence threatens perpetually to break out and consume, a barely controllable power that manifests itself in the outbreak of fire on the edges of the camp (Numbers 11:1), in the prophecy of Eldad and Medad (Numbers 11:26-9), and with the death in the meat (Numbers 11:33). Yahweh seems to have jurisdiction over the fire: it burns, or cooks, some of the people when they complain earlier in the story. Yet the people eat their meat One would expect the same with the body of Christ, having been kept for some 2,000 years, but it seems that it may well have been cooked and preserved. 23 Note that disease reappears in the following story, the revolt of Miriam and Aaron (Numbers 12). Miriam’s skin turns as white as snow—until she repents and is healed. 24 It seems that Yahweh, or at least a later version, may have a presence in contemporary fast food. For some time, the CEO of Domino’s Pizza was a right-wing Catholic, supporting the right-to-life movement and establishing a conservative lay organization called Legatus (“Ambassador”). Of course, “Domino” itself is Latin “for the Lord”—Pizza for the Lord (see Baker 1994: 22). 22

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raw and die of disease as a punishment for their whining. Since the disease and the fire both act as punishment, it would seem that they are one. Yet, for Lévi-Strauss, disease is on part with putrefaction, a natural process, whereas fire is associated with cooking, a cultural process. Yet, death by fire and disease follows another opposition in Numbers 11. In the myths discussed by Lévi-Strauss, this pair is determined by the presence and absence of the sun, for whom Yahweh is an appropriate replacement. Too great a presence, an over-presence, of the sun produces a burned world, whereas absence of the sun or total disjunction leads to rottenness and disease (1994: 293-4). The problem here is to achieve a balance between burning and disease, both of which are destructive. And the way in which that mediation is achieved is through the cooking of food, which is absent in Numbers 11, except with reference to the manna (Numbers 11:8). This involves a domesticated presence and use of the fire that Yahweh brings. Such a domestication is found precisely with the manna. In Numbers 11:8 it is boiled in pots and cakes are made of it; in Exodus 16:23 it is also baked and boiled. Is this the key to the preservation on the sabbath and before the testimony? Although it is not explicitly stated to be so, if I follow Lévi-Strauss then we might expect such cooking to be the domestication of the divine fire, especially when it is connected with the divine command to keep some over for the sabbath. Thus, preservation, fire and cooking belong to Yahweh, whereas raw food, rottenness and disease belong to the people. For Lévi-Strauss such an opposition is fundamental to social formation itself. Only those who remain in the social structures for which Yahweh is the enclosing force and symbol will remain whole—preserved, cooked and with fire—whereas those who threaten those structures come outside such support and fall away—rotten and diseased. Finally, there is also an originary dimension to this, for the process from eating raw food, being rotten and diseased to one of having fire, cooked food and wholeness is one that speaks of the very process of social formation itself. It symbolizes the inaugural moment of human society. Given that both Exodus 16 and Numbers 11 are concerned with natural processes, that is, from fresh to rotten, raw to disease, and that Yahweh holds fire, as it were, and is thus the key to social inauguration, then these two chapters may be read as a site of tension between natural and cultural processes; something that is entirely appropriate in that both Exodus 16 and Numbers 11 mark the start and restart of the wandering in the wilderness. This means that the wilderness period, as far as this narrative is concerned, is socially ambiguous, a conflict between the nature and culture. (“At least mine are cooked,” said Zara as she looked inside hers, “so they won’t be squirming.” She had three patties interlaced with cheese; sauce oozed out of the sides and dropped from the edge of the bun onto the table as she lifted in to her mouth. They were properly cooked and I envied her as she sunk her teeth into the burger. “Do you think this is the beginning of something new?” I asked her. “Maybe, except they’re going to run out of supplies in a few days.”)

While Exodus 16 and Numbers 11 broach the question of the beginning of cultural inauguration within the context of natural processes, McDonald’s may be read at the other extreme of overcooked and overdeveloped. I have mentioned both the question of work and that of processing itself, but is there another inaugural feature of fast food? It seems to me that it might be found in the distinctly populist note about places like McDonald’s (and shopping malls for that matter) that appeals to me. Not that populism necessarily entails anti-intellectualism (although there is something distinctly healthy about that too), but it seems to me that any viable left politics needs to consider seriously the mass patronage of places like McDonald’s. For in

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many areas there is a distinct class divide that manifests itself in the choice of places to eat: the clothes, appearance, and age of those in McDonald’s and, for example, a more expensive restaurant, mark a difference between youth and elderly over against the more well-heeled young and middle aged, between relative poverty and wealth, between places where the patrons live, and so on. But McDonald’s is not merely a place for wandering youth or lonely elderly, for people with less money who live in poorer area. It is also a haven for harried parents, coaches celebrating a win or commiserating over a loss with their teams, for travelers wanting a quick stop and some food, and even for those who can’t see any reason to pay more than they need to for a coffee. McDonald’s is, then, a popular intersection, a place where people, especially from certain groups, are to be found: it is a distinct example of mass or popular culture, the irony being that it is one of the most aggressive and expansive multinational companies out of all of them.25 Endless studies seek to locate the appeal of fast food—convenience (Balzer 1993), taste (Waldrop 1993), location, speed, consistency, cleanliness (Kasdan 1996)—yet it seems to me that the utopian dimensions of fast food are there despite and not because of these elements. It is like a lover, as soon as one begins to list the reasons for being attracted to a person—voice, politics, eyes, hair . . . then you lose sight of what is appealing about that person. Finally, Marxists have always been interested in the way internal contradictions of a system lead to its downfall and supersession. Ritzer’s (1996) recasting of Weber’s rationalization process in terms of “McDonaldization” identifies four features—efficiency, calculability, predictability and control (1996: 9-10, 35-120)—the precursors of which he finds in bureaucratization, the Nazi Holocaust, scientific management, the assembly line, shopping malls and new suburban housing. Although he identifies the irrationalities and problems of this process and although he argues for an alternative vision, his analysis would be strengthened by being incorporated into a Marxist framework in which the ubiquity of McDonaldization is read as a marker for the ubiquity of capitalism itself—the domination of the market, commodification and reification. However, there is an embryonic argument that is contained within its Weberian limits: Ritzer traces a contradiction within McDonaldization that may be read as a marker of the contradictions of capitalism. The drives to efficiency, calculability, predictability and control end up producing their opposites. Although vitiated by a humanist argument, what is interesting here is that the contradiction of food is not only a trace of contradictions within capitalism but an effort to overcome those contradictions—the drive to freedom produces enslavement, democracy produces anything but, efficiency leads to inefficiency. . . . It is precisely these sorts of contradictions that can lead to breakdown of a socio-economic system and either its restructuring or its collapse.26 (So there we sat, on same metal chairs at a plastic table in a slightly jaded fast food restaurant at the edge of the world; piles of rubble surrounded us, the smoke of explosions and fires hung in the air, and yet there were people here, eating what could still be made for them. Zara was engrossed in her burger, Hokhma had joined us with hers, Miriam had succeeded in getting her sign up. I put aside the patty and bit into my burger. It was crunchy, but satisfying.)

It is also ironic that in some places McDonald’s sets in train a whole different set of reactions, since it is regarded as a place of privilege, of the glowing promise of capitalism, for which one must pay more than other food stops. In these cases—the early Moscow McDonald’s fell into this category—McDonald’s mutates significantly from its basic form. 26 I am thinking of neither the “post-hunger society”—the need to keep the mouth full while doing something else (Mort 1989: 18–19)—nor solving the world’s food problems by fast food (Molitor 1984 25

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References Ames, Sanford. 1988. “Fast Food/Quick Lunch: Crews, Burroughs and Pynchon,” In Literary Gastronomy, ed. David Bevan. Rodopi Perspectives on Modern Literature 1. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 19–27. Baker, Ross. 1994. “Fast Food Conspiracies: Demogaffes,” American Demographics 16 (May):22–3. Balzer, Harry. 1993. “The Ultimate Cooking Appliance,” American Demographics 15 (July) 40–4. Beijing Review. 1985. “Fast-food Joint Ventures Set Up,” Beijing Review 28 (April 1):29. Brown, Douglas M. 1990. “The Restaurant and Fast Food Race: Who’s Winning?” Southern Economic Journal 56 (April):984–95. Card, David, and Alan B. Krueger. 1994. “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” American Economic Review 84 (September):772–93. Crawford, Franklin. 1992. “Fried Chicken Still Rules the Roost,” American Demographics 14 (July):17. Culley, Robert C. 1990. “Five Tales of Punishment in the Book of Numbers,” In Text and Tradition: The Hebrew Bible and Folklore, ed. Susan Niditch. Semeia Studies. Atlanta, GA: Scholar’s Press, pp. 25–34. Dawson, Tim. 1992. “Quick Bucks from Fast Food,” New Statesman and Society 5 (January 31):20–1. Dumoulin, Pierre. 1994. Entre la Manne et L’Euchariste: Etude de Sg 16, 15–17, 1a. AnBib 132. Rome: PBI. Economist (The). 1984b. “Take Away Olé,” The Economist 292 (September 22):72. ——. 1988a. “Sweet and Sour Pizza to Go,” The Economist 306 (March 5):72. ——. 1988b. “McComrades,” The Economist 307 (April 16):54. ——. 1989a. “Pushkin, Coke and Fries,” The Economist 313 (November 18):44. ——. 1989b. “Teriyaki McBurger,” The Economist 311 (April 29):64. ——. 1990. “Fast-food Wars: Drive In, Run ’em Over,” The Economist 314 (February 17): 88–90. ——. 1993. “Big Mac’s Counter Attack,” The Economist 329 (November 13):69–70. Edmondson, Brad. 1994. “Burger Breaks,” American Demographics 16 (July):60. Ekelund, Robert B., Jr., and John Keith Watson. 1991. “Restaurant Cuisine, Fast Food and Ethnic Edibles: An Empirical Note on Household Meal Production,” Kyklos 44(4):613–27. Fass, Simon M. 1995. “Fast Food in Development,” World Development 23 (September): 1555–73. Foster, R. Spencer, Michael G. Aamodt, James A. Bodenmiller, Jeffrey G. Rodgers, Robert C. Kovach, and Devon A. Bryan. 1988. “Effect of Menu Sign Position on Customer Ordering Times and Number of Food-Ordering Errors,” Environment and Behavior 20 (March): 200–10. Gabriel, Yiannis. 1985. “Feeding the Fast Food Chain,” New Statesman 109 (April 12):8–9, 12. Huang Wei. 1993. “Local Versus Foreign Fast Food,” Beijing Review 36 (March 15):13–16. Ihlanfeldt, Keith R., and Madelyn V. Young. 1994. “Intrametropolitan Variation in Wage Rates: The Case of Atlanta Fast-Food Restaurant Workers,” Review of Economics and Statistics 76 (August):425–33. Juni, Samuel, Robert Brannon, and Michelle M. Roth. 1988. “Sexual and Racial Discrimination in Service-Seeking Interactions: A Field Study in Fast Food and Commercial Establishments,” Psychological Reports 63 (August):71–6. Kasdan, Pamela. 1996. “Fast Food for Thought,” American Demographics 18 (May):19–21. Katz, Lawrence F., and Alan B. Krueger. 1992. “The Effect of the Minimum Wage on the Fast-Food Industry,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 46 (October):6–21. Kinsella, Marjorie. 1982. “The Fast Food Restaurant: Expression of Popular Culture,” Journal of Cultural Economics 6 (June):59–70. Krueger, Alan B. 1991. “Ownership, Agency, and Wages: An Examination of Franchising in the Fast Food Industry,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 106 (February):75–101

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——. 1991. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Vol. 2. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. Notes by John Forrester. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. Leidner, Robin. 1993a. Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ——. 1993b. “Review of Making Fast Food and Dishing It Out,” American Journal of Sociology98 (January):942–4. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1989. Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Picador Classics. London: Pan Books. ——. 1994. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology. London: Random House. Love, John F. 1986. McDonald’s: Behind the Arches. New York: Bantam Books. Molitor, Graham T. T. 1984. “From Farming to Fast Food: The Changing Look of Agribusiness,” The Futurist 17 (December):20–22. Moore, Stephen. 1996. God’s Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible. New York and London: Routledge. Mort, Frank. 1989. “Moveable Feasts,” New Statesman and Society 2 (January 27):18–19. Noguchi, Paul H. 1994. “Savor Slowly: ekiben—the Fast Food of High-speed Japan,” Ethnology 33 (Fall):317–30. Parcel, Toby L., and Marie B. Sickmeier. 1988. “One Firm, Two Labor Markets: The Case of McDonald’s in the Fast-Food Industry,” The Sociological Quarterly 29 (Spring):29–46. Pynchon, Thomas. 1973. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking Press. Queen, Carol. 1996. “The Four Foot Phallus,” In Tales from the Clit: A Female Experience of Pornography, ed. Feminists Against Censorship. Edinburgh and San Francisco, CA: AK Press, pp. 140–4. Reiter, Ester. 1991. Making Fast Food: From the Frying Pan into the Fryer. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ritzer, George. 1996. The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation Into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. 2nd edition Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. ——. 1998. The McDonaldization Thesis. London: Sage. Robertson, Pamela. 1996. Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Schori, Thomas R. 1996. “Getting the Most Out of Image: An Example from the Fast-Food Industry,” Psychological Reports 78 (June):1299–303. Sprinkle, Annie, interviewee. 1991. “Annie Sprinkle,” with Andrea Juno. In Angry Women, eds Andrea Juno and V. Vale. San Francisco, CA: Re/Search Publications, pp. 23–40. Van Giezen, Robert W. 1994. “Occupational Wages in the Fast-Food Restaurant Industry,” Monthly Labor Review 117 (August):24–30. Van Seters, John. 1994. The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus–Numbers. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox. Wagner, Jana L., and Richard A. Winett. 1988. “Prompting One Low-Fat, High-Fiber Selection in a Fast-Food Restaurant,” Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 21 (Summer):179–85. Waldersee, Robert. 1991. The Impact of Manager Attributional Accuracy and Feedback on Subordinate Performance and Non Performance Outcomes. Working Papers Series. Kensington, NSW: Centre for Corporate Change, Australian Graduate School of Management, University of New South Wales. Waldersee, Robert, and Fred Luthans. 1991. Feedback Sign and the Performance and Nonperformance Outcomes of High Task Mastery Employees, Kensington, NSW: Centre for Corporate Change, Australian Graduate School of Management, University of New South Wales. Waldrop, Judith. 1988. “Fast Food and Family Fare,” American Demographics 10 (June):14. ——. 1993. “When Tulsa Burps, McDonald’s Apologizes,” American Demographics 15 (July):44–5.

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Wildavsky, Ben. 1989. “McJobs: Inside America’s Largest Youth Training Program,” Policy Review 49 (Summer):30–7. Worden, Steven. 1995. “Review of Fast Food, Fast Talk,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 23 (January):523–6. Yang Ji. 1996. “Domestic Fast Food Catches Up,” Beijing Review 39 (August 19–25):25.

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Part II

Bible and Cultural Studies Biblical Characters and Passages Interpreted in Popular Culture The chapters in this portion look to the appearance of biblical characters, images, and language in popular culture and media. This may be the most extensive body of work in the area of Bible and cultural studies. It is certainly the area of most rapid growth in the twenty-first century. Much as biblical scholars today associate the refinement of historical-grammatical approaches to “higher criticism” with nineteenth-century European, particularly German, scholarship, and the development of critical theory and hermeneutics with twentieth-century continental philosophy and francophone scholarship, the rise of work in Bible in elements of mass culture will likely come to be known as an innovation of twenty-first century, Anglophone criticism, particularly in North America and the United States in particular. There is a narrative of continuity one can compose for the developments leading to the growth of attention to the Bible in mass culture that touches on all those previous discourses. German higher critics made a priority of a long-steeping trend in European biblical studies, which foregrounded the study of the Bible as if it were any other book arising from antiquity and affecting the development of Western thought. Their goal was to read the Bible without assumptions of faith or concerns for theological application or confessional community, but, instead, as if it were a work by Homer or Sophocles. The higher critics were foregrounding the book as a book, as an element of human culture which was, in turn, influential upon the same. The core interest of German higher criticism was to unpack the best argument for how the Bible emerged as “the Bible” we know today—what sources or authors were involved in its composition, redaction, collection, and canonization—and also to unveil via historical and grammatical inquiry what the Bible likely “meant” to its authors, early readers, and later interpreters. Greater credence was given to later interpretations that resonated with most continuity to the uncovered meaning intended by the author. The goal was to foster a “science” of biblical interpretation, where expertise in antiquity, languages, and historical methodologies was prized. Not surprisingly, this trend in biblical studies arose concurrently with (also continental) scholarship after Otto Rank which approached “Religion” itself via a critical, “scientific,” and sociocultural lens, and entered the twentieth century permeated with a desire to study religion not as insider and practitioner, but as a second-order discourse, asking questions about the definition, structures, and function of religion itself.

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Such focus was, inevitably, descended from earlier trends from the Enlightenment and very much an element of Modernity, particularly with its high confidence in “science” and scholarly objectivity, a soup salted heavily by Modernity’s infatuation with Structuralism and its confidence in universal human experience, social Darwinism, and predictable, linear, cognitive development, and cultural growth toward “sophistication.” Confidence in human potential and unvaried progress, the rationality of science, scholarly objectivity, and the ability to identify intrinsically (and universally) “Human” ways of thinking and culture were, to say the least, severely disrupted by early to mid-twentieth-century history. The emergence of poststructuralism and critical theory among later twentieth-century (particularly francophone) critics removed optimism in locating an objective, external and “scientific” method of interpretation. Critical theory, particularly work influenced by scholars such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and others, challenged naïve intuition that authorial intention can be determined clearly in a given text. Authors do not always know (or fully grasp) their own intentions. Words and language function, they argued, via intricate systems of connotation and denotation. Meaning—and to an extent Truth itself—was a community construct. It was highly relative, and scholars could not extract themselves from their own limits, biases, and desires (whether sacred or secular). What arose was a suspicion of “metanarrative” (big stories that explained reality into which—and via which—discrete elements of culture such as art and literature were understood). Metanarrative shaped not only the meanings one was willing to attach or interpretations one advocated but even scripted what was visible as “culture” or “art” or “literature.” Sigmund Freud argued that the development of human psychology and Self was the product of a narrative. Much like Freud suggested for the individual, poststructuralists argued that large metanarratives had within them a great deal that was being suppressed or hidden. Jacque Derrida advanced his work in Deconstruction—critical analysis that searched, metaphorically, for how any text or scholarly product carried within itself, suppressed, the seeds of its own sub-conscious experience. Of particular attention were binaries and divisions that marked the world into either-or options. Deconstructionists reveled particularly in cracking these binaries, revealing how what was often suppressed was the potential middle-term, the place where neither binary option held true but where metanarrative worked to provide harmony. As we saw in Part I, Cultural critics (largely in the United Kingdom) began refining their definition of “culture” and expanding the concept to include more than high art or refined critical discourse. Scholars affiliated with the Birmingham Centre, such as Hoggart and Hall, challenged the bifurcation between so-called high and mass culture. Again, as we saw in Part I, influenced by theorists such as Gramsci and Althusser (who were, in turn, influenced by Marx), they argued that such bifurcation was actually manifestation of a metanarrative that privileged one class over another and created hegemonic systems of social control. Attention to one book as “literature,” but another, much more popular book, as “popular” was in reality the creation, protection, and perpetuation of a system of class difference—establishing those in the know from the masses. Implicit in their critique were questions such as: Why would literature departments privilege via critical attention and acclaim the plays of Shakespeare over modern comic books, and what was at stake (who benefited) from such distinction? The anglophone scholarship on culture emigrated to America at precisely this moment of focus and question and found welcome collaborators. Programs devoted to mass culture, such as Bowling Green State University’s Department of Popular Culture (led by Ray Browne), began offering undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in popular culture as early as 1973. Scholarship turning the tools of formal academic theory on an array of popular media and entertainment

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began to flourish in the humanities in the 1980s, and Stephen Greenblatt’s development of “Cultural Poetics” or “New Historicism” (telling history via mass or pop culture) remapped much of the discourse. In part, the study of mass culture found a natural home in the United States, given rhetoric of populism, celebration of the individual (via rhetoric of democracy), and the US innovation and domination in global media and entertainment industries. This last point, however, may point at one of the more critical factors. Frederick Jameson has identified the culture of postmodernity as a culture of late capitalism (though, by no means, a fan of the same). In late capitalism, as Jameson defines it, capitalist energies of innovation, market, and consumption turn toward both cultural production writ large and ideology, as well. Such a turn contradicts metanarrative (beyond consumption and choice) but also revels in cultural superficiality, in celebration of the moment and the current as the point of substance. Biblical scholars who turn toward popular or mass culture are doing so as a humanities field within this broader conversation. A few decades behind traditional MLA fields, work on Bible in popular culture began in earnest in the later 1990s. If slower in starting, it has, however, come on quite strong in the intervening years, with significant attention from professional societies, journals, and monograph series. Much of this biblical scholarship is grouped, by the general field, into the taxonomy of “Reception Criticism.” Biblical critics turned to popular culture have not been as deeply involved in the scholarly conversations and methodologies surrounding it as one finds in literature or other fields represented by the Modern Language Association. Many sub-fields within popular culture (film criticism, web and digital media, photography and visual imagery, etc.) have long histories of critical theory and methodological development. These often go under-attended by biblical critics. Many biblical critics are, instead, intent on first tracing where and how Bible themes, passages, or characters appear in popular media, and then either observing how Bible is affecting (or not) popular taste and ideology or noting how media and culture are getting Bible (in)correct. A few scholars, however, are doing more sophisticated work via “intertextuality.” Certainly, for many biblical critics, the word “intertextual” is used in its most mundane of meanings: an examination of how one part of the Bible cites and interprets another. As a more theoretically rigorous term, however, “Intertextuality” refers to the ways in which “texts” (generically understood—perhaps written word, but equally as likely to be visual arts, music, dance, sports, architecture, etc. In other words, any potentially meaningful human activity or creation) are interpreted by “readers” (again, generic for interpreter) via the complex ways that the encounter with that text intersects with the meaning or encounter with another text. Drawing from Kristeva (herself influenced by Roland Barthes) intertextual critics examine the meanings that arise in the reader (often in themselves) via the productive juxtaposition of multiple texts. What does a Bible reader, steeped in the literature of Jesus traditions, make of Superman? In what ways does the comic character reveal by analogy or comparison new insights about the gospel character? In what ways does understanding the Messianic nature of Jesus add substance to understanding the heroic nature of Superman? Within biblical scholarship, Fernando Segovia paved the way for these sorts of questions and this sort of sophisticated understanding of intertextuality via his 1995 article “Cultural Studies and Contemporary Biblical Criticism: Ideological Criticism as Mode of Discourse.” For Segovia, cultural studies is an opportunity for the critic to examine her own context-driven reading assumptions and investment(s). It is the role assigned to the reader that, without doubt, most sharply differentiates cultural studies from other competing paradigms in contemporary biblical criticism. For cultural

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studies the reader does not and cannot remain . . . in the background, even if so wished and attempted, but is actively and inevitably involved in the production and meaning of “texts” and history.1

Segovia intended, as well, that this criticism, with its focus upon (rich interpretive history and cultural encounter of) the reader would also, at its best, foreground the reader’s identity and cultural location, unveiling the way diverse readers with diverse experiences encounter biblical documents. We will return to this theme in the last section, Part V, of this reader. While they may not specifically cite Segovia or explicitly invoke “intertextuality,” the chapters in this portion have been selected because they effectively demonstrate this better, more critically informed concept and because they exemplify an awareness of methodological conversations and trajectories in other forms of cultural critique. The first chapter, “Jezebel Revamped” by Tina Pippin, is a chapter extracted from her significant monograph Apocalyptic Bodies, a book that addresses Bible, bodies, and human sexuality. Though certainly, bodies and sex are not, per se, items of culture, how bodies are perceived and sexual norms of expression (and the effect of it all upon gendered behavior and expectations) certainly are. In this chapter, Bible and biblical texts are used to create cultural structures and how the Bible, itself, is/has been read to reinscribe or perpetuate those cultural constructions. Pippin also employs a type of critical interpretation, which was called “autobiographical” criticism. Autobiographical critics shattered typical expectations of scholarly detachment (or aloofness) in order to foreground the scholar, as reader, engaged, contextually and experientially, with the process of interpretation. Unlike a “reader response” that imagines (or better, constructs) a hypothetical “ideal reader,” ancient or modern, autobiographical criticism foregrounds the scholar herself via the integration of first-person, autobiographical intrusions or extended vignettes. The approach revels in the logic of “intertextuality” even if it doesn’t always explicitly name it, and it is something of a prelude to work that emerges later as Affect Criticism (an approach covered in Part V). Following this section’s themes not only of biblical characters but also of the nexis between Bible and Gender Studies, I’ve selected J. Cheryl Exum’s “Bathsheba Plotted, Shot and Painted”; she (arguably along with Alice Bach) launched the interest in film and moving image within biblical studies (an interest that would grow exponentially in the decades to follow). In addition to Exum, I include another early notable work on Bible and film, “How the West Was Not One: Delilah Deconstructs The Western” by Jennifer Koosed and Tod Linafelt. This chapter not only anticipated Bible and film but also a return to interest in the genres of film and books about the American West. These two chapters also cue up the next section’s focus on film. Finally, this section is concluded by “Dracula: ‘The Blood Is the Life’” by Larry Kreitzer. This chapter explores the character of Dracula in fiction, film, and general mass culture, noting the ways he is an inversion of biblical tropes and norms (an exact opposite of the figure of Jesus, in that Dracula consumes the blood and bodies of others and “raises” his victims to perpetual death). This chapter inverts the interests of the prior three chapters in this chapter in interesting ways: it focuses on a male character from popular culture, noting how he draws from and inverts Bible (rather than exploring how Bible is used to create pop culture characters). Fernando Segovia, “Cultural Studies and Contemporary Biblical Criticism: Ideological Criticism as Mode of Discourse,” in Reading from This Place, ed. F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995), 2:12. Segovia would later refine this, writing that cultural studies is a “joint critical study of texts and readers”; Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000), 30.

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Annotated Bibliography: Further Readings Clanton, Dan W. The Good, the Bold, and the Beautiful: The Story of Susanna and Its Renaissance Interpretations. LHBOTS, 430. London: T & T Clark, 2006. Dan Clanton, Jr. has been at the forefront of criticism of the Bible in popular culture. This work is a sustained monograph that is an excellent foray into his work (interested readers might progress to his Daring, Disrespectful and Devout: Interpreting the Bible’s Women in the Arts and Music [New York: Continuum, 2009]). Clanton has also worked extensively as an editor, collecting the work of several exciting scholars on various elements of mass culture. I also recommend his edited collection The End Will Be Graphic: Apocalyptic in Comic Books and Graphic Novels. BMW, 43; APC, 5 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2012). Conway, Colleen M. Sex and Slaughter in the Tent of Jael: A Cultural History of a Biblical Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. This work examines the character Jael’s execution of the invader Sisera (Judges 4) as it has been seen in art and literature of the intervening centuries. It is a substantial survey of one way that the Bible has been integral to European mass culture (as well as a helpful reminder that what is now “high” art was often, itself, “mass” or popular culture in its origins). Exum, J. Cheryl, ed. “The Bible and the Arts.” Biblical Interpretation 6.3–4 (1998). This collection was one of the earlier forays into the Bible in/as/and art, and it remains a critically important work. Gilmour, Michael J. Tangled Up in the Bible: Bob Dylan and Scripture. New York: Continuum, 2004. Gilmour has devoted substantial attention to the appearance of the Bible in twentieth-century popular music. Readers interested in this title would also do well to note his edited collection “Call Me the Seeker”: Listening to Religion in Popular Music (New York: Continuum, 2005) and his more definitive Gods and Guitars: Seeking the Sacred in Post-1960s Popular Music (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009). Leneman, Helen. The Performed Bible: The Story of Ruth in Opera and Oratorio. BMW. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2007. What Gilmour has done for Bible in twentieth-century rock music, Leneman does for Bible in/and high opera. Leneman does not share Gilmour’s desires to collapse “high” and “mass” culture, but brings a depth of formal music training to her analyses. Moore, Stephen D. God’s Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible. New York: Routledge, 1996. Stephen Moore’s (prolific) career in biblical studies has been spent largely at the vanguard of new methodologies and critical theory. His earliest major work acquainted Bible scholars with poststructuralism (particularly Derrida and Foucault), and he was a member of the Bible and Culture Collective (whose work famously resulted in the extremely influential Postmodern Bible). Moore’s God’s Gym merges poststructuralist thinkers, queer theory, and cultural studies (and is a notable example of auto-biographical criticism). Moore’s later work, as we will note in Part V, turns to posthuman studies and affect. Pippin, Tina. Apocalyptic Bodies: The Biblical End of the World in Text and Image. New York: Routledge, 1996. Tina Pippin’s monograph is another early example of Bible and pop culture that mixes autobiographical criticism. Pippen explores the gender implications of John’s Apocalypse via its influence on mass culture (particularly that found in the southern United States). Roncace, Mark and Patrick Gray, eds. Teaching the Bible through Popular Culture and the Arts. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2007. This edited volume by Roncace and Gray is a follow-up to their earlier work Teaching the Bible. It offers several signed, brief articles that survey the use of popular culture in the college classroom (with particular focus on introductory, undergraduate courses). Seesengood, Robert Paul and Jennifer L. Koosed. Jesse’s Lineage: The Legendary Lives of David, Jesus and Jesse James. LHBOTS, 548; Playing the Texts, 14. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. This volume, co-written with my partner and colleague Jennifer Koosed, uses the American Reconstruction folk hero of Jesse James as a model for understanding folk heroism and oral tradition, then

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turns to the biblical characters of king David and Jesus. The volume both explores how the Bible has influenced mass culture (noting popular comparisons or descriptions of Jesse James that drew from biblical allusion) and how the study of pop culture (the dynamics of folk heroism in particular) can inform and enrich our reading of the Bible. Segovia, Fernando. “Cultural Studies and Contemporary Biblical Criticism: Ideological Criticism as Mode of Discourse.” Pages 1–17 in Reading from This Place vol 2. Edited by Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995. This chapter (discussed earlier, and perhaps in tandem with Segovia’s Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000]) lays a methodological basis for Bible and cultural studies, drawing from the poststructuralist idea of “intertextuality.” It should be noted that, as Segovia uses the term, “intertextuality” is a far more complex and subtle concept than observing how parts of the Bible use, cite, alter, or allude to others. Sherwood, Yvonne. A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Yvonne Sherwood’s pioneering book was among the first wave of biblical scholarship examining the history of biblical interpretation in cultural production—visual arts, music, later literature, and eventually film, television, and internet. Sherwood termed her interest “afterlives”—exploring how the Bible and its characters transform in culture by their use. The analysis of “afterlives” gained some attention in biblical studies, perhaps in the most sustained way via the Wiley-Blackwell Commentaries series, each individual volume commissioned by a cultural studies-oriented critic and bearing the subtitle “Through the Centuries.” Much of Sherwood’s work here is what later biblical critics would describe as “Reception Criticism,” particularly in the way it is used in the mammoth reference project The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (published by Brill). Wainwright, Elaine and Philip Culbertson, eds. The Bible in/and Popular Culture: A Creative Encounter. SemeiaSt, 65. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010. The monograph series “Semeia Studies” has long been interested in promoting leading-edge and experimental methodologies for biblical scholarship. Not surprisingly, it has often featured essay collections and single-author monographs that feature Bible and cultural studies and Bible and pop culture. This volume is an excellent introduction to the work of several scholars, as well as being one of a few volumes to foreground a richer sense of Bible and popular culture—noting not just when the Bible appears in pop culture but also when pop culture provides analogous means for understanding Bible more, or when the Bible itself becomes a cultural item.

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Jezebel Revamped1 Tina Pippin

Introduction Southern women in the United States define Jezebel:2 everything negative; wicked; scheming; whore; cheap harlot; either promiscuous or a complete whore; female form of gigolo; the name has seductive connotations; biblical queen; wife of Ahab; gave her husband bad advice; evil and treacherous; two-faced; one who seduces men and leads them to destruction; a woman who gets around; not ashamed; bimbo; I didn’t know what it meant until my roommate called me this; someone who is wild, free, and comfortable with her sexuality; uninhibited, some might say slutty; a beautiful name; a southern belle with a mind and will and sex drive who is damned for not fitting the stereotype of a helpless, frigid woman; Scarlett O’Hara; Bette Davis in the red hoop dress in the 1938 film; condescending term used for African American women in the time of slavery; Gene loves Jezebel; you’re a jezebel = flirty girl, light, flighty, aloof or dirty slut; free spirit, happy, cute, very feminine; always a lady (but not always nice); slinky; powerful; ambitious; calculating; ruthless; eaten by dogs; taking pleasure from material things; selfcentered; decorated woman; painted face; Cosmo clothes; sensual; she has been given a “bad rep” by many scholars and people; she is famous for her badness; vamp, vampire, temptress, femme fatale, siren, witch—a woman who takes or ruins the life of another. The body of the dead and defeated Jezebel in 2 Kings 9 and Apocalypse of John 2 returns in multiple texts as the classic femme fatale. Jezebel is the vamp/ire who roams the texts of culture and gender relations. The point in this chapter is not to reconstruct or re-form the biblical image of Jezebel, but to trace the trace of “jezebel” through various texts from the biblical period to the present using theories of intertextuality and the social construction of the body of the dead woman. The complex and ambiguous character of Jezebel in the Bible serves as the archetypal bitchwitch-queen in misogynist representations of women. Beginning in 1 Kings 16 through 2 Kings 9 and reappearing again in Apocalypse 2: 20, Jezebel is the contradictory, controlling, carnal foreign woman. The common pronouncement (still widely used in the contemporary southern United States), “She is a regular Jezebel,” underlies the imagining of Jezebel beginning with the Apocalypse 2: 20 passage and has referred to countless women from political queens including A different version of this article appears in Athalya Brenner, A Feminist Companion to Samuel and Kings, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994 and in Semeia 69/70 (1995) on “Intertextuality and the Bible,” George Aichele and Gary Phillips (eds). 2 I conducted an informal survey of college students (ages 18 to 50), Atlanta area artists, and members from both Episcopal and southern Baptist congregations. 1

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Mary Tudor, Mary Stuart, and Isabella I to movie queens such as Bette Davis, Vivian Leigh, and Elizabeth Taylor. A sampling from different older and more recent biblical commentaries confirms this view of Jezebel as sexually evil and a demon woman: Ahab’s “evils . . . are laid at her door . . . she came near to bringing the house of David to extinction” (Culver 1975: 589–90). She totally disregarded Israelite law and custom. To these more common reactions add: “She was a woman of masculine temperament and swayed her husband at will” (Gehman 1970: 492).3 Jezebel is the foreign influence that is dangerous and brings destruction. In considering Jezebel, her reputation precedes her, regardless of how narrow or misogynist its presentation. The Woman’s Bible of 1895 turns to another dimension of Jezebel: Jezebel was a brave, fearless, generous woman, so wholly devoted to her own husband that even wrong seemed justifiable to her, if she could thereby make him happy. (In that respect she seems to have entirely fulfilled the Southern Methodist’s ideal of the pattern wife entirely fulfilled in her husband.) (Stanton 1974: 75)

Jezebel is the equal rival of Elijah; both their deeds of genocide are seen as “savage” (Stanton 1974: 75).4 The newer women’s bible states that Jezebel “met her death with characteristic audacity: she painted her eyes, adorned her head, and greeted Jehu from her window with a caustic insult” (Exum 1985: 489). I am “re-vamping” the generally accepted view of Jezebel as an evil woman from the biblical to the modern representations of her. Using theories on intertextuality from Bakhtin to Thibault and contemporary film theory, I trace the relations between the biblical text and other texts (drama, poetry, film, and art). The codes and “signifying practices” of the presence of Jezebel in a variety of texts have implications for the hermeneutics of gender and sexuality. In other Emphasis added. On the masculinity of the Jezebel figure, see Patricia Morton (1991: 153): Black women’s history:

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has been shaped in the image of Jezebel who deserved what she got because she was other than womanly. And the image of black womanhood as other than womanly has served to confirm black manhood as other than manly, and thus to confirm that the Negro was other and less than fully deserving of racial equality.

In an early twentieth-century drama (McDowall 1924), Jezebel speaks twice of her desire to be male: “Oh, would I were a man that I might go myself with them and face Elijah too” (1924: 12) and “Oh! God! If only I had been a man!” (1924: 21). In film representations the jezebel is termed a “superfemale” as opposed to the more masculine “superwoman.” The superfemale is “a woman who, while exceedingly ‘feminine’ and flirtatious, is too ambitious and intelligent for the docile role society has decreed she play. She is uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable as to rebel completely; her circumstances are too pleasurable” (Haskell 1987: 214). The film image that comes to mind is Bette Davis in her academy award-winning role in the 1932 Jezebel, in which she plays a southern woman who schemes and destroys those around her and eventually almost destroys herself. In the final scene she rides off toward possible vindication. Teresa de Lauretis expresses a parallel notion in her feminist critique of Derrida: Were I to do so, however, I would earn Derrida’s contempt for “those women feminists so derided by Nietzsche,” I would put myself in the position of one “who aspires to be like a man,” who “seeks to castrate” and “wants a castrated woman” ... I shall not do so, therefore. Decency and shame prevent me, though nothing more. (1987:47)

Elijah is “that much-overestimated ‘man of God’” (Stanton 1974: 75). Ellen Battelle Dietrick adds a contemporary note, calling on the reader “to imagine why Jezebel is now [1895] dragged forth to ‘shake her gory locks’ as a frightful example to the American women who ask for recognized right to self-government” (in Stanton 1974: 75). Are these “gory locks” also an allusion to Medusa—dred/dreaded/dreadful/dredlocks?

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words, the “trace” of Jezebel is in her adorned face peering through the lattice (representing the face of the goddess Asherah), with the image of her corpse as a vivid reminder of the defeat of the goddess-centered cultures—“they found no more of her than the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands” (2 Kgs. 9: 35). The text of the goddess is distorted and placed in only negative terms. I do not intend to un/recover a heroic woman figure from the biblical narrative or to redeem a “bad” woman of the Bible. I want to deal with the cultural representations and the interactions of readers with the image of Jezebel. A re-reading of different texts of Jezebel reveals the complexities of “that cursed woman” who fought to retain her indigenous culture and the continuation of the “curse” for all women who claim autonomy—sexual, religious, or political.

Jezebel “Jezebel” has ambiguous definitions: from “unexalted, unhusbanded; or the brother is prince” (Gehman 1970: 492) or “where is the prince?” (Exum 1985: 489)5 to meaning “chaste as does the common European name Agnes—quite inappropriate” (Culver 1975: 589). “Jezebel” means the monstrous female—loose and let loose, loose woman.6 Why is the monster, here the jezebel, so fascinating? What is the “seduction,” the draw into the dangerous darkness where the “monster” lurks? Like the use of the “curse on Ham” as a justification for slavery of Africans, “jezebel” was the designation of the sexually dangerous African American slave woman. The juxtaposition of the images of the mammy and the jezebel served as an apologetic for the exploitation of the female slave. Deborah White (1985)7 describes these divisions in terms of the madonna—whore dichotomy: the mammy is asexual; loving; warm; maternal; dark-skinned; big; older; wears formless clothes; covers her hair with a kerchief; is loyal, religious, and pious. The jezebel is sexual; provocative; young; with changing skin color; comely; promiscuous; provocatively dressed; a breeder; rebellious; a whore. E.B. Johnston (1982: 1057) finds a word play in Jezebel’s name: zebel in Jezebel’s name is made a pun in 2 Kings 9: 37 with the word “dung” (domen). 6 On the double monster in the mother and daughter relationship see Gallop (1989). She finds the mother– daughter relationship reflected in groups of women: “One monster cannot be separated from the other.” I think this idea has interesting implications for the Jezebel—Athaliah connection; is the narrator of 1–2 Kings presenting us with a pair of monsters? 7 See chapter 1, “Jezebel and Mammy: The Mythology of Female Slavery.” On p. 46 White states: 5

Southerners, therefore, were hardly of one mind concerning African-American women. Jezebel was an image as troubling as it was convenient and utilitarian. . . . On the one hand there was the woman obsessed with matters of the flesh, on the other was the asexual woman. One was carnal, the other maternal. One was at heart a slut, the other was deeply religious.

Patricia Morton (1991: 10) follows White’s argument: “by labeling the female slave as a Jezebel, the master’s sexual abuse was justified by presenting her as a woman who deserved what she got . . . by labeling the slave woman as a sexual animal—not a real woman at all.” Morton adds that the jezebel was scapegoated: “still cast as Jezebel, the black woman was assigned responsibility for the supposed sins of black as well as white men” (1991: 33). See also Victoria Bynum (1992: 35 ff.). In discussing the Jezebel in Apocalypse 2, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza rightly draws on the southern tradition: Like the historical queen Jezebel, she has served in Western thought as the archetype of the sexually dangerous woman. During the time of slavery, for instance, the image of Jezebel, the whore, became the controlling image of black womanhood in white, elite, male propaganda. (1991: 135)

There is no solid evidence of the extent to which the jezebel title was used to describe these women.

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The white masters created these images to control and dominate the female slave. The mammy represents the desire for a positive image for African Americans. The jezebel was an excuse—of masters to justify their own adolescent and later adulterous behavior. White women blamed the jezebels in order to deny the rape and oppression of slave women. The jezebel acted out of the constraints of race and gender. The cultural “Africanisms”—of women having children before marriage and of exposing more of their bodies in the field as they worked—were misunderstood by whites. The whole system was based on the white male, which left white women finding ways to discredit the slave women. So jezebel is not an abstract sign but a real physical presence—for antebellum culture and also in popular culture in the United States. Can one get outside the popular culture meaning of Jezebel?

Re-vamped Recent biblical scholarship reveals the ambiguity of the character Jezebel and the religious/ political rather than sexual intention of her painted face in the murder scene. But the term “jezebel” has distinct social meaning that is biblical (in Hosea; Ezekiel 16; the “strange woman” of Proverbs; the false prophetess of Apocalypse 2). Whoring and fornication are associated with strange religion and strange culture. Claudia Camp remarks that in the story of Naboth’s vineyard, the Deuteronomic historian may have blamed Jezebel for Ahab’s deed: “shifting of the blame to the foreign woman forms part of that era’s polemic on the dangers of intermarriage” (1992: 104).8 The jezebel schemes with both her mind and body. She has “been around”—in/ from foreign territory (Tyre; Africa), and she brings danger with her. Therefore, her body must be destroyed. Look closely at the remains: skull; feet; palms of her hands (2 Kgs. 9: 35).

Viewing the Dead Body The image of Jezebel is difficult to identify iconographically; her portrait and scenes of her life are rare.9 Still, she is imaged as the temptress. Both men and women are drawn to her. Even though 2 Kgs. 9: 37 pronounces that “no one can say, This is Jezebel,” the irony is that “This is Jezebel” is exactly what people said ever since this Deuteronomic proverb. The best view of the death scene is in Gustave Doré’s La Sancta Bible in the print, Les Compagnons de Jéhu Retrouvent la Tête et les Extremités de Jézabel. The eye of the viewer is drawn to the central image of Jezebel’s severed head, peacefully beautiful in its silence and separation from her body. The severed head is veiled here; in the picture of the previous scene of Jezebel being thrown out of the window by Camp is following Alexander Rofe on this point. Peter Ackroyd states that “Jezebel becomes a type; into her figure is projected in detail the hostility to what is believed to be alien practice” (1985: 256). Elise Boulding (1992: 209) adds:

8

Foreign women were dangerous role models for Israelite women, with their political ways and priestess notions. We shall see the same scenario played out again 1,000 years later, in the Christian church fathers’ distrust of pagan women and their priestess tradition. The sexual seduction aspect of this struggle is, I suspect, a male rationalization.

T h e Index of Christian Art at Princeton University lists about twenty respresentations of Jezebel up to 1400 CE. Of these there are approximately ten portraits; the rest are from three scenes of her life.

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Figure 6.1  Detail from The Death of Jezebel (1865) by Gustave Doré.

the eunuchs, Jéhu Fait Précipiter Jézabel, her hair is loose. The viewer is face-to-face with Jezebel. Does death bring her back to a virginal state? Is this face the death mask of the ideal woman? Is the ideal woman a dead woman—silent, fragmented, and powerless? Is the viewer responsible for her death? Is this the severed head of Medusa, a warning, a marker to other women who seek power?​​ In Doré’s vision Jezebel’s two hands and one foot remain. Whereas her head is covered, the hands and feet are exposed and thereby eroticized.10 There is no blood and no corpus; only the extremities remain. The hands and foot seem to gesture. In her reading of “Rembrandt’s” drawing of the Levite’s wife on the threshold in Judges 19, Mieke Bal states, “The hand of this Bram Dijkstra refers to “the dead woman as object of desire” in his work on nineteenth- to twentieth-century iconography of evil women (1986: 51).

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Figure 6.2  Detail from Jehu’s Companions Finding the Remains of Jezebel (1865) by Gustave Doré: “But when they went to bury her, they found no more of her than the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands” (2 Kgs. 9: 35).

woman is crucial: it tells about death and about representation. It does not ‘see,’ but it speaks about mis-seeing . . . . It demonstrates that her gesture is phatic, enforcing semiosis” (1991: 370–1). So Jezebel’s hands in the Doré drawing are poised and regal, even inviting. This Jezebel has been dis-abled, immobilized; her life (and evil doings) interrupted. In the sexual politics of the death scene by Doré the soldiers dominate; they stand over her transfixed, while one of them lifts her severed head for viewing. All that is left are the outermost parts. Why these body parts? These remains seem excessive, some textual excess—the excess of horror?—the excess of desire? Jezebel’s dead body parts are the signs of the liminal body, made even more liminal by their being dung on the fields. No one owns this body; as a king’s daughter she is denied the appropriate burial by the dogs who eat her. Jezebel the Queen is now Jezebel the dog food. Her flesh is devoured. Jeze-baal/Asherah is eaten. “The corpse of Jezebel shall be like dung” (2 Kgs. 9: 37) shows the shaming and utter destruction of the Canaanite/Phoenician religion. The focus on scatology appears again in Jehu’s destruction of a temple of Baal in 2 Kgs. 10: 27: “Then they demolished the pillar of Baal, and destroyed the temple of Baal, and made it a latrine to this day.”

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A similar scatological joke is made at the Mount Carmel contest (1 Kgs. 18: 17). The reference to dung, outhouses, and a Canaanite god’s deposal point to a way to dismiss and shame the enemy by referring to them by particular body parts (the Philistines as the uncircumcised ones) or by/ as their body functions. Jezebel as dung represents the ultimate impurity. Thus, Jezebel and her religion are excrement to be excreted. What is left of Jezebel is more than the sum of the dead body parts. In the horror of the death scene and the gaze of the viewer on the public execution—the fall, splattering blood, trampling horses, eating dogs, leftover flesh—the death of the female is forcefully presented. According to Virginia Allen in her study of the femme fatale, “Dead women, exotic women, embody a fierce and total rejection of living women” (1983: 186). Of course, Ahab also died a miserable, public death with the dogs drinking his blood. Ahab followed the evil ways of many kings before and after him, but he was “urged on by his wife Jezebel” (1 Kgs. 22: 25). The representation of Jezebel’s death is different. She represents the power behind the throne, both political and spiritual. Her scattered body parts are a gendered focal point for the viewer, and their seductive power in Doré is intact. The power and seduction of Jezebel linger. Even after the destruction of the house of Ahab (especially Jezebel’s daughter Athaliah, 2 Kgs. 11), Asherah returns, and Jezebel returns. So again, are the body parts markers, signs of warning: beware of foreign women and queen mothers; beware of all living women? Despite warning, Jezebel returns eternally as vamp/ire, the phantom-ghost who roams time haunting both men and women. Jezebel is the vamp/ire that cannot be killed, who roams through other texts and times and women. She has a future in a different form; she is constantly re-formed in the image of male desire and fear. The “original” Jezebel is tangled up in its cultural texts, including the biblical story, that is its own invention of Jezebel. All texts of Jezebel are copies (Baudrillard’s simulacra). Who’s telling the truth? Everyone is. And no one is. Even the severed head speaks in tongues: tongues that are political, queenly, indigenous, elite, evil, religious, female, sexualized, monogamous, mothering, and murdered. The head speaks in the tongues of all the “texts” of Jezebel. The biblical text presents both the limits of Jezebel and her limitlessness. From the confines of her house she is the anti-prophet to Elijah the prophet (cf. Apoc. 2: 20). Jezebel talks to Jehu from her high window within female space. When she enters the male world, she is thrown to her death. Crossing that boundary is her last act—in the Deuteronomic text.

The Intertext of Desire Jezebel is a fantasy space. She is an effect, a personality, a lifestyle, an ethical way of being female in the world, and an intertextual turn for the worst. Her multiple stories are parodies, including the biblical story. As parody, the Jezebel “texts” are ironic, contradictory, ambiguous, and paradoxical. Postmodern theorist Linda Hutcheon equates parody with intertextuality. Hutcheon relates: “It [parody] is also not ahistorical or de-historicizing . . . . Instead, through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference” (1988: 93). The biblical Queen Jezebel is reconsidered with each subsequent “text.” There is no closure to the story of Jezebel’s death in 2 Kings; as parody, Jezebel engages the reader in a montage of images. Tom Robbins re-creates a parody of a modern Jezebel/Salome in his book, Skinny Legs and All, by questioning the tradition handed down in Western culture. The main character, Ellen Cherry, thinks to herself:

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What had Queen Jezebel done to earn the distinction as our all-time treacherous slut: In the Bitch Hall of Fame, Jezebel had a room of her own; nay, an entire wing. For fixing her hair and applying makeup? Was it implied that she went to the window to flirt with the rebel warrior? And if so, was that so wicked that it should wreck her reputation for three thousand years? The trimillennial lash bat? As Ellen Cherry walked the rain-rippled pavement of Seattle, bumpershooting from restaurant to restaurant in search of a job, she bore upon her back the weight of a skull, a pair of feet, and the palms of two hands. The nails of the feet were lacquered vermilion, a pretty ribbon fluttered from a lacuna in the skull. And she would wonder as she walked, “What is the Bible trying to tell us?” That Satan is a hairdresser? That Elizabeth Arden ought to be fed to the poodles? (Tom Robbins 1990: 33)11

Robbins is a lover of Jezebel, and his book is about his experience of jouissance. He plugs into the tradition of Jezebel as the ultimate femme fatale and creates a parody out of this web of desire. Jezebel’s grave is empty; she stalks new victims in creative ways, forever crossing boundaries and challenging convention. Mieke Bal points to the Jezebel narrative as an “ideo-story”; that is, a story taken out of context. Bal gives the example of a tabloid story, “Devilish Ladies Who Everybody Loves to Hate,” which includes “Lilith, Jezebel, Delilah, and . . . Sappho . . . . The combination of the four figures is a function of the principle of coherent reading. Both within and between the four stories, contradictions and problems are repressed” (1987: 11). That Delilah is not a liar or that Jezebel is not an adulteress get lost in the ideo-story. The reproduction of popular mythology is a priority in the reading process. This reading of Jezebel in predominantly sexual terms is socially grounded. A social semiotics which draws from Bakhtin’s heteroglossia is useful reading for Jezebel. The textual voices on Jezebel are many; they overlap, origins unknown (except the general patriarchal culture which is women’s context). Paul Thibault promotes a “neomaterialist social semiotic,” uniting theory and practice into the study of semiotics.12 Thibault is involved in asking ethical questions of theory—that intertextual theorizing challenges existing hegemonic relations. In other words, Robbins’s protagonist Ellen Cherry considers Jezebel “her doppel-gänger.” He describes her search for the biblical Jezebel:

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she had procured a bible and gone searching for the lurid details of Jezebel’s debauchery. From Sunday school, she had a hazy picture of a thoroughly immoral harlot who costumed herself like a rock ‘n’ roll vamp, but she couldn’t recall a single biographical fact. Imagine her surprise when the Old Testament Book of Kings informed her that Jezebel was a royal—and faithful—wife. (1990: 32) 12 T h ibault defines social semiotics as a theory that moves semiotics “beyond its self-identification with many of the foundational ideological assumptions of Western culture” (1991: 3). Social semiotics is connected with social heteroglossia as follows: The systems of voices in the social semiotic, including potentially unvoiced meanings and practices, comprise the relations of social heteroglossia through which relations of alliance, consensus, opposition, conflict, and co-optation among voices are positioned and articulated in specific texts and intertextual formations. (1991: 25)

Morgan (1985: 8) relates this point: “Indeed, culture itself, or the collection of signifying practices in a society, is radically intertextual.” On the materiality of language see Kristeva (1975).

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intertextuality is grounded in a social context/community with certain dominant assumptions about how the world operates. The sign “jezebel” is embedded in social relationships and in a range of “texts.” As John Frow states, “Texts are therefore not structures of presence by traces and tracings of otherness. They are shaped by the repetition and the transformation of other textual structures” (1990: 45). Jezebel is not an image but images, a plural form. The whoring Jezebel is of course the most seductive image. In discussing seduction and prostitution in Flaubert, Ross Chambers writes: “In the homosocial world, literature must pose, in order to gain acceptance, as a figure of powerlessness, helpless or charming; a child or a woman. . . . Literature, in short, must camp it up” (1990: 155). Thus, the passage in Apocalypse 2 stands out: Jezebel refuses to repent and continues to beguile and fornicate. “Beware, I am throwing her on a bed, and those who commit adultery with her I am throwing into great distress, unless they repent of her doings; and I will strike her children dead” (Apoc. 2: 22-3). And the Jezebel in 2 Kings 9 paints her face and fixes her hair boldly to face death and the fulfillment of the prophecy of the enemy. What would the apocalyptic Jezebel say to the narrator John in reply? What would Queen Jezebel say to the narrator of her life story? Are their only traces skull and feet and palms of the hands and dead children? An outside Jezebel has invaded the text, a Jezebel who would proclaim (as did Ellen Cherry’s cynical mother Patsy in Skinny Legs and All), “Of the Seven Deadly Sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter” (1990: 106). But the biblical Jezebel does not seek or find sexual pleasure. Looking out the lattice, Jezebel is framed. She is also imprisoned. In the biblical text, as well as in early twentieth-century “devotional fiction,” Jezebel is a prisoner in her own palace; she never leaves or confronts men (like Elijah) on the outside. Jezebel remains inside; acting behind the lattice. All attempts to colonize her fail. The colonial nature of the jezebel text and the oppression of the jezebel voice are apparent in the sadistic retelling of her death. In her book on the effects of imperialism on the reading process, Laura Donaldson calls for a “materialist-feminist semiotics” that “requires that we not only recognize how micrologies of power keep certain information systems in place while simultaneously suppressing others but also resist the temptation of an unmediated politics of meaning” (1992: 120-1). The discourse on Jezebel is guided through the colonial mind. The image of the Other, the foreign, the dangerous, and thereby seductive woman is used against medieval women and slave women and southern women who break with tradition. Tom Robbins attempts to decolonize Jezebel: Jezebel. Jezebel. Painted Queen of Israel. I am praising thee, O Queen of Israel. Whore of the Golden Calf. Strumpet of Baal. Jezebel. Slut of Samaria. Our queen whom the dogs are eating. The watercourse of the Jews is flowing through thee. Jezebel. My Queen. Whose daughter is ruling in Jerusalem. From whose womb is pouring the House of David. Mmm. Jezebel. Priestess of Fornication. Mmm. Queen of Spades. Queen of Tarts. O Jezebel, you are my queen, I exalt thee and praise thy sandals. (Robbins 1990: 348)

Even though in popular Western culture to be called a jezebel is not a compliment, there is a strange connection/disconnection to Jezebel. Women read themselves as Jezebel, as having the “jezebel spirit.”13 Are we happy/satisfied when Jezebel is splattered and trampled by horses and eaten by dogs? What have we done with the story of Jezebel? Is her story continually recolonized, re-opened, the brief scenes of her life re-enacted and reinscribed? An older woman student of mine recently commented that Jezebel is that (or any) evil woman who steals husbands. Then she added with a wink, “There’s a part of Jezebel in me.”

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Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter R. (1985) “Goddesses, Women and Jezebel,” in Averil Cameron and Amelie Kuhrt (eds) Images of Women in Antiquity, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Allen, Virginia (1983) The Femme Fatale Erotic Icon, Troy, NY: Whitson. Bal, Mieke (1987) Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. _____ (1991) Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, New York: Cambridge University Press. Boulding, Elise (1992) The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time, vol. 1, revised edition, Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Bynum, Victoria E. (1992) Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Camp, Claudia V. (1992) “1 and 2 Kings,” in Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (eds) The Women’s Bible Commentary, Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox. Chambers, Ross (1990) “Alter Ego: Intertextuality, Irony and the Politics of Reading,” in Michael Worton and Judith Still (eds) Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Culver, R.D. (1975) “Jezebel,” in The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia, vol. 3, Grand Rapids, MI: Merrill C. Tenney. de Lauretis, Teresa (ed.) (1986) Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. _____ (1987) Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dellamora, Richard (1994) Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Dijkstra, Bram (1986) Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture, New York: Oxford University Press. Donaldson, Laura E. (1992) Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire Building, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Exum, Cheryl (1985) “Jezebel;” in Paul J. Achtemeier (ed.) Harper’s Bible Dictionary, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Frow, John (1990) “Intertextuality and Ontology,” in Michael Worton and Judith Still (eds) Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gallop, Jane (1989) “The Monster in the Mirror: The Feminist Critics Psychoanalysis,” in Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (eds) Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gehman, Henry Snyder (ed.) (1970) The New Westminster Dictionary of the Bible, Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press. Grixti, Joseph (1989) Terrors of Uncertainty: The Cultural Contexts of Horror Fiction, London/New York: Routiedge. Haskell, Molly (1987) From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hutcheon, Linda (1988) A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London/New York: Routledge. Johnston, E.B. (1982) “Jezebel,” in Geoffrey W. Bromiley (ed.) The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Grand Rapids, MN: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Kristeva, Julia (1975) Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University Press. McDowall, H.M. (1924) Jezebel: A Tragedy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Morton, Patricia (1991) Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women, New York: Greenwood. Robbins, Tom (1990) Skinny Legs and All, New York: Bantam Books. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth (1991) Revelation: Vision of a Just World, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (ed.) (1974) The Woman’s Bible, Seattle, WA: Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion. Thibault, Paul (1991) Social Semiotics as Praxis, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. White, Deborah Gray (1985) Aren’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, New York: W.W. Norton.

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Bathsheba Plotted, Shot, and Painted1 J. Cheryl Exum

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. John Berger, Ways of Seeing To be given in free exchange, to be willingly kept in ocular circulation, to serve as object for readerly and visual reception, not to hold out on the viewer, is already surely an act of generosity, if not forced. Mary Ann Caws, “Ladies Shot and Painted: Female Embodiment in Surrealist Art.”

“Plotted” in the title of this essay refers, of course, to the narrative handling of the story of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11. “Shot” has nothing to do with Bathsheba’s death, which is not recounted in the Bible, but rather invokes the camera, since I want to consider how Bathsheba is treated in movies based on the biblical story. I also want to look at some famous paintings of Bathsheba, from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. My primary interest in the comparison between narrative, painting, and film is in the representation of the female body; specifically, I want to investigate how Bathsheba, a paragon of sensuality, is portrayed as the object of sexual desire and aggression, and to inquire how her body is focalized, first in the text itself, and then in visual representations of it. I shall be looking, then, at women—for we’re dealing with more than one Bathsheba here—as the object of the male gaze. And I shall be arguing that there is more to Bathsheba than meets the eye. Since I shall be self-consciously looking at looking, I invite the reader to join me in looking at our own gaze—at our collusion, or complicity, or resistance when faced with the exposure of female flesh for our literary or visual consumption. Surely female and male readers and spectators will react differently to the textual and visual images. The female reader or viewer, like it or not, is identified with the body observed. To the extent we view the naked woman as object, we are co-opted into objectifying our own bodies and reading the textual and visual representations against our own interests. I shall return to this point later.

T h is essay is based on my inaugural lecture as Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield. A shorter version was delivered in the series, The Bible in the 21st Century, at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Chicago, IL, for which I gratefully acknowledge a travel grant from the British Academy.

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Bathsheba Plotted The biblical story of David and Bathsheba holds a place in popular imagination both as a tale of unbridled lust and also, curiously, as a famous “love story.” It is, in fact, as a love story that producer Darryl F. Zanuck and director Henry King presented David and Bathsheba in their 1951 film. What is it about David and Bathsheba as a topos and about us as consumers of this topos that makes us so eager to imbue their encounter with feeling—with mutual feeling— rather than dismissing it as an isolated incident, a gratified whim of the king with disastrous consequences for him and his kingdom? The biblical version is no love story. Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, is “sent for” by King David, who has sex with her in a moment of passion. That brief encounter might have been the end of it but for one complication: Bathsheba becomes pregnant. Unlike King’s film version, where David and Bathsheba romp about the countryside enjoying bucolic trysts, in the biblical account David and Bathsheba do not have sex again until after she has become his wife. Nor is there any evidence in the biblical version to suggest that David wanted Bathsheba either for his wife (as the film is at pains to show) or his paramour. On the contrary, the text makes clear that David would prefer to have Uriah assume paternity of the child and, presumably, continue in his marriage to Bathsheba as before. David has Uriah killed and then marries Bathsheba only because his ploy to get Uriah to “go down to his house”—that is, to have sex with his wife (11:11)—fails. In the biblical account, David’s erotic involvement with Bathsheba occupies only one verse of narrative time. David sent messengers and took her. She came to him and he lay with her, while she was purifying herself from her uncleanness. Then she returned to her house. (2 Sam 11:4)

Since Bathsheba will become pregnant, the clause, “while she was purifying herself from her uncleanness,” is necessary to establish David’s paternity. Apart from this essential information, only five actions—three on David’s part and two on Bathsheba’s—are minimally described. He sent, he took, and he lay: the verbs signify control and acquisition. In contrast, only her movement is described: she came and she returned. This encounter is set in a narrative context of aggression and violence. “All Israel” (2 Sam 11:1)—that is, all the men except the king—are away at war, besieging a city, while David is at home, taking a woman.2 Is Bathsheba, like Rabbah of the Ammonites, taken by force? We cannot be sure, for although “sent” and “took” indicate aggression on David’s part, “came” and “returned,” the two verbs of which Bathsheba is the subject, are not what one would expect if resistance were involved. The king sends for a subject and she obeys. Does she know for what purpose she is summoned? For news about her husband Uriah, who is away on the battlefield (which is the pretext used in the film David and Bathsheba)?3 Or for sex? An actual demand for her sexual services is not necessary to make her feel she must agree to sex. David is, after all, the king; is she free to refuse? Both the placement of this scene within the account of the Ammonite war and its consequences suggest force. When, as part of his punishment, David’s children reenact his sins, David’s adultery See Fokkelman: 41-70 and Bal, 1987:10-36 for discussion of the combination of war, sexuality, and violence in 2 Samuel 11. For other explorations of the connection between women, war, and metaphors of sexual violence, see the essays in Camp and Fontaine. 3 In the film, David tells Abishai to invite Bathsheba to dine with him so that he can reward her for Uriah’s valor in battle. 2

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with Bathsheba is replayed as rape, not once but twice. First Amnon rapes his sister Tamar (2 Samuel 13) and later, to signal his takeover of his father’s kingdom, Absalom rapes ten of David’s wives. The ten women are raped in a tent on the roof, a location which serves both to remind us of the place where David sinned and to fulfill Nathan’s prophecy that God will do to David in the sight of the sun and all Israel what David had done in secret (2 Sam 12:11–12; 16:21–22). Whether or not David rapes Bathsheba is a moot question, and one I do not feel compelled to argue, since I am not interested in subjecting a literary creation to cross-examination.4 What Bathsheba might have done or felt is not the point; the point is we are not allowed access to her point of view. The issue of force versus consent, which is crucial for constructing the woman’s point of view, is not raised. Nor does the text describe an attempted seduction, which would give the woman a role, even if one in which she is manipulated.5 Bathsheba’s rape is semiotic; that is to say, her violation occurs not so much in the story as by means of the story. By denying her subjectivity, the narrator violates the character he created. By portraying Bathsheba in an ambiguous light, the narrator leaves her vulnerable, not simply to assault by David but also to misappropriation by those who come after him to spy on the bathing beauty and offer their versions of, or commentary on, the story. In particular, the withholding of Bathsheba’s point of view leaves her open to the charge of seduction. Both the 1951 film David and Bathsheba6 and the 1985 King David,7 for example, are unable to resist the appeal of seduction in order to make David less guilty at Bathsheba’s expense. David and Bathsheba is sensitive to the possibility of coercion: is Bathsheba free to say no? “You are the king,” says Bathsheba. “What other answer can I give, sire? You have sent for me and made known to me your will, what else is there for me to say?” This response represents Bathsheba as a subject who feels she cannot refuse her king, one who yields to his authority, and at this point we may think that the film is out to restore Bathsheba’s honor.8 But pursuing this characterization of Bathsheba would cast King David in too negative a light. David therefore responds to Bathsheba’s submission to his will with a long speech in which he prides himself for refusing ever to take anything by force, not even the kingdom: “So I said nothing to you until you told me that there is no love in your marriage. Yes, you told me that, and so did Uriah. . . .”9 Only when he tells Bathsheba that she may leave, proving his respect for her right to refuse, does Bathsheba confess to having planned the whole thing! She watched him walking on his balcony every evening and knew she could count on his being there to see her. She had heard he had found no woman to please him. She wants to be the woman who will make him happy. She wants to be his wife. In the 1985 film King David, drastic changes are made to make David look better. He sees Bathsheba bathing, but does not send for her. He has sex with her only after their marriage, which takes place after Uriah is dead (a death David arranges to rid Bathsheba of an abusive husband). For an approach that attempts to flesh out female characters by giving them narrative life in the reader’s consciousness, see Bach. 5 On the problem with the rape/seduction opposition, see Rooney. 6 Twentieth Century Fox; produced by Darryl F. Zanuck; directed by Henry King; screenplay by Philip Dunne; and starring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward. 7 Paramount Pictures; produced by Martin Elfand; directed by Bruce Beresford; and starring Richard Gere. Alice Krige has a minor role as Bathsheba. For interesting comments about his role as advisor to the film, see “My Part in the Fall of ‘King David,’” in Magonet. 8 T h e fact that the film uses it at all shows, I think, how compelling an interpretation it is of the narrative silence. It also makes Bathsheba appear more manipulative: she does not yield to David until she has him in the position she wants. 9 In the film, Uriah has already indicated to David that he prefers the soldier’s life to the marriage bed. Making Uriah into an insensitive brute is part of the film’s strategy to make David seem less guilty. 4

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As a result of these and other distortions of the story line, nothing that happens later in the film makes much sense. In particular, the disasters that befall David’s house now appear arbitrary and random rather than as connected to his sin and his punishment in kind. Though Bathsheba is not clearly guilty of planning the affair, as in David and Bathsheba, she is nonetheless complicit in letting herself be seen bathing. When David first meets her face to face, he says, “I’ve seen you once before,” to which she responds, “I know.”10 What I have described is not just a contribution of Hollywood. Biblical scholars draw similar conclusions. When commentators on 2 Samuel 11 suggest that Bathsheba shares the blame, are they picking up on a latent message in the text, or are they reading their own gender stereotypes back into it? George Nicol, for example, maintains: It cannot be doubted that Bathsheba’s action in bathing so close to the king’s residence was provocative, nor can the possibility that the provocation was deliberate be discounted. Even if it was not deliberate, Bathsheba’s bathing in a place so clearly open to the king’s palace can hardly indicate less than a contributory negligence on her part. (Nicol: 360)

Similarly, in his commentary on the books of Samuel, Hans Wilhelm Hertzberg says, “We must, however, ask whether Bathsheba did not count on this possibility,” and then quotes Alfons Schulz—“one cannot but blame her for bathing in a place where she could be seen”—before concluding, “not, of course, that this possible element of feminine flirtation is any excuse for David’s conduct.”11 Though he holds David accountable, Hertzberg manages to blame the woman also. He goes on to propose that, although we know nothing of Bathsheba’s point of view, “her consciousness of the danger into which adultery was leading her (Deut 22:22) must have been outweighed by her realization of the honour of having attracted the king” (310). I find it more than a little disquieting that what is arguably a violation and certainly an objectification has so easily, in the view of the conventional commentator, become an honor. Why is it that (male) interpreters are so quick to blame Bathsheba for appearing on the scene in some state of undress? What about the responsibility of the narrator, who made the decision to portray her in the act of washing?12 It is, after all, the biblical narrator who, using David as his agent, makes Bathsheba the object of the male gaze. When biblical commentators imply that Bathsheba desired the king’s attentions and when popular renditions of the story attribute such motivation to her, they let the narrator off the hook at the woman’s expense. We also are involved in the narrator’s pretense. By introducing Bathsheba to us through David’s eyes, the biblical narrator puts us in the position of voyeurs: “. . . he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful” (2 Sam 11:2). I have discussed the voyeuristic nature of this scene in my book, Fragmented Women (see esp. 174–75, 194–95). The narrator controls Why she has come to petition David is another aspect of the film that makes little sense, for, although she tells David that Uriah beats her and shows him her wounds, she reminds him that a woman has no redress against her husband. She can tolerate the beatings, she says, but she wants a child. David says she shall have one, to which she replies, “Not while my husband lives.” The scene thus suggests that she puts the idea of killing Uriah into David’s mind, and the very next shot is of Uriah’s death letter being sealed. 11 Hertzberg, 1964:309, italics mine. In the German original (1960), the term is “Koketterie.” 12 Berger (51) makes this point about visual art, but it applies as well to narrative: “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.” To the extent that the narrator implies culpability on Bathsheba’s part, he, too, is being hypocritical—morally condemning her for the nakedness he has created imaginatively for his pleasure, David’s, and that of his ideal readers. He could have, for example, had David see Bathsheba in somewhat the same way that another biblical “lover,” Samson, sees the woman he wants: “David went out in Jerusalem and he saw a woman who was the right one in his eyes.” 10

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our gaze; we cannot look away from the bathing beauty but must consider her appearance: “very beautiful.” We presume she is naked or only partially clad, and thinking about it requires us to invade her privacy by undressing or dressing her mentally. The intimacy of washing is intensified by the fact that this is a ritual purification after her menstrual period, and this intimacy, along with the suggestion of nakedness, accentuates the body’s vulnerability to David’s and our shared gaze. A woman is touching herself and a man is watching. The viewing is one-sided, giving him the advantage and the position of power: he sees her but she does not see him.13 Readers of this text are watching a man watching a woman touch herself.14 Can male and female readers possibly react in the same way to the scene? For my part, I am uncomfortable being put in the position of voyeur, watching a naked woman being watched. Nor are we and David the only voyeurs: “Is this not Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” (v. 3). It is not clear who says these words, whether David15 or an attendant,16 but in any event, “Is this not Bathsheba?” suggests that someone else is looking too. The woman is focalized through the male gaze: . . . and he saw a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful.

How does David, through whose eyes we see the woman’s body, react to what he sees? The sight of Bathsheba’s body arouses his desire, and he acts on it: he sends for her and has sex with her. Lustful looking is the prelude to possessing. The story thus raises the question of the relationship between looking, desiring, and acting on the basis of desire.17 Fortunately, not every voyeur acts on his lustful impulses. The text condemns David for doing so, but only because the woman is another man’s property. The voyeuristic gaze at the female body that can lead to appropriation is permanently inscribed in the text, and we, its readers, are implicated in it. With all this looking, it is little wonder Bathsheba has become the quintessential object of the gaze in literature and art through the ages. Her “punishment” for being desired is to be forever visualized as the sensual woman who enflames male lust. This is how the paintings and films I want to consider treat her, dramatically reinscribing the text’s voyeuristic gaze at the naked female body. As readers or spectators, we are implicated in this gaze, but as gendered subjects, we are implicated differently. The biblical story, it is fair to say, was written by men for men. To the extent that female readers assume its male perspective, we are forced to read against our own interests: to accept the concept of woman as a source of temptation that can bring about a man’s downfall. Even if we do not identify with Bathsheba, we cannot escape feeling implicated in the indictment of woman that she represents.18 The

Looking at the female body is a cultural preoccupation for both men and women. Women look at women, as the genre of the fashion magazine—the how-to manual for capturing the gaze—well illustrates. Looking at women is an expression of male sexuality. Men are the owners of the gaze. Men look at women to assess us, to take stock of us, to decide how to treat us. Women look at women (including ourselves), among other reasons, in order to determine how to attract the gaze (or how to avoid attracting attention), in order to become like or unlike the image before us. 14 If we accept the testimony of literature, art, film, and pornography, men are aroused by watching a woman touch herself. Even more arousing perhaps is the sight of another woman touching a woman—a scene exploited in the film King David (see below). 15 So, convincingly, Bailey: 85. 16 So most commentators and most translations. 17 My discussion of this issue owes much to Bal’s analysis of the story of Susanna (1993). 18 T h e position of the female reader is well described by Fetterley: 507. 13

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paintings of Bathsheba are also by men19 and for assumed male spectators and male owners. In commenting upon the Western artistic tradition, John Berger observes, In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. But he, by definition, is a stranger—with his clothes still on.20 (54)

Finally, the films, like most Hollywood movies, are produced and directed by men, and in spite of the fact that their audience consists of women and men, the naked female body remains focalized through the male gaze. The woman holds the look; she plays to and signifies male desire (Mulvey: 19). As Laura Mulvey has argued in her classic study on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”: “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (19; italics hers). The male viewer of the paintings and the films, like the male reader of the biblical story, is invited to take David’s symbolic position as the focalizer of the gaze: he can look through David’s eyes; he can fantasize himself in David’s place. The woman is naked for his pleasure. The female spectator’s involvement is more complicated. Our position is that of both surveyor and surveyed, or, to use Mulvey’s terms, we are both the image and the bearer of the look. The male spectator is invited to identify with the male protagonist and to desire the female image. The female spectator is also invited to look at the female image with the phallic power of the gaze, yet we are identified with that image as well. Identification and desire, which for the male spectator remain separate operations, are collapsed for us.21 We might find the male perspective we are asked to assume uncomfortable, and therefore reject it and, with it, the pleasurable cinematic experience. Or we might enjoy the control and freedom of action that identification with the male protagonist gives us.22 Either way, it would seem that it is not possible for our desire to be acknowledged.

T h ere were not many women artists, and women were not admitted to academies where nude models were used until the end of the eighteenth century according to Miles: 13-14. It is illuminating to compare Artemisia Gentileschi’s “David and Bathsheba” to the Bathshebas discussed here. Gentileschi gives us a sympathetic Bathsheba who appears to want to shield herself from the gaze. 20 Kenneth Clark’s often discussed distinction between naked and nude is neither relevant for my purposes nor compelling; for critiques of the gender assumptions in Clark’s discussion, see Miles: 13-16; Nead: 12-33. Nead deconstructs Clark’s binary opposition between the naked and the nude, a binary opposition retained but reversed in Berger’s study. As Nead (16) remarks: “The discourse on the naked and the nude, so effectively formulated by Kenneth Clark and subsequently reworked, depends upon the theoretical possibility, if not the actuality, of a physical body that is outside of representation and is then given representation, for better or for worse, through art; but even at the most basic levels the body is always produced through representation. . . . There can be no naked ‘other’ to the nude, for the body is always already in representation.” 21 See Doane, 1987:157, 168-69. As Kaplan (31) notes, “. . . men do not simply look; their gaze carries with it the power of action and of possession which is lacking in the female gaze. Women receive and return a gaze, but cannot act upon it.” It should be obvious that I am pursuing a heterosexual reading, since the premise of the paintings is heterosexual and mainstream, classical Hollywood cinema represents heterosexuality as the norm. I hope it is equally obvious that I am not insisting that the approach taken here is the only way to look at this material; many factors will cause individual readers and viewers to react differently. 22 See Mulvey: 29-38. The nature and the possibilities of a female gaze is a subject of debate among feminist film critics; see Kaplan: 23-35, 200-6; Doane, 1987:155-83; Doane, 1991:17-43; Silverman; and the essays in Gamman and Marshment. 19

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Figure 7.1  Rembrandt, Bethsabie au bain, Louvre (© Photo R.M.N.).

Bathsheba Painted The story of David and Bathsheba provides both theme and pretext for artistic representations of a naked woman. Female nudity in the art of the Christian West, argues Margaret Miles, carries associations of shame, sin, and guilt. In the case of Bathsheba, the paintings imply what the cinematic representations will make explicit: Bathsheba’s exhibitionism. But they also problematize it, and with it our voyeurism also. I should explain briefly how I intend to “read” the paintings discussed below. I am neither an art critic nor an art historian. I find art history somewhat like historical criticism in biblical studies: it asks questions about origins, about the artist’s historical situation and influences on the artist’s life, and it talks about composition and style, particularly in terms of contemporary trends and distinguishing characteristics. But it doesn’t seem very much interested in the “story” the picture has to tell, in what Berger calls “the plane of lived experience.”23 The mystification of art by art historians that Berger deplores is much like the mystification of the Bible by professional biblical scholars—how many people really care if a particular text was written by J, D, or P? When I look at Rembrandt’s famous painting of Bathsheba (fig. 1), I am not particularly interested in the artist’s age or his financial circumstances when he painted her. It does not matter to me that the subject was probably the artist’s common-law wife, Hendrickje Stoffels (though this may account for her sympathetic portrayal). Nor is my interpretation affected by the question whether the letter she holds in her hand represents Hendrickje’s summons before the Dutch Reformed Church for “living in sin with Rembrandt the painter” or whether the painting itself Berger’s satiric critique of the mystification of art by art historians has emboldened my “reading” of these paintings. Berger acknowledges his debt to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (217-51), anticipates much modem art and film theory. The other important influence of my use of the visual is Mieke Bal’s Reading “Rembrandt” (1991).

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may have incited the church authorities to issue the summons.24 This is not to say that I am not interested in what historical critics of the Bible have to say or that I do not appreciate knowing something about the background of a painting. But what I see when I view these paintings is a naked woman identified either by the painter or someone else as Bathsheba, and I cannot help reading the painting in the light of what I know of the story. What I am advocating here is a reader response criticism of art. I intend to read the paintings semiotically, as if, like texts, they have a story to tell. In their case, the story is often compressed, with various elements of the story represented in one moment in time. More importantly, I want to raise questions about the interaction between painting and spectator similar to the questions I am asking about the interaction between text and reader. The striking thing about this nude is that David is not looking, we are. We replace David as voyeur, as we view what we assume he has viewed already. This assumption is predicated on the letter summoning her to the king, which Bathsheba holds in her hand—an intertextual reference to Uriah’s death letter, since in the story Bathsheba receives no letter from David. I cannot help thinking if she has had time to be seen by David and receive the letter and still hasn’t put her clothes on, she must spend a good deal of her time naked. The imagery is essentially frontal because the sexual protagonist is the spectator/owner who is looking at it.25 Bathsheba’s body, however, is slightly twisted, as if she were in the act of turning away, and her crossed legs are a modest gesture in relation to the spectator. The pose is ambivalent, making it difficult to decide: is she or is she not an exhibitionist? In a brilliant discussion of this painting in her book, Reading Rembrandt Mieke Bal calls attention to a distortion of structure that requires explanation. The letter in Bathsheba’s hand points to the locus of the distortion. Her legs are crossed, the right leg over the left leg, but her right foot remains at the right side of her knees. The distortion, Bal argues, draws attention to the artificiality of the display of the woman’s body; it exposes itself as an exposure. The navel, the center of the body, had to be displayed so that the viewer could collude with David’s voyeurism, but the display itself—its artificiality—had to be emphasized. (1991: 244)

Whereas Bathsheba’s body is turned toward us, offering itself to our view, her head is turned away, indicating her reluctance to be seen. The expression on her face suggests an inferiority that we cannot penetrate, a private, inner space that is hers alone. She is pensive, perhaps even melancholy. Should we interpret the look on her face as signifying resignation or hopelessness? We might read it proleptically as expressing mourning for her husband Uriah (2 Sam 11:26) or grief for her dead child (2 Sam 12:15–24), or, more generally, as regret over all the misfortune the letter in her hand will cause. The painter gives Bathsheba what the biblical narrator did not: a measure of subjectivity. He has managed to reveal an inwardness and an inaccessibility in the expression of her body and face. This humanizing of the female nude tells the spectator that she is not simply naked for him.26

See the discussion of this issue in Bal, 1991: 224-27. The quotation is from Bal, p. 226, citing Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 292. 25 Berger (56) makes this point about most post-Renaissance European painting of the nude. 26 On such “exceptional nudes” in European oil painting, see Berger: 60-61; but cf. the caveat of Nead: 15. See also Bal’s discussion of this painting (1991:219-46). Something similar to Rembrandt’s humanizing of his subject occurs later in the narrative, when pregnancy gives Bathsheba power and voice. 24

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Figure 7.2  Hans Memling, Bathseba im Bade, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

In Hans Memling’s Bathsheba, the only remaining panel of a triptych (fig. 2), once again we, and not David, are the voyeurs. David is in the background, in the upper left-hand corner of the painting. Given his distance from her window, he cannot see or have seen her very well. Indeed, she seems fairly well shielded from his view since her back is to him and her attendant, holding ready her dressing gown, stands between them. Clearly her nakedness is for the spectator’s

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benefit. We—and, again, I mean specifically the male spectator—are invited to identify with David’s perspective by means of the woman’s body, which signifies his sexual arousal. What we see is female nakedness as the cause of male desire, with the slipper and the pot by the bed providing conventional symbols for sex. Bathsheba has the long limbs and rounded belly that were standards of female beauty in the fifteenth century. The rounded belly also foreshadows Bathsheba’s pregnancy, which will lead to David’s downfall. Her naked body therefore suggests both the allure and the danger of female sexuality. Here, too, it seems to me, there is an awkwardness to the pose that draws attention to itself. The suggested movement appears unnatural: it is hard to see how she can keep her balance, and it seems rather awkward for her to be slipping into her dressing gown while still in the process of climbing out of such a high bath. The painting thus gives greater meaning to the precariousness of Bathsheba’s position. Neither Rembrandt’s nor Memling’s Bathsheba meets our voyeuristic gaze. Both are staring into space. Rembrandt’s Bathsheba stares ahead pensively. Memling’s stares vacantly as if she were a sleepwalker getting out of her bed. The fact that these Bathshebas do not acknowledge our gaze heightens the voyeuristic effect and conveys a sense of shame on their part in relation to the spectator.27 Not looking back is what we tend to do when we are self-conscious about being observed, as if by ignoring the observer we can feel less aware of being watched. In addition, by averting their eyes from the viewers, the naked Bathshebas cannot accuse us of looking. An alternative way of looking offers itself to us in these paintings. Both paintings show a servant attending Bathsheba. Neither looks upon her naked mistress: the old woman in the Rembrandt Bathsheba, so elaborately dressed as to make Bathsheba’s nudity conspicuously artful, is absorbed in her work; Memling’s servant modestly looks down from behind Bathsheba as she helps her into her robe. By looking elsewhere, these women make us aware of, and thus enable us to share in, their self-consciousness at the idea of looking. In other words, they problematize our voyeurism by drawing attention to the alternative: looking away. They invite us to look away from the naked woman even as the naked Bathshebas avoid returning our intrusive gaze. In the painting of Bathsheba by the Dutch artist, Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (fig. 3), David is absent, as in Rembrandt’s Bathsheba. Here, however, there is no clue that he has seen or will soon see her. The complete absence of any reference to David in this painting (he cannot see from the roof of the castle far in the background) dramatically illustrates that Bathsheba is naked for the spectator’s pleasure. So too does the fact that Bathsheba’s attendants are also naked and thus join her as objects of the voyeuristic gaze. Their nudity, in turn, dramatizes hers, since she alone is fully exposed (except for the translucent cloth hiding and marking the place of her genitals). The women appear to be in a magnificent garden, and almost at the center of the painting is a tree in the middle of a landscaped area, like the tree of (sexual?) knowledge in the midst of the garden of Eden. Bathsheba’s body is brightly illuminated in strong contrast to the servant at her side, whose darkness strengthens the impression of otherness and the exotic of which the woman is already an example. The black attendant is positioned as the dark place between the two pale figures. As representative of the new, mysterious dark continent that fascinated Europeans of the time, she symbolizes the dark and dangerously seductive mystery of woman.

T h is is not to say that female subjects of voyeuristic painting do not look back at the spectators; Rembrandt’s Susanna and the Elders is good example. Looking back can have various meanings: accusation, appeal for help, acknowledgment of responsibility, etc.

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Figure 7.3 Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Het toilet van Bathseba, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (©Rijksmuseum-Stichting, Amsterdam).

Particularly noteworthy are paintings of Bathsheba in which she is shown looking at her reflection in a mirror. Not only does the mirror function to accuse Bathsheba of vanity, it also permits her to join her voyeurs in the act of looking. She thus not only colludes with but also participates in making herself the object of the voyeuristic gaze. This is most striking in the painting by Carlo Maratti (fig. 4). Bathsheba gazes at herself, while King David looks on from the balcony in the background. Bathsheba’s two servants look at each other, not at her. Yet again it is clear that the woman’s nakedness is for the sake of the spectator, who alone is offered the full frontal view. Bathsheba’s legs are parted, suggesting availability, though the traditional piece of cloth covers her genitals, and her left arm covers her left breast. Bathsheba’s reflection in the mirror is difficult to make out. Given the position of the mirror, we ought to be able to see her shoulders and arm, but all we can see is her face, the reflection of which appears reversed. In the painting by Hans van Aachen (fig. 5), Bathsheba’s reflection is also, and more arrestingly, reversed. This distortion, like that in Rembrandt’s painting of Bathsheba, draws attention to itself, and alerts the viewer that something is awry. We might take it as foreshadowing the reversal of the fortunes of Bathsheba, Uriah, and, of course, King David. Or, alternatively, as a hint that there is another side to the story, and even another side to Bathsheba. The image in the mirror is not an accurate reflection of the lovely face of the woman

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Figure 7.4  Carlo Maratti, David and Bathsheba (Photograph: Courtauld Institute of Art).

but a transformation of her almost innocent beauty, prefiguring perhaps the formidable woman she will become (1 Kings 1–2).28 As a perversion of perspective, it calls our attention to the perversion of the voyeuristic gaze that leads in this case to appropriation.

T h e reflection is not as unflattering in the original painting as it appears on the reproduction, though there appears to be a distorting mark on the face from below the ear just about to the chin. A sign of vanity? A memento mori?

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Figure 7.5  Hans van Aachen, David und Bathseba, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Who is the figure looking over Bathsheba’s shoulder and holding the mirror? A servant? According to the description in the museum catalogue, the figure is a female servant (Dienerin [1995]:631), but the features, especially the neck, are rather mannish. Could this figure represent David’s voyeuristic gaze (David is barely visible in the distance, on the rooftop), so that Bathsheba looks upon herself reflected through his eyes, as it were?29 Or is it a reminder of Uriah, who is away on the battlefield, and his claim to possession of the woman (and the gaze)? Another, earlier painting by van Aachen presents a suggestive point of comparison. In Scherzendes Paar mit einem Spiegel (Der Künstler mit seiner Frau) (fig. 6), van Aachen has painted his wife, Regina di Lasso, who served as the model for Bathsheba, looking at her reflection in a mirror. Her breasts are bared to the spectator. The artist, laughing, looks over her shoulder directly at the spectator. With one hand he holds the mirror, displaying his wife for the spectator’s pleasure. His other hand rests on his wife’s shoulder, and he wags his finger at the spectator in a knowing gesture, as if playfully (or mockingly) saying, “I am offering this to you to enjoy, but shame on you for looking.” The similarities between this painting and David und Bathseba are striking. The same woman is the subject of both paintings. A figure stands behind her, looking over her shoulder and As, for example, in the miniature from the Codex Cermanicus 206 (c. 1454), which represents David on the roof as well as standing next to the bathing woman.

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Figure 7.6  Hans van Aachen, Scherzendes Paar mit einem Spiegel (Der Künstler mit seiner Frau), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

holding a mirror in which we see her reflection.30 David und Bathseba assumes two spectators, David on the roof, who cannot see the woman very well, and the viewer of the painting, whose view is close-up and direct. Scherzendes Paar has only one, the viewer. The artist both invites the voyeuristic gaze by exposing the woman (his wife) and at the same time implicitly criticizes it: David ought not to be looking; the viewer of Scherzendes Paar is chided for it. If the figure looking over Bathsheba’s shoulder is not Uriah, at the least she or he stands in the position of the husband who cooperates, even to the extent of holding the mirror, and whose presence simultaneously accuses the viewer of looking.31 Is the subject—and the moral—of the paintings the same? Not that it constitutes an argument, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the T h e Kunsthistorisches Museum catalogue refers to Scherzendes Paar as a moralizing allegory (62). What looks on the reproduction like a crack in the mirror appears in the painting to be a sliver of light, a reflection of some unseen light source such as a window or door, perhaps to show that this is a mirror and not a portrait. 31 In another painting of Bathsheba with a mirror, Pieter de Grebber’s Toilet of Bathsheba (Rijksmuseum), a child is holding the mirror. Like the artist in “Scherzendes Paar,” the child returns the spectator’s gaze as if to acknowledge our joint complicity in the viewing. In this painting, the letter summoning her to the king momentarily takes Bathsheba’s gaze away from her image in the mirror. De Grebber’s Bathsheba is less available to the spectator than those discussed here; a translucent wrap covers much of her body, and her left arm hides her breasts. A servant points to the window, through which we can make out the faint outlines of the balcony from which we assume David will have seen her. The mirror reflects Bathsheba’s hand, holding the letter, thereby calling attention to the letter’s fateful consequences. 30

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photographs of the paintings appear on the same page of the museum catalogue for the 1995 exhibit with the titles reversed!

Bathsheba Framed Our gaze does not permit the naked Bathsheba to leave her bath or the canvas. The cinematic Bathshebas, in contrast, are in motion, and our gaze at them is both guided and interrupted. We can gaze only at what the camera chooses to show us. Unlike the canvas Bathshebas—frozen in time, ever available to our intrusive gaze—these movie stars are performing for the gaze. Susan Hayward knows that theater audiences are watching along with Gregory Peck. During her bath, she looks around in all directions, making a pretense of not noticing her attendants, or David, or us, all of whom are looking at her, while coquettishly casting a glance at the camera. Alice Krige in the role of Bathsheba strikes a pose that tells us she is looking back at David, returning his and our shared gaze. Film is by nature a voyeuristic medium: we sit passively in a darkened theater and spy on other people’s lives. We watch anonymously and with impunity. The replacement of David with the viewer as voyeur is achieved in both films by means of zoom shots, overcoming a difficulty of perspective the paintings could not. The close-ups of Bathsheba bathing create the illusion that what we see is what incites David, but, of course, he is back on the roof and not in the room with the camera, the woman, and us. We are privy to more than David can see. In addition, the films contribute something lacking in the paintings, since our voyeurism includes David’s response as well as Bathsheba’s bath. The paintings show us Bathsheba through David’s eyes but do not expose him to us, as the films do by recording on his face his reaction to what he sees (he does, of course, like Berger’s spectator of the nude painting, have his clothes on). When David spies Bathsheba bathing in the 1951 film, David and Bathsheba, the timing of the scene and the music add to the titillation. We are watching David as the camera moves back and forth between his face, as an indicator of his arousal, and what he sees, the image that activates his lustful gaze. Through the window, we glimpse, through his eyes as it were, the woman bathing. From a distance, we watch her slip out of her robe and step behind a screen, which is where her bath will take place. Then we see David’s face, attentive and interested. Next we see the woman again, through the window, which is framed and illuminated as if it were a movie screen, with David in the position of moviegoer in the shadows (see fig. 1 pg. 75). Again we see his face, fixed on the screen/scene before him. He munches on grapes he has plucked from an overhanging branch—a rather obvious sign that his sexual appetite has been whetted by the sight of Bathsheba. Our next view of Bathsheba is a zoom shot into the room. Drawing on the iconographic tradition, the film shows Bathsheba attended by two servants, whose blackness, as in the painting by van Haarlem, lends a sense of otherness and the exotic. In this close shot, one attendant is washing Bathsheba, but because Bathsheba is bathing behind a screen, we cannot see her hands, and so we do not see her actually touching Bathsheba. Both the hierarchy of status and the hint of intimacy between women appear calculated to intensify male arousal. David’s superiority to Bathsheba is mirrored in Bathsheba’s superiority to her attendants, who, however, enjoy greater access to Bathsheba’s naked body than David has—at the moment—and also, at the moment, their gaze, like ours, is not from a distance, like his. Unlike David and us, they are allowed on Bathsheba’s side of the screen. In the next shot, the camera lingers on David’s face for what seems to be a much longer time than it actually is. The slow pace allows the spectator to imagine, perhaps even to participate in, his arousal: when the camera shifts back to Bathsheba again, what will we see? I said earlier, with

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regard to the biblical text, that we cannot look away from the woman but are forced to think about her appearance. Of course, we can read the text without visualizing the naked woman, especially if we are casual readers. The pacing of the cinematic scene forces us to do what the text implicitly calls for: to take account of the woman’s body. Since this is a Fifties movie, the answer to the question “What will we see?” is: not much. We are watching David’s face when Bathsheba steps from behind the screen, and when we see her again, she is already pulling her robe about her and leaving the room, the outline of her body barely but tantalizingly visible through her transparent robe against the light behind her. This scene in the film King David is very similar to that in David and Bathsheba. It begins with the same illusion, with David in the role of moviegoer and Bathsheba framed as if on a movie screen. Again the camera moves back and forth between David and Bathsheba; in this case, a total of five times as compared to four times in the 1951 film. This film uses lighting more effectively than the earlier one to create a mood of sensuality. Bathsheba is bathing in the open air (in what looks curiously like ancient ruins) and the fire that heats her water and keeps her warm represents the flame of passion. She is filmed in hues of red and orange, colors that, as in the painterly tradition, suggest sensuousness and concupiscence, while David is filmed in the cold blue of the evening. The 1980s production, however, leaves less of the erotic for the imagination. From David on the roof, the camera moves to Bathsheba bathing, seen from a distance that represents David’s perspective. Then we see his face again, and a slightly closer view of her bathing. She is naked, and she is not, like Susan Hayward, bathing behind a screen. David, and we—in ever closer views he cannot share—can see her entire naked body. She has an attendant, who is not black (this is an Eighties film), and both she and her attendant are rubbing her body. Again we see David’s face, the camera moving closer in on his face just as it moves in on her body. The camera now shows an even closer shot of her and her attendant running their hands over her body. Back again to his face, followed by an even closer view of her, from the waist up. She and the attendant are washing her breasts—rather thoroughly I would say. Indeed, there are suggestions of homo-eroticism and nymphomania—certainly not innocent washing—in the way Bathsheba enjoys her bath. We then have yet another close shot of his face, followed by an even closer view of her in which her head, neck, and shoulders fill the screen. The hint of intimacy between women I mentioned in David and Bathsheba is even stronger here, as both Bathsheba and her attendant caress her body repeatedly. This is a performance designed to titillate male desire. No woman bathing is going to let herself be touched like this by another woman, unless they have an intimate relationship (and we need to keep in mind that this is a servant and her mistress).

Bathsheba Framed Biblical style typically suggests a causal connection by means of simple juxtaposition: . . . he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful. So David sent and inquired about the woman. He said, “Is this not Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” David sent messengers and took her.

Because Bathsheba was seen bathing, she was sent for. It is thus the woman’s fault that the man’s desire is aroused. Bathsheba is guilty of being desired, but the text hints that she asked for it: she allows herself to be seen. By having Bathsheba plan or know she is being seen, the films

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go beyond the biblical text in making Bathsheba’s complicity in the viewing explicit. For them, David may be a voyeur, but Bathsheba is an exhibitionist. The effect is to lessen David’s guilt at the woman’s expense, because she wants to be seen. As representations of a single moment in time, the paintings stand somewhere between the biblical account and the films with regard to accusing the woman. In them, because Bathsheba’s body alone (and not David’s face, as in the films) communicates and explains David’s desire, her nakedness becomes a sign of her guilt.32 In the biblical account, David’s crime is twofold: he had Uriah killed and he took Uriah’s wife—both are crimes against Uriah and against God. But they are not treated as crimes against Bathsheba, who is defined solely in terms of her relation to Uriah. Having sexual intercourse with Bathsheba is a crime because it violates another man’s marital rights.33 David’s punishment for adultery is that his wives will be raped. What he did to another man will be done to him, only more so; in neither case is the women’s point of view represented. Although the story is about David’s guilt, it does not follow that Bathsheba is blameless. When she is introduced in the story, Bathsheba is bathing. Guilty of being seen, the beautiful woman is responsible for arousing male desire. Gender is an important factor here; a man bathing would not raise the same questions about provocativeness because what is being provoked is male desire. Bathing is sexually suggestive in our story because a woman is doing it and because a man is affected. In 2 Samuel 6, David exposes himself when he dances before the ark of the Lord wearing only a loincloth. The degree of exposure is ambiguous, as in Bathsheba’s case, but in both instances we are led to imagine at least partial nakedness. The sight arouses a woman’s anger, not her desire. When David’s wife Michal criticizes him for his exhibitionism (“How the king of Israel has honored himself today, exposing himself today in the eyes of his subjects’ women servants . . .”), he boasts of the attention he has received (“among the women servants of whom you have spoken, among them I shall be held in honor”). This situation, where a woman views a man’s nakedness, is not quite the reverse of 2 Samuel 11, where a man watches a naked woman, for David is in both cases the focal character, first as exhibitionist and then as voyeur. The women are not there for themselves but for what they reveal to us about him. In a clever twist, the film King David has Bathsheba watching David dancing—thus she sees his nakedness before he sees hers. She desires him before he desires her. Male display of sexuality is active: David is dancing. It is public: he is in control, and he lets himself be seen by women and men alike. As David’s response to Michal shows, he is not ashamed of his nakedness. Female “display” of sexuality, in contrast, is passive and private: Bathsheba is observed while bathing. This notion is reproduced in the Western artistic tradition, where, as Margaret Miles has demonstrated, the male appears as glorified nude and the female as shamefully naked. Whatever else nakedness signifies, its connection with sexuality is never far from view. In our two scenes, nakedness and sex are linked. Michal sees David’s nakedness and objects to it. As a result (the causal connection is created simply by juxtaposition), she has no children. A reasonable conclusion is that David does not again have sex with her because she objected to his (public) nakedness.34 Bathsheba is seen naked, and it leads to her becoming pregnant. Miles (123) makes this point with regard to Susanna. Adultery is always a matter of the woman’s status: a married woman who has sex with a man other than her husband commits adultery; a married man who has sex with a woman other than his wife commits adultery only if that woman is another man’s wife. On adultery in ancient Near Eastern law, see Westbrook and the references cited there. 34 Another possibility is that Michal refuses to have sex with David, which would not be out of character for her. Or responsibility could lie with the deity, whom the Bible describes as opening and closing the womb. 32 33

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Interestingly, both our films juxtapose the scene between David and Michal to the scene between David and Bathsheba, whereas in the biblical account they are separated by four chapters of narrative in which time passes and various significant events take place. In David and Bathsheba, Michal loves David but he no longer loves her; in King David, we have the reverse: he loves her, but she wants to return to her second husband. Both films pick up on the portrayal of Michal in 2 Samuel 6, to cast Michal as haughty and petulant, but they move beyond the biblical account in implying that the rift between them is not really David’s fault.35 In both films, no sooner have David and Michal quarreled than he walks out the door onto the balcony from which he spies Bathsheba, suggesting that if you can’t get along with one woman, you can always find another. Using the unhappy relationship with one woman as a backdrop enables the film makers to explain David’s emotional vulnerability to Bathsheba (in the Bible, he just takes her). It makes his behavior more excusable, again placing him in a more favorable light at a woman’s expense. The connection between the desire to see (voyeurism) and the desire to know needs to be considered in comparing these textual and visual representations of the female body. “It is evident that sight has always been both a central faculty and a central metaphor in the search for truth,” writes Peter Brooks (96). The erotic investment in seeing is from the outset inextricably bound to the erotic investment in knowing, in the individual’s development as well as in the Western philosophical and literary traditions. And the value given to the visual in any realist tradition responds to the desire to know the world: it promotes the gaze as the inspection of reality. (99; italics his)

In the examples I have discussed, men control representation. What is represented is the female body, seen through the male gaze. This representation has a social function. In her analysis of film, Mulvey discusses voyeurism as knowledge that leads to control.36 Similarly, Miles sees portraits of the female body in the Western artistic tradition as attempts to capture the complexity of woman on canvas. It is a man’s way of managing the threat women pose. “Figuration works to displace threat in that women seem to be understood in advance of any relationship with a real woman” (82). In her study, The Female Nude, Lynda Nead, too, argues that artistic representations of the female nude can “be understood as a means of containing femininity and female sexuality” (5–33). I have made similar claims about the portrayals of women in biblical literature: they serve to define women and keep them in their place, where their threat can be perceived as more manageable (1993). Just as representation is gender-determined, so too is interpretation. Since meaning is constructed through interaction between text or image and reader or spectator, we will decide for ourselves whether or not we feel called upon to be voyeurs when we read the “story of David and Bathsheba” or view these paintings or films. Women and men are likely to decide differently, largely but not wholly along gender lines, based on the different demands they perceive the story or image to be making upon them. Some of us will resist the phallocentric premises of the text and its visual representations more than others. I have argued elsewhere that the biblical story of David and Bathsheba invites a kind of voyeuristic complicity between the narrator and his assumed or ideal male readers (1993:196–97). The narrator not only controls our gaze at the naked or partially naked female body, he excuses it by letting us look without any blame being attached, which is For further discussion of Michal’s portrayal, see Exum, 1995. Mulvey: 14-26; similarly, Kaplan: 23-35.

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more than he does for David. The text insinuates that David has no business looking, since it leads him to sin. He should be away at war with “all Israel” instead of at home taking a long siesta. By setting it up so that what we see through David’s eyes becomes part of our judgment against David, the narrator gives us the moral high ground. This makes it possible for readers to gaze upon the naked woman without embarrassment, or at least without feeling guilty about it. Possible, but not inevitable, and harder, I think, for women for reasons I’ve tried to suggest. The narrative strategy of allowing us to look guiltlessly and, if we wish, to blame the woman at the same time is the premise behind the story’s representation in painting and film. In this essay, I have sought to problematize our position as consumers of images, to draw attention to its gendered nature, and to make it difficult to view unreflectively both texts and images that invite our collusion in voyeurism. Resisting such textual and visual claims upon us does not mean advocating the removal of nudes from museums or the deletion of sex scenes from movies— though, personally, I would like to see more censorship of films. Nor does it mean “cleaning up” the Bible—which, interestingly, both films I have discussed attempt to do in other respects. Resisting, as I see it, involves interrogating these materials with the aid of an interpretive strategy that takes seriously the sexual politics of both representation and interpretation. Resisting involves being aware of what is at stake when we see texts and images in certain ways, and it means taking responsibility for our interpretations.

Works Consulted Bach, Alice 1993 “Signs of the Flesh: Observations on Characterization in the Bible.” Pp. 61–79 in Characterization in Biblical Literature. Ed. E. Struthers Malbon and A. Berlin. Semeia 63. Atlanta: Scholars. Bal, Mieke 1987 Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bal, Mieke 1991 Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bal, Mieke 1993 “The Elders and Susanna.” Biblical Interpretation 1:1–19. Bailey, Randall C. 1990 David in Love and War: The Pursuit of Power in 2 Samuel 10–12. JSOT Supplement Series 75. Sheffield: JSOT. Benjamin, Walter 1969 Illuminations. Edited with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken. Berger, John 1972 Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Brooks, Peter 1993 Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Camp, Claudia V. and Carole R. Fontaine, eds. 1993 Women, War, and Metaphor: Language and Society in the Study of the Hebrew Bible. Semeia 61. Atlanta: Scholars. Caws, Mary Ann 1986 “Ladies Shot and Painted: Female Embodiment in Surrealist Art.” Pp. 262–87 in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. S. R. Suleiman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Doane, Mary Ann 1987 The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Houndmills: Macmillan. Doane, Mary Ann 1991 Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Exum, J. Cheryl 1993Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives. JSOT Sup 163; Sheffield: JSOT/Valley Forge, PA: Trinity.

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Exum, J. Cheryl 1994 “Second Thoughts about Secondary Characters: Women in Exodus 1:8–2:10.” Pp. 75–87 in A Feminist Companion to Exodus to Deuteronomy. Ed. A. Brenner. Sheffield: JSOT. Exum, J. Cheryl 1995 “Michal at the Movies.” Pp. 273–92 in The Bible in Human Society: Essays in Honour of John Rogerson. Ed. M. D. Carroll R., D. J. A. Clines, and P. R. Davies. JSOT Sup 200; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Exum, J. Cheryl 1995 1996 Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women. Gender, Culture, Theory 3. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Fetterley, Judith 1991 “Palpable Designs: An American Dream: “Rip Van Winkle.”” Pp. 502–8 in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. R. R. Warhol and D. Price Herndl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press [reprinted from The Resisting Reader (1977)]. Fokkelman, J. P. 1981 Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel Vol. I. King David. Assen: van Gorcum. Gamman, Lorraine and Margaret Marshment, eds. 1988 The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture. London: The Women’s Press. Hertzberg, H. W. 1960 Die Samuelbücher. ATD 10. 2nd. rev. ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hertzberg, H. W. 1964 I & II Samuel. The Old Testament Library. Trans. J. S. Bowden. Philadelphia: Westminster. Kaplan, E. Ann 1983 Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. London: Routledge. Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien 1995 Eros und Mythos, Begleitheft zur Ausstellung des Kunsthistorischen Museums, Wien. Magonet, Jonathan 1991 A Rabbi’s Bible. London: SCM. Miles, Margaret R. 1989 Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West. New York: Vintage. Mulvey, Laura 1989 Visual and Other Pleasures. Houndmills: Macmillan. Nead, Lynda 1992 The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. London: Routledge. Nicol, George G. 1988 “Bathsheba, a Clever Woman?” ExpT 99:360–63. Rooney, Ellen 1991 ““A Little More than Persuading”: Tess and the Subject of Sexual Violence.” Pp. 87–114 in Rape and Representation. Ed. L. A. Higgins and B. R. Silver. New York: Columbia University Press. Silverman, Kaja 1988 The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Westbrook, Raymond 1990 “Adultery in Ancient Near Eastern Law.” Revue Biblique 97:542–80.

8

How the West Was Not One Delilah Deconstructs the Western Jennifer L. Koosed and Tod Linafelt

If one watches enough reruns of the 1960s TV Western series Bonanza, one inevitably begins to wonder how it has eluded the attention of Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigiray. Leaving aside for the moment the thrilling action scenes and the jovial yet heartwarming banter of the Cartwright clan, episode after episode exhibits a structural integrity worthy of Jean Rousset and a repression of the feminine that would confound even Freud. But for some inscrutable reason, Bonanza— and the Western genre as a whole—managed to escape both Derrida’s analysis of Rousset and structuralism in his article “Force and Signification” (1978) and Irigiray’s analysis of Freud and the feminine in her book This Sex Which Is Not One (1985). In this paper we will do our bit to rectify this oversight, bringing Derrida and Irigiray to bear on the Western and finding unlikely allies in Clint Eastwood and the Bible.

Derrida Does the Ponderosa, or, Structure, Sign, and Gunplay in the Discourse of the Western The Western is a genre that lives or dies on structure. We see this both in what Derrida calls “geometrism,” as well as what he calls “preformationism.” In geometrism, the figures of rhetoric are understood in terms of spatial patterns: the familiar binary oppositions, but also the curve, the helix, and the ring (Derrida, 1978:16–17). The Western evinces clear spatial boundaries, most graphically epitomized in the circular figure of the corral. The corral represents the structural border par excellence: the inside/outside distinction here functions to separate nature from civilization. Horses kept inside the corral are domesticated, tamed, and separated from their wilder brethren on the mesa. Once outside the corral, the energy of the horse must be literally “harnessed” in the service of men (masculine noun intentional), lest the animal break away and take to the great wide-open spaces. Likewise with the cattle herd, who on the range represent a great seething beast, on the verge of stampeding at any moment and thereby pulverizing any thing or person that gets in its path. But once in the corral, the Thundering Herd (the title of a Zane Grey novel) becomes a group of much more prosaic “cows,” little more than steaks-on-legs waiting passively to be eaten. Following the ring structure outward concentrically, the next border we encounter is that of the ranch. The ranch depends for its very life on the corral, and while it surrounds and

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incorporates the corral into itself, it represents the next level of order or culture over against the wildness of nature. This wildness exists outside the borders of the ranch; the ranch or homestead is carved out of the midst of the desert, and it must constantly be maintained against the threatening chaos. A third level in the ring movement may be seen in the Western town. As the ranch depends on the corral, so the town depends on the ranch. The cowboy tames the wild herd in order to turn a profit, and the town tames the wild cowboy to turn its own profit. Each boundary ring exists to keep the lawlessness of nature at bay; yet each space marked off by the boundary must incorporate into itself something of that lawlessness in order to survive. As with any structural system, the moment of border crossing is the moment of greatest threat, and so the liminal must be guarded meticulously. In Clint Eastwood’s 1992 film Unforgiven, we see this very clearly in a scene where Little Bill, the Sheriff played by Gene Hackman, viciously beats English Bob, a wandering gunman played by Richard Harris, while the entire town looks on. All this concern for the maintenance of boundaries is represented synecdochically in the body of the gunman. This border must finally be maintained at all costs. The gunman of the Western must be in total control over his body. Consequently, he talks little, eats little, and is rarely portrayed as having sex. The body of the hero is nearly completely closed off to the outside world and is ruled over by his iron will.1 The classic Western is less about escaping the constricting aspects of law and culture (i.e. the East), as is often supposed, than it is about establishing an even stricter code of law and conduct. The fact that the setting is the wide open, lawless western territories only serves to accent the necessity for strict enforcement. The ultimate threat to all these borders is the badman. The badman threatens to rustle the cattle, shoot up the town, and—the ultimate threat—put holes in the body of the hero. So we find that alongside the geometric structure of the world of the Western is the deep structure of its plot, which moves inexorably toward the confrontation between two gunmen, one bad and one good. This type of structuralism is what Derrida refers to as preformationism, a term drawn from biology indicating that “the totality of hereditary characteristics is enveloped in the germ, and is already in action in reduced dimensions that nevertheless respect the forms and proportions of the future adult” (1978:23). In other words, we know what’s going to happen right from the beginning. One could make a strong argument that such structural regularity is the appeal of all popular culture. One knows that in every action film the hero will survive all the explosions to save the plane, train, or bus he is on and that he will always encounter a conveniently placed young, single woman; one knows that if a Smashing Pumpkins song starts out slow and introspective that the power cords and angst are not far behind. The Western is no different. One knows that the force of good (or law and order) will be challenged by the force of evil (or lawlessness), leading to a final confrontation in which good triumphs over evil, and law and order are decisively reestablished. A key element in each of these structural construals of the Western is violence. The violence of the drunken cowboy or of the evil gunman is what both the spatial structure of the town and the teleology of the plot movement attempt to neutralize. The central irony of the Western is, of course, that only through the counter-violence of the hero can the evil violence be neutralized. The Western takes into itself the very thing it attempts to keep out. The dynamic is not unlike that of the practice of scapegoating explored by Derrida in “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1981:120–34). In

Jane Tompkins (56) notes, in this regard, Octavio Paz’s definition of the “macho” as “hermetic being, closed up in himself.”

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ancient Greece, the scapegoat (or Pharmakos) was ejected from the city in a ritual of purification. Derrida writes: The city’s body proper thus reconstitutes its unity, closes around the security of its inner courts . . . by violently excluding from its territory the representative of an external threat or aggression . . . Yet the representative of the outside is nonetheless constituted, regularly granted its place by the community . . .in the very heart of the inside. (1981:133)

The line between inside and outside is not so secure. The threat of violence, projected onto the gunman-from-outside, already exists in the figure of the gunman-on-the-inside. The Western genre (at its best) is not unaware of this irony, so that even the protagonist is felt to harbor a certain intrinsic danger just beneath the cool surface. But it is exactly this danger and violence that the Western imagines it has controlled; more than that, it imagines to have reduced it to a single, pure moment of ritual violence (Derrida’s “ceremony of the pharmakos” [1981:133]). Zane Grey’s protagonist, Buck Duane, in The Lone Star Ranger anticipates this ceremony as he goes to a gunfight: He forced into mind the image of Poggin—Poggin, the tawny-haired, the yellow-eyed, like a jaguar, with his rippling muscles. He brought back his sense of the outlaw’s wonderful presence . . . Poggin was his supreme test. And this abnormal and stupendous instinct, now deep as the very foundation of his life, demanded its wild and fatal issue. (299)

The wild and fatal issue of the Western is thus a man-to-man contest between noble warriors in which one must inevitably give way in the face of the skill and training, and sheer animal agility, of the other. Or so the Western imagines. But with Unforgiven Clint Eastwood recognizes, like any good poststructuralist, that spatial structures cannot finally achieve “the simultaneous comprehension of a homogeneous reality in a unifying operation” (Derrida, 1978:14), and that the “ceremony of the pharmakos . . . ceaselessly undoes itself ” (Derrida, 1981:133). That is, structural boundaries cannot remain secure, and the ritual shoot-out cannot remain pure.2 And Eastwood, perhaps not like any good poststructuralist, uses the Bible to tell us so. Consider for example the penultimate scene of Unforgiven, when Eastwood’s character, William Munny, steps into a saloon crowded with Little Bill (Gene Hackman) and his deputies. Munny shoots the proprietor Skinny for displaying the dead body of his partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman). In a chaotic gunfight, Munny then shoots a number of the scared and inept deputies, as well as Little Bill himself. Before the final shot that will finish him off, a wounded Little Bill intones the hopeless line, “I don’t deserve this . . . to die like this; I was building a house.” Little Bill’s statement makes no sense until one realizes that it is an allusion to Deut 20:5, which occurs there in the midst of instructions about the preparation for war: Then the officers shall speak to the people saying, “What man is there that has built a new house and has not dedicated it? Let him go back to his house lest he die in battle and another man dedicate it.” T h ough we refer throughout this article to Unforgiven as Clint Eastwood’s film, we are not unaware of the collective nature of film making. No doubt much of the subtlety with which Unforgiven appropriates biblical and religious imagery and language, for example, is attributable to screenwriter David Webb Peoples, who also wrote the screenplays for Blade Runner (1982) and Twelve Monkeys (1995).

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The act of building a house is presented—along with the planting of a vineyard and betrothal—as an activity that exempts a person from military conscription. These are activities that are too important to the future well-being of the community to allow them to remain unfinished in case of the individual’s death.3 People engaged in these activities, in the words of Little Bill, “don’t deserve to die”: the survival of the community depends on them. And the implication is that if one guards these activities and those engaged in them, then a stable community can be maintained in spite of the violence of war. What makes this more than just a passing allusion in Unforgiven is the extent to which the trope of house-building is integrated both into the film and into the Deuteronomistic History. It functions throughout the film as a metaphor for Little Bill’s own concern to maintain the stability of a community in the face of violence; not the violence of all-out war as in Deuteronomy, but the violence of wandering gunmen, which we have seen is a central concern of the genre. So the borders of the community are rigorously policed. In Unforgiven, all guns are to be turned over to Little Bill and his men when entering town, and are returned when leaving. Violence is to remain outside the town limit (or ring), but Little Bill and his men must be armed and willing to resort to violence in order to disarm and render nonthreatening those who would invade the town. What the classic Western has left virtually unchallenged, and what Unforgiven quite literally blows away in the scene above, is the notion that the violence practiced by the good guys is qualitatively different from the violence practiced by the bad guys, and that the community can in fact host this “limited” violence within it for the sake of maintaining its essentially “peaceful” nature.

Irigiray and the Scene of Riding, or, This Sex Which Is Not a Gun The tightly constructed world of the Western strives to be, and often nearly is, a world without women. Jane Tompkins (28–45) has argued that the genre arose as a male reaction against the domestic novels—written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, Maria Cummins and others—of the 19th century. These novels were often concerned with religion, took place in the confines of the home, and featured female protagonists. The Western systematically exorcised all these elements. It ignored or belittled religion, took place in the wide open spaces of the mesa or the public space of the saloon, and, most emphatically, it featured men being men. Or to quote a line from the movie, The Santa Fe Trail, “Kansas is alright for men and dogs, but it’s pretty hard on women and horses.” In other words, it would be difficult to find a more convincing example of what Luce Irigiray has called “the phallocratic law of order” than the Western. Irigiray’s critique of psychoanalytic discourse—that it “implies that there are not really two sexes, but only one” (86)—could not be more appropriate to the Western. As with an unproblematized psychoanalytic discourse, the feminine exists in the Western only as the negative or the lack in relation to the male. “Westerns insist on this point by emphasizing the importance of manhood as an ideal. It is not one among many, it is the ideal . . .” (Tompkins: 17–18). This repression of the feminine is manifested to a near-cartoonish extent in Bonanza, which not only focuses on an all-male family of four, but which—given the fact that the three sons all have different but equally deceased mothers—requires its audience to concur in a not-so-subtle pathological need to kill off women. The series works A good recent treatment of this subject can be found in Daniel L. Smith: 133-37. See also Carmichael.

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diligently to maintain this absence of women. After a few episodes, a pattern becomes apparent. A woman arrives from “outside” in a stagecoach. One of the Cartwright boys develops an interest in her and sometimes even proposes marriage. At this point we know the woman is doomed either to death or to some unforeseen circumstance that requires her to return “East”; anything to keep her from invading the all-male preserve of the Ponderosa. But just as we saw with the element of violence, the Western cannot completely exclude women. First, as Tompkins puts it, “The women and children cowering in the background of Indian wars, range wars, battles between outlaws and posses, good gunmen and bad legitimize the violence men practice in order to protect them” (41). Second, as none other than Michael “Little Joe” Landon himself pointed out about Bonanza in an interview with Johnny Carson, people begin to get a little nervous about the virility of these men who spend so much time together without women. So the Western must make room for women, if only to give men something to fight about or to prove that they are not queer. Women who do show up in Westerns are severely constrained in their roles. Though the protagonist is never married, he nearly invariably has a “love interest” who is opposed to the strict code of masculinity by which the gunman lives. She represents the soft life of the East, education, society, and a feminized Christianity. As a traditional-minded critic puts it: “She is against killing and being killed, and [the man] finds it impossible to explain to her that there is no point in being ‘against’ these things: they belong to his world” (Warshow: 436). Again we see a pattern emerge. The woman pleads that the man give up his guns and refuse to go out to meet the badman. If he engages in violence, she will leave him. The man occasionally wavers in the face of the woman’s onslaught. Immediately preceding the scene in The Lone Star Ranger, quoted above in section I, in which the protagonist Buck Duane goes out to meet the outlaw Poggin, Duane is saying goodbye to his love, Ray Longstreth. She was throbbing, palpitating quivering with hot wet cheeks and arms that clung to him like vines. She lifted her mouth to his, whispering “Kiss me!” She meant to change him, hold him. (298)

It is a wonder that the gunman ever makes it to his battle! But in the end he always goes to the gunfight, and the woman always takes him back. This victory over the woman becomes as important to the genre as the victory over the badman. At the center of any phallocratic symbolic order is, by definition, the phallus. The phallus is the guarantor, within the family economy, of the Law of the Father. It “assures and regulates the economy of libidinal exchanges” (Irigiray: 61). In the Western, the most obvious representation of the phallus is the pistol. The pistol hangs low on the gunslinger. It is his ultimate tool for proving his virility. And the pistol is quite explicitly the guarantor of the symbolic order that the Western works so hard to maintain. There is a wonderful scene in Unforgiven that makes explicit, with a sly wink, the identification of the pistol with the phallus, and that does so in the context of a subversion of the imagined ideal of skillful man-to-man combat. Little Bill is describing to a writer the way a gunfight actually took place between English Bob and Two-Gun Corcoran, as compared with the romanticized version the writer has published. He tells the writer that Two-Gun Corcoran never in fact carried two guns, but that he got his nickname because “he had a dick that was so big, it was longer than the barrel on that Walker Colt that he carried.” He goes on to tell the writer that English Bob was not defending the honor of woman (as he claimed) and that it was not a fair fight. English Bob was “too damn drunk” to shoot straight and when Corcoran’s gun backfired, Bob walked right up to him and shot him in the liver.

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The scene is indicative of the subtle line that Unforgiven treads in maintaining a recognizable identity as a Western film, while at the same time working against the grain of that genre’s “strict set of formal and thematic codes” (Tompkins: 25). Instead of naively reiterating these codes, the film manipulates them in order to expose and subvert the ideologies they represent. We saw this above with the notion of a noble and necessary violence. Unforgiven functions similarly in relation to gender, exposing the instability of the masculine construct and making women’s experience the drive of the plot.4 The starting point of the film’s plot is a prostitute named Delilah. The opening scene is the brutal slashing of her face by one of her cowboy customers. The violent outbreak of the man is triggered by Delilah’s laughter: when the cowboy (a pointedly large man, reminiscent of Samson) unzipped his pants, Delilah “gave a giggle” at the size of his penis. Irigiray writes that “in our social order, women are used and exchanged by men” (84). As commodities, women are objects of transaction: they have no voice, nor do they have any qualities of their own; they can only reflect the qualities of men. Prostitutes are inscribed in this order in the most apparent way, but all women experience it. Delilah, however, rejects her position in this order with a single laugh. She is neither lack nor flaw. Instead, she points out the lack of the man—his “teeny weeny pecker” as the character Alice puts it—and by so doing strikes at both the foundation of his masculinity as well as the guarantor of the symbolic order of the Western. Delilah has no penis envy. Through the speech-act of laughter, she moves into the subject position and makes the man the object of exchange. The cowboy—who must have been reading his Freud—reacts with fury. He grabs a long knife and begins to slash Delilah’s face, violently attempting to reinstate himself as the subject of their interaction. The long, sharp knife penetrates the woman as the phallus could not. Delilah emerges from the ordeal silenced, de-sexed, and scarred. Such is the reactionary force of an ideology under threat. The prostitute’s name-sharing with the biblical “temptress” extraordinaire is not incidental. It is another example of Unforgiven employing biblical allusion as a primary tool to destabilize the boundaries of the Western genre. In this case, there is an interplay between the biblical Delilah, the film’s Delilah, and the Delilah of popular culture in general. Contrary to popular wisdom, the Delilah of the Bible does not use trickery to obtain the secret of Samson’s strength. She is, in fact, remarkably straight-forward. Mieke Bal (1987) has examined the popular commentaries on this story, as well as its treatment in children’s books. Considering the ambiguity in the biblical account, Bal uncovers a remarkably uniform response. The image of Delilah is consistently negative: Delilah is beautiful, but “false, unreliable and greedy” (Bal, 1987: 39). The reasoning behind this judgment is a circular process of mythification and naturalization, wherein the reader conflates motivation with moral character and then explains both in terms of the other: Delilah’s betrayal of Samson was a bad thing, which demonstrates that she is a bad woman, which explains why she did a bad thing. Delilah becomes the paradigm of the wicked woman, seducing and betraying, exploiting all men’s one weakness: desire for the female body. Delilah, both in the Bible and in popular culture, symbolically castrates Samson by cutting his hair. The

T h e issue of whether Unforgiven subverted or reinforced the strictures of the Western genre was a matter of debate among film critics. The judgment of Jane Tompkins and Paul Smith in favor of the latter is no doubt influenced by the fact that both had just written books in which the structural and thematic regularity of the genre was extolled (Tompkins; Smith 1993). As this article makes clear, we tend to agree with those critics, like Eleanor Ringel of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Gilbert Adair of the London Sunday Times, who see the film as exhibiting a much more complex and ambivalent relationship to the genre. See especially Adair: 196-7.

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supplied motivation turns her into “the castrating bitch,” envious and therefore after masculine strength, masculine potency, and masculine genitalia. But the character Delilah in Unforgiven is not evil. She is young, inexperienced, even innocent. The symbolic castration she accomplishes (by verbal belittlement) is not because she is wicked or envious. As Alice says, she just “didn’t know no better.” Respect and desire for the phallus is not something that women intrinsically feel, nor is it that which defines their sexuality. It is something that they learn. Delilah’s “error” was that she had not yet learned that she was supposed to envy the male sexual organ—an envy that is expressed in submissive awe by good women and in castrating rage by wicked women. If the cowboy in Unforgiven has been reading his Freud, then Delilah has been reading her Irigiray, who writes: “It is not a matter of toppling that [masculine] order so as to replace it—that amounts to the same thing in the end—but of disrupting and modifying it, starting from an ‘outside’ that is exempt, in part, from the phallocratic law” (68). Delilah neither reveres nor rages against the phallus, and therefore places herself outside the phallocratic order and simultaneously calls attention to the “smallness” of its foundation. The violence of the cowboy toward Delilah quells for the moment the “disruptive excess” (Irigiray: 78) that threatens the masculine. Here we begin to see the complexity of the interrelatedness of gender and violence in the Western, since this type of violence against women is necessary to keep women in their place and maintain the masculine ideal. The economy of exchange goes into immediate effect. Little Bill arrives to do damage control. Skinny, the proprietor of the Saloon and the prostitutes’ pimp, demands restitution: he has a “lawful contract” demonstrating an “investment of capital,” and now the whore is “damaged property.” The crime is against Skinny, not Delilah, and Little Bill assesses a fine against the cowboy and his companion, to be paid to Skinny. If the episode ended there it would simply be absorbed into the phallocratic economy without causing more than a tremor. But this does not happen. For classical psychoanalysis, one of the results of penis envy is that the young girl turns away from her mother because the mother does not possess the valorizing organ. “This rejection of the mother is accompanied by the rejection of all women” (Irigiray: 69). In Unforgiven, exactly the opposite happens. The prostitutes, led by Alice (the “mother”), band together around Delilah and proceed to “jam the theoretical machinery” (Irigiray: 78) of the Western. The women pool their resources to hire gunmen to kill the cowboy who cut Delilah. When some of the women express doubts, Alice (Frances Fisher) states: Just ‘cause we let them smelly fools ride us like horses, don’t mean we gotta let them brand us like horses. Maybe we aint nothing but whores, but by God we aint horses.

Alice acknowledges her position as less than human when she engages in the commerce of her body, but she refuses to be treated as less than human in any other circumstance. The phallocratic law is pervasive, but it is not all-comprehending; there is (as Irigiray suggests) an “outside” from which one may “disconcert the staging of representation according to exclusively masculine parameters” (Irigiray: 68). The women in Unforgiven disconcert the staging of the Western with a vengeance. By putting out a call for gunmen who will avenge the cutting of Delilah for money, they effectively reverse the prostitution dynamic. It is no small irony that, mirroring the reduction of women to their function in servicing male desire, the women turn exactly that which is most sacred to the male economy, the ability to wield the phallic pistol, into a simple object of exchange in its own right. It is important to note that the women in Unforgiven, unlike the protagonists in the recent models-

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with-guns movies Bad Girls and The Quick and the Dead, do not attempt to claim a pre-existing “masculine” subjectivity by picking up guns and doing the job themselves. To do so within the libidinal economy of the Western would be tantamount to accepting the notion of penis envy. By engaging in the much more symbolically disruptive move of subjecting the phallic pistol to the economy of exchange, the women are able to expose the fallacies inherent in the imagined structural integrity of the Western’s ideal world.

Judging the Western It should be clear by now that our two organizing themes for this paper—violence in the service of the maintenance of borders, and the absence of women—are too closely related to be separated. The presumed “absence” of women is actually the violent exclusion of women. Rather than repressing this violent exclusion, as Bonanza so successfully did, Unforgiven foregrounds it and makes it the central drive of the plot. In the false naivete of the film’s frame—it opens and closes with scrolled writing that describes in blatantly hokey terms William Munny’s wife who dies of smallpox, but who remains an absent presence throughout the film—this exclusion of women is caricatured. In the banding together of the women around Delilah, the return of the repressed has dire consequences for the community that imagines to have contained it. The house that Little Bill is literally building throughout the movie, is one in which he plans to retire peacefully, sit on the porch, and watch the sunset while he smokes his pipe. It is significant that there is no indication that Little Bill was ever married or ever will share the house with a female partner. In this, Little Bill’s house represents the ideal Western community. But it is no less significant that the house he is building, despite his constant attention to it, is full of leaks and gaps and crooked angles. (As one of his deputies says of Little Bill, “He aint scared, he just aint no carpenter.”) With the return of what has been repressed, the community he has tried to maintain crumbles around Little Bill, despite his bewildered protestations that he was building a house. The house-building trope and the character of Delilah have brought us into the realm of the Deuteronomistic History. At this point we cannot help but wonder if Unforgiven evinces an even closer relationship to this work. A scene in which Alice helps Ned and the Kid escape out her window from Little Bill and his men mirrors Rahab’s similar actions to the two spies who come to her in Jericho (Joshua 2); the call to vengeance based on the story of a “cut-up woman” mirrors the story of the Levite and the woman he cuts up and “sends throughout all the territory of Israel” (Judges 19); English Bob’s judgment that the barbarism of America is due to the fact that it has a president instead of a monarch mirrors the statement that “in those days there was no king in Israel and everyone did as he pleased” (Judges 21:25; cf. 18:1, 19:1); the Kid’s assassination of the big cowboy in the outhouse while his body guards wait for him mirrors Ehud’s assassination of “the very stout” (JPSV) Eglon in his “cool upper chamber” where his body guards imagine he is relieving himself (Judges 3). Within the Deuteronomistic History, the film has the clearest affinities with the book of Judges. As Mieke Bal has pointed out (1988:170ff.), Judges is concerned again and again with the boundaries of “the house” (whether it be the mother’s house, the father’s house, or the house of a host). In Judges, as in Unforgiven, the house gives no protection from violence. It is a common view that houses are one side of an opposition between public and private, between danger and safety, between freedom and bondage, between communal and individual. Reading Judges, we quickly discover that those neat oppositions do not work and

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perhaps never do because they rely on the myths we are used to about the home, homeliness, and the family. (Bal, 1988:171)

In this regard, Judges functions in relation to the Book of Deuteronomy in a way similar to how Unforgiven functions in relation to other Westerns: both incorporate structural elements from their precursive texts, while making manifest the cracks and gaps in the ideology of those texts. Deuteronomy imagines a unified Israel on the eve of their successful march westward into the promised land of Canaan. By the time we get through the book of Judges, we find a nation that has splintered into warring factions and in which lawlessness is rampant.5 The classic Western also imagines the successful march westward of America into its promised land of manifest destiny. By the time we get through Unforgiven, the picture of noble men doing battle for the stakes of law and order has degenerated into random murder. But most importantly, both Judges and Unforgiven know that a public order cannot be based on the violent exclusion of women. Both texts question the myths of how the “West” was won, even as they state quite clearly that it was never, in fact, one.

Works Consulted Adair, Gilbert 1995 Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Years of Cinema. London: Faber and Faber. Bal, Mieke 1987 Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bal, Mieke 1988 Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Braudy, Leo 1976 “Genre: The Conventions of Connection.” Pp. 411–33 in Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Mast and Cohen. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Carmichael, Calum M. 1974 The Laws of Deuteronomy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Derrida, Jacques 1978 [1967] “Force and Signification.” Pp. 3–30 in Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago. Derrida, Jacques 1981 [1972] “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fewell, Danna Nolan, and David M. Gunn 1993 Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story. Nashville: Abingdon. Irigiray, Luce 1985 [1977] This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mast, Gerald and Marshall Cohen 1985 Film Theory and Criticism. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Daniel L. 1987 The Religion of the Landless. Bloomington: Meyer-Stone. Smith, Paul 1993 Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tompkins, Jane 1992 West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford University Press. Warshow, Robert 1954 “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner.” Pp. 401–16 in Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Mast and Cohen. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

See especially Fewell and Gunn on this aspect of Judges (117-30).

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Dracula “The Blood Is the Life!” Larry J. Kreitzer

“There Is a Fountain,” one of the best known hymns of William Cowper (1731-1800), is based on a rather bizarre image contained in Zech. 13.1. The verse contains a reference to a fountain being opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, a fountain to deal with the sin and impurity of the people of God. The precise religious significance of this fountain within the life of the nation Israel remains a matter of some dispute. However, the image is a provocative one, and it has yielded at least one bountiful harvest in the form of Cowper’s hymn. The hymn was written in about 1772 and later published in the influential collection of Olney Hymns (1779). The first verse of the hymn emphasizes the centrality of a sacrificial imagery, concentrating on the shedding of divine blood, which lies close to the heart of one particular evangelical way of understanding the meaning of Christ’s death: There is a fountain filled with blood Drawn from Immanuel’s veins; And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains: Lose all their guilty stains, Lose all their guilty stains; And sinners plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains.1

Clearly within the thought-world of this hymn, sacrificial blood is invested with tremendous power. It cleanses and transforms, bringing life and a new order of existence. In this sense, there is little doubt that “the blood is the life” (Deut. 12.23). My task within this study is threefold. First, I shall note briefly how such blood-sacrifice imagery helps to frame Paul’s theological understanding of the death of Christ. Next, I will consider how the importance of blood, or more precisely, the drinking of blood, is creatively employed within Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula (1897). Third, I shall examine in detail It is perhaps worth noting that Cowper’s hymn is used within Aldous Huxley’s novel Island (1962). Huxley’s novel explores the idea of a utopian existence, and has the central figure, a journalist named Will Farnaby who has recently come to the island community, cite the first stanza of Cowper’s hymn. The barbarity of the sacrificial image is noted by Susila, one of Farnaby’s listeners, who goes on to contrast the blood-thirsty image of Christianity with that of the less violent Buddhism. The essential point is that Christ’s death on the cross at Golgotha is portrayed as a place where the sacrificial shedding of blood takes place, however “obscene” such an idea may be.

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some of the cinematic adaptations of Stoker’s novel and the ways in which the sacrificial shedding of blood, and related communion imagery, are used within them. I shall begin by examining one of the places where the sacrificial imagery surrounding Christ’s death is most clearly exhibited in Paul’s thought, that is, in his understanding of the Lord’s Supper.

1.  The Lord’s Supper in Paul’s Thought The controversy in the church of Corinth surrounding the celebration of the Lord’s Supper has been the subject of special interest in recent years. Nowhere is this more true than among New Testament scholars seeking to explore the sociological implications of the controversy. Gerd Theissen’s work in this area has been seminal,2 with a number of others building upon his basic reconstruction of the Corinthian situation and making refinements to it.3 It now seems clear that the theological debate over the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the church at Corinth was inextricably bound up with tensions between richer and poorer members of the congregation. In short, it appears that traditional social distinctions and classifications were spilling over into the corporate celebrations of the ritual meal. This resulted in unacceptable practices being adopted wherein one wealthier group (the “strong”) was taking advantage of another poorer one (the “weak”), probably with regard to seating arrangements as well as the timing and quality of food distributed. Paul reacts strongly against such divisive practices and exhorts the congregation to live more in keeping with the unity that they have in Christ. However, I shall concentrate not on the sociological question of the Lord’s Supper as it was celebrated in the church at Corinth, but rather on the theological idea of the “body and blood of Christ” which was an integral part of how Paul conceived of those celebrations. The precise relationship between the Jewish Passover celebration and the Christian celebration of the Lord’s Supper (as it came to be known) has long been a matter of discussion. A variety of terms were used to describe these early Christian ritual meals, including “the Lord’s Supper” (1 Cor. 11.20), “the breaking of bread” (Lk. 24.30; Acts 2.42, 46; 20.7, 11; cf. 27.35?), the “agape feast” (Jude 12), and “the eucharist” (Didache 9.1; Ignatius, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 8.1; Justin Martyr, Apology to the Jews 66.1).4 Exactly how such overtly religious celebrations were integrated into Graeco-Roman banquets and guild meals is also a subject which has engendered considerable scholarly debate (Smith 1981). It is commonly, though not universally, agreed that the Lord’s Supper was based upon the celebration of the Passover which Jesus shared with his disciples in the upper room (Mt. 26.26-29/Mk 14.22-25/Lk. 22.15-20).5 Paul alludes to this Passover celebration when he writes in 1 Cor. 11.23-26: For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink

Especially Theissen (1982: 121-74). Barton (1986) is an important advance along these lines. Also see Winter (1978) and Witherington (1995: 241-52) 4 Klauck (1992); Stein (1992); and Marshall (1993) offer helpful surveys of the matter. 5 On this, see Higgins (1952); Hunter (1961); Schweizer (1967); Marxsen (1970); Martin (1974: 110-29); Jeremias (1977); Marshall (1980b); and Barrett (1985: 60-78). 2 3

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it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

Most scholars agree that in this passage Paul creatively adapts the traditions concerning the Lord’s Supper which have been handed down to him. Both elements of the Lord’s Supper—bread and wine—are spoken of in the passage, as are their spiritual equivalents, the body and blood of the Lord. From the way that the two eucharistic elements are described in this passage, it seems that the idea of the “body of Christ” was a much more important theological concept for Paul than was the “blood of Christ.” He certainly has much more to say about the “body of Christ” than he does about the “blood of Christ,” although the latter expression does function elsewhere in Paul’s letters as an expression for the death of the Lord Jesus (as we shall see in a moment). Paul does not explicitly say that the cup of wine is Jesus’ blood, nor does he suggest that Jesus himself ever made such a declaration at the Last Supper. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that Jesus would have made such a crass equation between the ritual cup of wine and his own blood (although Mk 14.246 does suggest it). An outright identification like this would presumably have made the Lord’s injunction to his disciples extremely objectionable, given that they were religiously minded Jews for whom there was a prohibition in the Torah against the ingesting of blood (Lev. 17.10-12). Rather, here Paul reworks the sacrificial imagery contained within the eucharistic traditions of the synoptic gospels and stresses the shedding of Christ’s blood as the basis of a “new covenant,” invoking the imagery of Jer. 31.31.7 Such participation in the new covenant also seems to lie at the heart of another passage from 1 Corinthians wherein Paul alludes to the eucharistic imagery of the Lord’s Supper. In 1 Cor. 10.16, within a passage given over to discussing Christian participation in pagan sacrificial meals, we read: The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?8

The phrase “in the blood of Jesus” (or “through the blood of Jesus”) occurs in several other places within the Pauline letters and is generally taken to be a reference to his death on the cross (Rom. 3.25; 5.9; Eph. 1.7; 2.13; Col. 1.20). The point is that Christ’s crucifixion is invested with sacrificial significance and the shedding of his blood is interpreted against the backdrop of the cultic sacrificial system of Judaism (Dunn 1974: 133). In the words of Herman N. Ridderbos (1974: 80):9 When therefore the blood of Christ is regularly referred to, it is not so much because of the manner of his death but because of its significance as a sacrifice, especially as an atoning sacrifice, in which the blood was shed to cover and eradicate sin.

For more on this controversial verse, see Bultmann (1952: 146); Higgins (1952: 29-34); Emerton (1955); and Jeremias (1977: 193-95). 7 Käsemann (1964: 131-32). Maccoby (1991) argues that the idea of the Lord’s Supper came to Paul in a vision in which the risen Lord laid out for him the significance of the bread and wine. The suggestion distances Paul from the Last Supper/Passover traditions recorded in the Gospels and effectively makes Paul the creator of the Lord’s Supper, as it came to be known and celebrated in the church. The thesis is not without its difficulties. 8 Too much can be read into the reversal of the normal order of the elements here (“cup” usually follows “bread” in eucharistic passages). Paul probably makes the alteration in order to set up his statement in 10.17 that the church is the united body of Christ. 9 For more recent discussions, consult Travis (1994); Carroll and Green (1995: 113-32). 6

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Thus, in 1 Cor. 5.7 Paul can go so far as to describe Christ as “our Passover lamb who has been sacrificed” (τò πάσχα ήμών έτύθη Χριστός).10 The unspoken implication of this unusual statement, which helps to give the metaphor its force, is that the Christian life is likened to a spiritual Passover festival and that the Corinthian Christians should live their lives accordingly. This is quite an astonishing declaration and demonstrates one way in which eucharistic imagery served to communicate the reality of new life brought about “by the blood of Christ.” Little wonder that Christians down through the ages have seen the eucharist as a ritual celebration of the salvation which is made possible by Christ’s death. I move now from the New Testament materials to begin my consideration of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, one of the most influential and enduring of modem vampire myths.11

2.  Communion Imagery in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) Before I turn to examine the place that communion imagery has within Dracula itself, it is worth reviewing how it was that Stoker came to write the novel and what sorts of critical discussion it has engendered, not least in the realm of theological matters. A brief consideration of some of these issues will also serve to set the proper context for the religious imagery I am concentrating on in this study.

a. Bram Stoker and the Writing of Dracula The year 1997 marked the centenary of the publication of Dracula. The novel has been phenomenally successful; it has been translated into approximately 20 languages worldwide and it has never been out of print in English since it first appeared in June 1897, sporting a mustardyellow cover with blood-red lettering.12 Paradoxically, the author of the celebrated novel, which is often described as the quintessential Gothic horror story, remains something of an obscure figure. Many people today know of his creation largely because of the numerous film adaptations of the novel, but remain totally unaware of the author’s identity. Indeed, the recent biography of Bram Stoker by Barbara Belford (1996: x) goes so far as to describe him as “the soulless invisible man” and suggests that the paper trail left by him is very faint indeed, so much so that it was difficult to write a detailed biography about him.13 Stoker wrote a total of 18 novels, but it is only Dracula that has stood the test of time and it is generally only by this single work that he is known to the public.14 What influenced Stoker to write the story, and under what circumstances he produced the work, are matters of considerable dispute.15 Much scholarly attention has been directed to T he immediate context of this passage (5.1-13) is that of the disciplining of an errant member of the congregation. The description of Christ as the sacrificial Passover lamb is made as a passing remark by the apostle, possibly in preparation for the church’s celebration of Easter. See Howard (1969) on this. 11 Hollinger (1997: 201) describes the vampire as “a metaphor for certain aspects of postmodernism,” which perhaps helps to account for its abiding popularity. 12 Originally published by Archibald Constable and Company, Westminster. 13 T h is is now the standard biography of Stoker and replaces the other two inferior biographies by Ludlam (1962) and Farson (1975). 14 Although an increasing number of people are aware of his last novel The Lair of the White Worm (1911), largely through British director Ken Russell’s film from 1989 which is based on the story. 15 T h e discovery in 1970 in the Rosenbach Library and Museum, Philadelphia, of Stoker’s working notes for Dracula puts paid to the suggestion that the novel was a rush-job. It now seems clear that Dracula was 10

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establishing the historical basis for the story of Count Dracula. It is now generally agreed that the figure of Vlad the Impaler, a fifteenth-century prince of Wallachia in what is now southern Romania, is the figure most likely to be behind it all.16 It will come as no surprise to know that the association of Prince Vlad with the Dracula legend is something which post-communist Romania has been eager to exploit; sites associated with the Prince have now become tourist attractions and there are many travel companies which offer a Dracula tour to the relevant areas.17 Yet whatever the historical anchors for them might be, vampire legends and myths have been around since the Middle Ages and stories of them became a standard feature of Gothic horror.18 There is good evidence that Stoker was familiar with many of these stories, notably Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Camilla (1872).19 The relationship between Bram Stoker and the celebrated actor Sir Henry Irving, with whom Stoker had a long and intimate association both as business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London and as a personal friend, is sometimes said to be the inspiration behind Dracula.20 In this sense, the relationship between Irving and Stoker is reflected in that of Count Dracula and his hapless business agent Jonathan Harker, and it is Irving/Dracula who sucks the life out of the devoted Stoker/Harker. In such a scenario Stoker’s own wife Florence is reflected in the character Lucy Westenra, who is socially frivolous and seemingly unable to keep herself from seeking after and accepting the attentions of a myriad suitors. Nowhere is the power of Irving over Stoker more evident than in the fact that Stoker hurriedly wedded Florence and postponed his honeymoon with her in order to comply with Irving’s demands that Stoker join him in Birmingham and begin the theatre season; in Dracula we find an echo of this in the fact that Jonathan Harker’s wedding to Mina is postponed when Count Dracula demands that Harker come to Transylvania in order to finalize the arrangements for his move to England. Both the narrative style and the structural design of Dracula have been focal points of investigation within recent years.21 The novel is divided into 27 chapters but they are not as straightforward as one might expect.22 The fact that the narrative throughout is conducted by means of a series of journals and letters, of diary entries and newspaper clippings, means that the way in which the story is communicated to the reader is somewhat unusual; there is always a sense of distancing involved, and there is no omniscient narrator to be found. The reader is never quite able to identify with the narrator of the story directly but is forced to engage with the narrative through a multiplicity of characters. The result is somewhat unexpected, yet meticulously planned and researched as a novel, in contrast to what was commonly assumed among earlier critics. Stoker spent at least six years researching and preparing the book. For further discussion along these lines, see Bierman (1977). 16 McNally and Florescu (1975); Leatherdale (1993: 13-44); Nandris (1966); and Porter (1992) all discuss this matter. 17 Elizabeth Miller, a Professor in the Department of English at the Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, manages an Internet site on the subject which is entitled “Dracula’s Home Page” (www​.ucs​.mun​.ca/​ ~emiller/). She includes colour photographs of most of the tourist spots in Romania. 18 One of the best treatments of the subject is Twitchell (1981). Also worth considering is Punter (1980). Several good anthologies of vampire stories are available which show the range and diversity of the subject. For example, consult Ryder (1987) and Haining (1995). 19 See Wilson (1983: ix-xii) on this point. Le Fanu was, like Stoker, an Irishman from Dublin. He was joint owner of the Dublin Evening Mail and thus was at one time Stoker’s employer (when Stoker was writing theatre reviews for the paper). 20 A suggestion which is no doubt responsible for the decision to have a cover photograph of Henry Irving (as Mephistopheles) for the Penguin Classics edition of Stoker’s Dracula (1993). 21 See Senf (1979); Seed (1985); Johnson (1984b); and Miller (1994). 22 I shall cite passages from the novel by noting their chapter and page number (thus 1.5 denotes p. five of chapter 1). The edition used here is that within the Penguin Classics series (London: Penguin Books, 1993) and contains an introduction by Maurice Hindle.

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spectacular: the reader encounters Dracula in a secondary sense. Count Dracula himself never assumes the role of the narrator in the novel; he is met only through the eyes and ears of the other characters in the story. Yet paradoxically this mediated encounter with the central figure of evil is all the more suspenseful as a result and the dramatic effect of the novel is enhanced by it. The sexual imagery underlying the vampire story is generally recognized, and there have been many studies specifically given over to exploring this theme, perhaps the most discussed aspect of Dracula within the critical literature.23 The illicit pursuit and capture of an unsuspecting victim, culminating in an intimate embrace and a bite to the throat, lies at the heart of the horror of the vampire story. Little wonder then that the marks left on the necks and throats of passionate lovers in Great Britain are commonly described as “love bites” (the American equivalent of “hickey” is rather lame in comparison). Given the thinly disguised sexual nature of the novel, it comes as no surprise that Dracula has been the happy hunting-ground for those pursuing a Freudian reading of the story. Many argue, for example, that it is the incest taboo that is foundational to the story and that the novel is best interpreted as a Victorian version of the Oedipus myth.24 The novel has been the focus of a number of other interpretative readings.25 For example, it has been analysed by some feminist critics for what it contributes to the late Victorian view of the sexual roles of men and women, with Stoker being both hailed by some as an early feminist and condemned by others as a chauvinistic traditionalist.26 The novel has also been subjected to various political interpretations, with the rich blend of metaphor and symbol inherent in the story readily lending itself to application. Thus it has been read as a text primarily concerned with political and economic matters arising out of the English imperial system and the role of England as an enlightened Western democracy in the face of the political chaos which threatened from the East.27 The clash between gothic supernaturalism and Victorian science is also a key feature of the novel, particularly as it is non-scientific instruments (crucifixes, communion wafers, wooden stakes, garlic bulbs, etc.) which serve as weapons against the evil Count (Jann 1989). Some have detected in the novel echoes of the debate over Irish Home Rule which so dominated the domestic political agenda in Stoker’s day. There has also been a school of thought which views Dracula as an illustration of the Marxist class struggle in which Count Dracula, as the personification of bourgeois capitalism constantly in search of new victims (or “markets”?), preys upon the working-class and sucks them dry.28 The interpretation of Dracula as an anti-Semitic work, in which Stoker employs the stereotypical nineteenth-century images of the Jew and sets these over against the virtues of Christianity, has also been put forward.29 However, the theological dimensions of the novel have not received the attention that they are due, and these promise much in terms of understanding the evolving nature of the religious mythology surrounding Dracula.

See, e.g., Fry (1972); Weissman (1977); Griffin (1980); Wood (1983); Craft (1984); Stevenson (1988); Howes (1988); Hogan (1988: 138-63); Case (1991); Leatherdale (1993: 155-71); Krumm (1995); and Belford (1996: 5-9). 24 Bentley (1972) is a case in point. 25 See Morrison (1994) for a helpful introduction to the ways in which Stoker’s Dracula continues to challenge readers. 26 Demetrakopoulos (1977); Roth (1977); Senf (1982); Johnson (1984a); Williams (1991); and McDonald (1993) offer varying interpretations. 27 For discussion of the social and geo-political dimensions of the novel, see Wasson (1966); Hennelly (1977); Arata (1990); and Wicke (1992). 28 See Moretti (1983: 83-108); Hatlen (1980); and Jancovich (1992: 48-52) on this line of interpretation. 29 Halberstam (1993) offers some interesting ideas along these lines, calling attention to the possible influence of Henry Irving’s portrayal of the Jew Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice upon Stoker’s imagination. 23

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b. Theological Imagery and Biblical Allusions in the Novel Dracula is a profoundly theological novel which contains a host of interlocking ideas commonly associated with historic Christianity. The novel contains a dozen or so clear allusions to biblical stories or texts that help to set the tone for the theological exploration that lies at its core. These come from a wide range of biblical strata, embracing both Old Testament and New Testament writings. For example, in 5.80, in one of Lucy Westenra’s letters to Mina Murray, there is an allusion to the parable of the ten virgins (Mt. 25.1-10). This comes in the form of Lucy’s recounting to her friend the proposal made to her by the Bowie-brandishing Texan Quincey P. Morris. Technically speaking, Morris is made to misquote the central image of the parable (he mentions the “seven young women with the lamps”), perhaps under the weight of seven as an image of perfection and the fact that in his eyes Lucy is the perfect woman. Similarly, in 10.156-57 there is an allusion to the parable of the sower (Mt. 13.1-9/Mk 4.1-9/Lk. 8.4-8), as Van Helsing explains to Dr Seward that they need to be patient in order to let the true nature of Lucy Westenra’s vampiric condition be revealed in due course, like the slowly developing crop sown by the sower. Meanwhile, in 6.99 Mina Murray’s journal contains an allusion to the story of the healing of the blind man of Bethsaida (Mk 8.24) when she offers a description of seeing people half-shrouded in the seaside mists of Whitby, and notes that they “seem ‘like trees walking.’” In 8.133, within Dr Seward’s diary, there is an allusion to the saying of Jesus recorded in Mt. 10.2931/Lk 12.6-7 in which God’s concern for the life of a sparrow (as compared to that for the life of an eagle) is asserted. The section of Dr Seward’s diary also describes the religious mania of the lunatic patient Renfield in language which is reminiscent of Jn 3.29 where John the Baptist declares the imminent arrival of “the Master” (the passage from John makes use of bridegroom imagery, perhaps building upon Isa. 62.5). In effect, this is to make Renfield something of an anti-type to John the Baptist and it carries the implication that Count Dracula is the anti-type to Jesus Christ himself. In 20.346 Dr Seward reports on a further conversation that he has had with his patient in which Renfield cites Gen. 5.24 (“Enoch walked with God”) as part of how the lunatic perceives his relationship with Count Dracula. He is to be rewarded with unending terrestrial life (as opposed to Enoch’s unending spiritual life) from his Master and Lord—Count Dracula. In the next chapter this allegiance is tested in a passage which is a parody of the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. Here, in 21.360, the zoophagous Renfield, mortally wounded by Dracula for having attempted to protect Mina from him, relates to Dr Seward how Dracula had offered him thousands of rats to eat, as well as dogs and cats. Dracula promised him, “All these lives I will give you, ay, and many more and greater, through countless ages, if you will fall down and worship me!” The parallel with Mt. 4.9/Lk. 4.7 is obvious. In 25.441 Van Helsing explains that Dracula’s hypnotic power over Mina will be his undoing, alluding to Ps. 69.22 when he says “The hunter is taken in his own snare.” The agelessness of Dracula is alluded to in 14.247 by comparing him with the biblical patriarch Methuselah who, according to Gen. 5.27, lived to be 969 years old. Meanwhile, the story of Noah’s ark in Gen. 8.8-12 is alluded to in 4.64 where Jonathan Harker describes Dracula’s castle in Transylvania as perched on a spot so high that it “seemed to me as if the dove from the ark had lighted there.” In 19.333 there is an allusion to Exod. 40.34-38 with its mention of “a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night” as part of “Mina Harker’s Journal.” Mina uses the image to describe her dream-like pseudo-sexual encounter with the Count in which he enters her bedroom as a thick and mysterious mist. Even Dracula himself occasionally alludes to Scripture, as in 2.31 where he uses a phrase from Exod. 2.22, “a stranger in a strange land,” to describe how he fears he may feel when he

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makes the anticipated move to London. In the Old Testament story these are words on the lips of Moses and are used to denote his period of life in Egypt as an exile. There are several allusions to the passion and crucifixion of Christ which help to establish this as the key theological idea for the sub-text of the Dracula story-line. In 21.367 Mina declares “God’s will be done!” when she is informed of Renfield’s death; arguably this is an allusion of Jesus’ words in the garden of Gethsemane recorded in Mt. 26.39/Mk 14.36/Lk. 22.42. In all three Gospel accounts this prayer of Jesus that the Father’s will might be done is linked to mention of the “cup” of suffering which he must endure. In 18.305 there is an allusion to Christ’s being pierced by the soldier’s spear while hanging on the cross at Golgotha. This occurs in “Mina Harker’s Journal” when she mentions “an arrow in the side of Him who died for man.” What is significant about this allusion is that it is recorded only in John’s Gospel (Jn 19.34) and it is immediately followed by a mention of the “blood and water” which flowed from Christ’s side—a fitting allusion considering the emphasis that blood has within the story-line of Dracula itself (the words “blood” or “bloody” occur a total of 117 times in the novel; only 5 out of 27 chapters omit reference to “blood”). Meanwhile, in 19.321, as part of Jonathan Harker’s journal, there is a recollection of how Professor Van Helsing bravely enters the lair of Count Dracula in London. As he crosses over the threshold of the home in which Dracula has hidden his earth-filled coffins, Van Helsing crosses himself and utters the Latin words Ίn manus tuas, Domine!,” an adaptation of the final words of Jesus on the cross according to Lk. 23.46 (“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”). Perhaps the most significant and best-known quotation of a biblical text within the novel appears in 11.184 where again in “Dr Seward’s Diary” the words of the maniac Renfield are cited. Following the knife attack by Renfield upon Seward, the attendants come to restrain Renfield and return him to his cell. As they do so Renfield repeats over and over again, “The blood is the life! The blood is the life!,” a line from Deut. 12.23 which could be described as one of the interpretative keys to the novel as a whole. The same line is repeated on other occasion by Renfield in 18.301. What are we to make of all of this? Is there something significant about the frequent allusion to imagery drawn from the Bible? Many critics of Dracula think so. Leonard Wolf (1993: vii) describes Dracula as displaying “the perpetual tension between the dark and the light; the wrestling match between Christ and Satan,” a point which helps to account for the prevalence of crucifixion imagery within the novel. After all, in theological terms it is on the cross that the clash between good and evil might be said to reach a climax. The use of a crucifix as a means of fending off the vampire occurs frequently in the course of the story, a point that has been especially frequently used within the cinematic adaptations of Stoker’s Dracula over the years.30 Other Christian rituals such as baptism and holy communion also appear at key points within the novel. These should not be overlooked, since they also contribute to the overall impression of the story as one which engages with the sacramental foundations of the Christian faith. For example, in 8.135 we find Seward remarking that Renfield “thinks of the loaves and fishes even when he believes he is in a Real Presence.” The feeding of the five thousand is clearly alluded to in this comment, as is the eucharistic sub-text of the Gospel story (Mt. 14.13- 21/Mk 6.32-44/ Lk. 9.10-17/Jn 6.1-15). Similarly, the sacrament of baptism is alluded to at several points within the narrative: in 27.469 Van Helsing describes Mina Harker as having been tainted with the “Vampire baptism,” and in 24.414 this is expanded to “the Vampire’s baptism of blood.” Insofar as Mina has been joined to Dracula she sacramentally shares his existence, partaking of his very life-blood. T h is is explored more fully in Kreitzer (1997).

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Charles S. Blinderman (1980: 427) associates this sharing of blood with eucharistic imagery, calling attention to the ominous reference in 21.370 to Mina as a “wine-press.” He remarks: Dracula effects communion with his congregation through the sharing of blood, for instead of wine being blood, blood is substantiated into wine, Mina emerging from this ritual as Dracula’s “bountiful wine-press.”

One should perhaps also point out that the full declaration made to Van Helsing and his band of vampire hunters by Dracula about his “wine-press” Mina is filled with phrases drawn from both Scripture (Gen. 2.23-24; Eph. 5.31) and from the Book of Common Prayer, which are traditionally associated with a Christian marriage ceremony. All of this supports the idea that the bloodsharing between Dracula and Mina is seen as an evil inversion of the relationship between Christ and the church which in itself is the theological underpinning of a marriage between a man and a woman. The fact that Mina has been contaminated via her blood-rites with Dracula means that she describes herself as “Unclean! Unclean!” as if she were a leper (see Lev. 13.45-46). This sense of contamination is also mentioned in 21.366 and 22.381. However, perhaps the most celebrated instance in which the blood-based union between Mina and Dracula is detailed occurs in 21.363 within “Dr Seward’s Diary.” The evil Count has managed to overpower Jonathan Harker and isolate Mina from her other vampire-seeking protectors. He exerts his influence over her and, in a scene which is extremely suggestive of fellatio, forces her to drink blood from his breast. Van Helsing and his courageous band break down the door of Mina’s room and find a hideous scene of seduction and blood-drinking intimacy before them. Dr Seward records Mina’s plight, which is only brought to an end by the power of a communion host: His [Dracula’s] right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white night-dress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare chest which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink. As we burst into the room, the Count turned his face, and the hellish look that I had heard described seemed to leap into it. His eyes flamed red with devilish passion. The great nostrils of the white aquiline nose opened wide and quivered at the edge, and the white sharp teeth, behind the full lips of the blood dripping mouth, clamped together like those of a wild beast. With a wrench, which threw his victim back upon the bed as though hurled from a height, he turned and sprang at us. But by this time the Professor had gained his feet, and was holding towards him the envelope which contained the Sacred Wafer.

At several other points the novel prominently displays the significance of holy communion as a weapon against Count Dracula and his demonic powers. Theologically speaking, it is at Calvary that the sacrifice of Christ, the shedding of blood, is most manifestly evident; it is here on the cross of Christ that the sacredness of the eucharist host is established. There is a deliberate and highly charged antithesis which is being exacted here, one which Stoker builds creatively into his novel. Indeed, James B. Twitchell (1985: 108)31 has described this as “an elaborate allegory for the doctrine of transubstantiation in reverse.” He states:

Also see Twitchell (1981: 13-16).

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[T]he vampire myth explained the most difficult concept in the last of the sacraments to be introduced—the Eucharist. It explained the doctrine of transubstantiation in reverse. In the Middle Ages the Church fathers found their congregation understandably hesitant about accepting that the wafer and the wine were the actual, let alone the metaphoric, body and blood of Christ. How better could the transubstantiation be explained than on the more primitive level, the level the folk already knew and believed in—namely, the vampire transformation. For just as the devil-vampire drank the blood and then captured the spirit of a sinner, so too could the penitent drink the blood, eat the body, and possess the divinity of Christ.

More significantly, the use of the communion host as an effective way to fend off Dracula frequently appears in the story. The consecrated communion host is also used as a means to seal doors and windows, so as to protect against Dracula’s entry. It is also employed as the method of despoiling Dracula’s earth-laden coffins. For example, the protective power of a communion wafer is mentioned in 19.321, and Van Helsing arms each of his intrepid band with a portion of the sacred wafer as they prepare to invade Dracula’s Carfax property. Similarly, in 22.383 Van Helsing uses a communion host to “desecrate” one of Dracula’s coffins within the property. Jonathan Harker’s journal records the words and actions of Van Helsing along these lines: Dr Van Helsing said to us solemnly as we stood before him, “And now, my friends, we have a duty here to do. We must sterilize this earth, so sacred of holy memories, that he has brought from a far distant land for such fell use. He has chosen this earth because it has been holy. Thus we defeat him with his own weapon, for we make it more holy still. It was sanctified to such use of man, now we sanctify it to God.” As he spoke he took from his bag a screwdriver and a wrench, and very soon the top of one of the cases was thrown open. The earth smelled musty and close, but we did not somehow seem to mind, for our attention was concentrated on the Professor. Taking from his box a piece of the Sacred Wafer he laid it reverently on the earth, and then shutting down the lid began to screw it home, we aiding him as he worked.

In the same manner, a crumbled communion wafer is used by Van Helsing to seal the tomb of the vampiress Lucy Westenra in 16.269-70. It is also worth noting that Stoker’s novel describes Professor Van Helsing’s “branding” of Mina’s forehead by means of a communion wafer in 22.381. The “mark” of this branding is strongly reminiscent of the “mark of Cain” of Genesis 4, and suggestively invites a comparison along these lines.32 The branding of Mina’s forehead with the communion wafer is intimately connected with the ultimate destruction of Dracula himself, and Stoker cleverly alludes to biblical imagery of sacrificial purity to convey this. As Elisabeth Bronfen (1992: 319) puts it: The touch of the paternal sign—the holy wafer—leaves a “red scar” on Mina’s forehead to indicate that her body is tainted though her soul is pure. Killing the vampire will be coterminous with purifying her forehead, “all white as ivory and with no stain.”

Griffin (1980: 463) relates the image to Nathiel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850): “The scar, often referred to as a stain, of course duplicates Dracula’s, but it is actually closer to Hester Prynne’s red ‘A.’”

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I turn now to consider some of the ways in which such communion imagery becomes transferred to cinematic adaptations of the Dracula myth.

3.  Communion Imagery in Some Film Adaptations of Dracula Representations of the Last Supper are staple items in most films depicting the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and many of them are quite good in portraying the sense of sacramental exchange which takes place between Jesus and his disciples in the course of the meal. Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) is a case in point, with a moving scene in which the Lord celebrates the Jewish feast with his 12 disciples. Jesus explains to Peter as they share together a cup of outpoured wine that “It is for this Passover that I came into the world.” He then invites them all to drink from their cups of wine with the words: “From now on this cup will not only be a memorial and sacrament of the covenant that God made with our fathers on Mount Sinai. This is my blood. The blood of the new covenant which is to be poured out for many.” However, it is not only within “lives of Jesus” films that we can find the importance of communion imagery. Any number of other films could be called upon to demonstrate the power that the idea of a communal meal has, particularly when it is shared by a group of followers as they are gathered around their leader and facing an uncertain future. The sequence contained in Kevin Reynolds’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) where Robin and his band of merry men share a celebration meal in Sherwood Forest is an obvious case in point. The transformation that can be wrought within a community by sharing a meal together is one of the things that makes Gabriel Axel’s Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast (1987), based on a short story by Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), such a joy to watch.33 However, not all such cinematic explorations of a community meal are as wholesome and uplifting as this, as the parodies of the Last Supper contained in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970) and Mel Brooks’s History of the World Part One (1981) serve only too well to illustrate. In any event, my task here is to explore some of the ways in which the idea of Christ’s shedding of his blood for the sake of others, a central feature of the celebration of the eucharist in the Christian faith, has been portrayed within Dracula films. Without doubt, the popularity of the figure of Dracula is due in no small measure to the various cinematic portrayals of him—a character as mythologically rich and vibrant as this readily lends itself to such artistic expression. This was recognized very early on; even during Stoker’s lifetime the novel Dracula was adapted for the London stage (Skal 1990). However, it was not until F.W. Murnau’s film classic Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1921) that the rich potential of Stoker’s creation began to be explored cinematically, and even here it was not without controversy. The film, now regarded as a seminal work of German expressionism,34 was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel and Stoker’s widow Florence vigorously pursued her legal rights through the courts. She eventually won her case in 1925 and all copies of the film were ordered to be destroyed, a legal injunction which fortunately, from the standpoint of cinematic history, was not successfully carried out since a few copies survived.35 Given this inauspicious beginning, it is indeed remarkable that over 200 Dracula and vampire movies have For more on the theological implications of this film see, Marsh (1997). T h is silent classic has been restored and is available through Redemption Films Ltd, London. The restoration contains English-text announcement panels and remains a must for anyone interested in the popular development of Dracula mythology. For more on this, see Wood (1979 and 1983). 35 Skal (1990: 40-63) discusses this. 33 34

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now been made by film-directors from all around the world.36 Perhaps most prominent among these, at least as far as shaping the popular understanding of the Dracula myth is concerned, are the various films produced by the British Hammer House of Horror films in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, films which made the actors Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing household names.37 However, the vampire film remains a perennial favourite and it has experienced something of a revival in the past 15 years or so (particularly for the teenage audience). I shall concentrate my attention on three films, one from each of the past three decades. The films are quite diverse in their subject matter, each exploring the Dracula myth in its own unique way. Yet there is a common theme which unites them, for each film uses communion imagery—namely the “drinking” of life-sustaining blood—to some extent within the story-line. I begin with the most recent of the three, one of the most ambitious efforts by the Oscar-winning director Francis Ford Coppola, perhaps best known for his The Godfather trilogy (1972, 1974 and 1990) and Apocalypse Now (1979).

a. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) has been the focus of considerable debate, not least because of the vision that it presents of Victorian England and the way in which it handles, or mishandles, the Gothic themes so central to the original novel.38 Thus despite the brash claim of the film’s title, in many ways this is barely recognizable as Bram Stoker’s story of Count Dracula. To be fair, the major characters are all in place and the costuming is certainly reflective of the late-Victorian age in which Stoker lived, but the guts of the story—its pulse, as it were—is missing. The film boasts an all-star cast, including Gary Oldman as Count Dracula, Anthony Hopkins as Abraham Van Helsing, Winona Ryder as Mina Murray/Elizabeta, Keanu Reaves as Jonathan Harker, Richard E. Grant as Arthur Holmwood, and newcomer Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra.39 Most damaging to the original plot of the novel is the way in which the relationship between Dracula and Mina Harker is transformed into a tale of lost love, as she becomes the reincarnation of Dracula’s wife Elizabeta who committed suicide over four centuries before. Thus, promotional posters for the film proclaim it as a story whose major message is “Love Never Dies.” In effect this makes the film into an overly sentimental love-story with Aliens-like special effects and bodily transformations galore gratuitously thrown in along the way. This substitution of romantic sentimentality for Gothic horror is all rather unfortunate. Nowhere in Stoker’s novel is Count Dracula said to love Mina in this way; on the contrary, he is animalistic and predatory in his approach to the women he pursues. Coppola’s film paints him as rather a noble figure, whose love for Mina eventually culminates in his own destruction as he sacrifices himself rather than contaminate the woman he loves with his vampirism. Indeed, even the erotic power of Stoker’s work, his indirect association of vampiric activity with sexuality, is seriously undermined, for the film leaves nothing to the imagination and makes Mina and Dracula lovers. One wonders how A number of books catalogue this rich explosion of films. See Jones (1993); Silver and Ursini (1993). See Eyles, Adkinson and Fry (1973); Hutchings (1993: 115-27). 38 T h e screenplay for the film was written by James V. Hart, who together with Coppola has produced Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Film and the Legend (1993), which contains a number of stills from the film together with the shooting script and some interesting interviews with people connected with the film. Fred Saberhagen’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) is a popular novel based on the screenplay as a movie tie-in. The book contains an afterword by Francis Ford Coppola and eight pages of colour photos from the movie. 39 A 30-minute supplemental video entitled The Making of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is also available from Columbia Tristan Home Video (1993). 36 37

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much of the motivation behind this (mis)interpretation of Stoker’s vision is due to the sexual climate of the 1990s and the ever-real threat of AIDS as a sexually transmitted disease; in effect vampirism becomes a thinly disguised cipher for HIV infection.40 Unfortunately, the attempt to update the message of the film and make it relevant for the contemporary viewing audience has lost something essential, something mysterious, in the process. Nowhere is the film more open to criticism than in the way in which it alters Stoker’s conclusion to the novel. At the end of the story Mina gives birth to a son, symbolically named after the men who risked their lives to save her from Dracula’s curse (see 27.485). Never in the film is there any mention of this. Instead, within the film we have the love between Dracula and Mina serving as the focus in the final confrontation at Dracula’s castle in Transylvania. Indeed, it is Mina herself who rises to the awful demands of her love for Dracula as she challenges Van Helsing and the band of vampire hunters, and withdraws to the chapel with the wounded Dracula. There she dispatches him by driving Quincey Morris’s Bowie knife through the Count’s heart before retrieving the blade and decapitating him. All of this is said to be an expression of her love for him (more about this in a moment). This may be highly romantic, tear-jerking stuff, but it is certainly not Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Nevertheless, there are one or two interesting features of the film adaptation that contribute to the examination of the place that communion imagery has in the retelling of Dracula. The first of these occurs early in the film while Prince Vlad is away defending his homeland against the invading Turks. He has left his beloved wife Elizabeta back at home in his castle. She receives a false message that he has been killed in battle and, unable to contemplate going on without him, commits suicide. The Prince returns just as she is about to be interred without the church’s blessing. She lies on the floor of the castle chapel, surrounded by a number of monks bearing crucifixes on standards. The chief priest among them is named Chesare (played by Anthony Hopkins in a cameo role), and he informs Vlad that since Elizabeta was a suicide she is outside of grace, her soul damned. The dead body of Elizabeta lies on the floor of the chapel, the shadow of a cross falling across her face as Chesare pronounces her damnation (the same image is repeated in a flashback episode in the middle of the film wherein Mina Murray asks Dracula about his Princess Elizabeta). The injustice of this so incenses the Prince that he curses the Christian faith for which he had so bravely fought, and renounces God. Knocking over a baptismal font and spilling its sacred water on to the floor, he moves menacingly towards Chesare, who crosses himself in a futile gesture of defence. Vlad brutally brushes aside the crucifix which the priest holds up to protect himself and, drawing his sword, rushes across the chapel to stab the sword into the centre of a large cross which stands behind the chapel altar. Blood begins to flow from the cross and soon the chapel is engulfed in a torrent of free-flowing blood. Vlad grabs a chalice and, filling it with some of the blood which comes down from the cross, drinks it, declaring, “The blood is the life . . . and it shall be mine!” A river of blood flows everywhere, flooding the chapel, as the opening sequence shifts to the title credit, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” The scene is now set for a story of revenge and blood-lust, with a striking image of a perversion of Holy Communion at its heart. Later on in the film, as Van Helsing attempts to discover the true story of what is taking place among them now that Dracula has arrived in London, he visits the British Museum and reads some forbidden records housed there relating to Dracula’s background. As he reads, the T h us Stewart (1995: 184-85) says, “[Dracula’s] readiness to sacrifice comes across as a biomedical parable of tragic self-control in an age when the exchange of bodily fluids, blood or otherwise, is ruled by thanatos rather than eros.” Also, see Nixon (1997) for a stimulating discussion of Tony Scott’s film The Hunger (1987) as an extended allegory of AIDS.

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arch vampire-hunter comes to an important realization. “Ja, Draculea! The blood is the life!” he intones, recalling the earlier declaration by the Count himself as he drank blood from the chalice in his castle chapel. The crucifix-bearing Abraham Van Helsing is certainly integral to the novel, and there are several scenes in the film in which he uses communion hosts to protect himself or others against the advance of the evil Dracula. Sacred communion hosts thus figure prominently in his armoury, taking their place alongside such items as crucifixes, hawthorn bushes, holy water and garlic bulbs. The scene where Jonathan Harker and Mina are married in the convent chapel in Romania also uses communion imagery to great effect. Interestingly, the ceremony is conducted in Romanian and is performed by an orthodox priest, a scenario which allows the inclusion of drinking from a communion cup as part of the proceedings. The complex sequence interweaves images of the wedding ceremony in Romania with images of Dracula’s final and fatal vampiric attack upon Lucy Westenra in far-away London. As part of the wedding ceremony, the bride and groom drink from a communion chalice, each in turn as they gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes. The wedding scene is framed by shots of Dracula making ominous declarations about his continuing presence in the life of the young married couple, most notably in Mina who is the reincarnation of his long-lost wife Elizabeta. Before the wedding vows are exchanged, we see the Count intone menacingly: “Your impotent men with their foolish spells cannot protect you from my power!” The words are directed primarily against the vampirized Lucy who is being protected by Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood, who are armed with guns and knives. Yet Dracula’s words could be more accurately construed as directed against Mina and the ritualistic “spells” of the church, such as holy communion, in which she is partaking. Immediately before Jonathan and Mina drink from the communion chalice, a second shot of Dracula is given in which he declares: “I condemn you to living death, to eternal hunger for living blood!” While Jonathan and Mina enjoy a long and lingering first kiss as a wedded couple, we see Dracula, in the form of a ravenous wolf, attack Lucy as she lies seductively awaiting the Count’s violation in her bed. Her death at the hands of the blood-thirsty Count Dracula is graphically illustrated by a deluge of blood splashing upon her bed (a scene which is brilliantly parodied in Mel Brooks’s spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It [1995] in which Professor Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker attempt to “stake” the vampiric Lucy). One of the most celebrated images within Bram Stoker’s novel involves Dracula slitting open a vein within his breast and inviting Mina to drink from it. The eucharistic implications of the passage, which occurs within the novel in 21.363 (see above), are clear. The conversation between Dracula and Mina that precedes this blood-drinking demonstrates an intriguing reworking of several key theological ideas from the New Testament, including eternal life, death to self, and rebirth. Mina: I want to be what you are, see what you see, love what you love. Dracula: Mina, to walk with me you must die to your breathing life and be reborn to mine. Mina: You are my love, and my life. Always! Dracula: Then, I give you life eternal . . . everlasting love. The power of the storm and the beasts of the earth. Walk with me, to be my loving wife . . . forever. Mina: Yes! I will, yes. Dracula: (He caresses her, exposes her neck and inflicts the vampire’s bite.) I take you as my eternal bride. Mina: (Moans in ecstasy as he drinks from her neck.)

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Dracula: (Slitting open a vein over his heart and pulling Mina to it.) Mina, drink and join me in eternal life (Mina begins to drink and Dracula throws back his head in delight. Suddenly a look of dread covers over his face as he realizes the enormity of what Mina’s act might mean for her. He stops her drinking from his breast.) Dracula: No! I cannot let this be. Mina: Please, I don’t care! Make me yours! Dracula: You will be cursed, as I am, to walk in the shadow of death for all eternity. I love you too much to condemn you! Mina: (Pleading with him to allow her to continue.) Take me away from all this death! (Mina forces her way back onto his breast. Dracula yields and swoons in near orgasmic delight. He wraps his arms around her in an image of intimacy.)

The scene is certainly the most graphic use of the drinking of blood within the film. The dialogue is filled with language reminiscent of the New Testament descriptions of Christ’s sacrificial shedding of blood as commemorated in the sacrament of holy communion. Indeed, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Film and the Legend (1993), issued by Francis Ford Coppola and screenwriter James V. Hart to accompany the release of the film, the scene is even described as “The vampire wedding sacrament” (Coppola and Hart 1993: 135).41 As a result of having drunk blood from Dracula’s breast Mina falls increasingly under his spell. As Van Helsing says, “The vampire has baptized her with his own blood.” Van Helsing and his band of vampire hunters travel to Dracula’s home-country Romania, endeavouring to catch him before he is able to return to his castle and revive his waning energies. At one point the group divides into two, attempting to intercept Dracula’s ship before it arrives in port or, failing that, to catch him in the mountain passes near his castle. Van Helsing travels with Mina in a carriage while Harker, Holmwood, Seward and Morris all travel by train and horseback. As Van Helsing and Mina draw near to the Count’s castle Mina becomes increasingly under the influence of the Count and at one point attempts to seduce Van Helsing by using her vampiric powers. She very nearly manages to bite him on the neck, but he is able to fend her off with the aid of a communion host which he thrusts against her forehead. The host sears her flesh and she falls backward, her forehead bearing a scarlet brand.42 Mina’s brand is prominently seen on her forehead until the final scenes in the chapel of the castle. The chapel offers a fitting setting for the conclusion of the film in that it was here that Dracula, outraged by the treatment of his beloved wife Elizabeta, stabbed his sword into the central crucifix and drank blood from the communion chalice (see above). The monster Dracula has been mortally wounded in his fight with Van Helsing and his band; his throat is cut and he has Quincey Morris’s Bowie knife embedded in his chest. He is allowed by the vampire hunter to retreat with Mina to the chapel; the vampire hunters suspect that their work is over and that something decisive is about to happen. In this final sequence of the film, where Mina and Dracula lie together in the chapel of the castle in Transylvania, there is an interesting T h e scene has long been a controversial one within the various theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Stoker’s Dracula. For example, the version by playwright Charles Morrell, which had a brief run in 1927 at the Royal Court Theatre in Warrington, was the object of official censure. The British censor, the Lord Chamberlain, objected to both the breast drinking scene and one in which Mina is branded on the head by a communion wafer. These were deemed to be blasphemous. See Skal (1990: 77) for details. Occasionally modem Dracula films include a version of the scene within their story-line. A case in point is The Hammer Studio production entitled Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966), directed by Terence Fisher. 42 In Stoker’s novel the branding of Mina’s forehead by Van Helsing takes place much earlier, just prior to the cleansing of Dracula’s Carfax lair (Dracula 22.381). 41

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combination of two of Jesus’ sayings from the cross. Dracula lies prostrate on the chapel floor, mortally wounded, and laments to Mina, “Where is my God? He has forsaken me! It is finished!” These words allude to the words of Jesus from the cross recorded in Mt. 27.46/Mk 15.34 (“My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?”) and Jn 19.30 (“It is finished!”). The overall effect of this is to transform Dracula into something of a Christ-figure, one who has to undergo the abuse and misunderstanding of his fellow creatures as well as rejection by God. This he willingly accepts out of love, for Mina. Mina, for her part, demonstrates her love for him. She professes her love, kissing his blood-stained mouth gently. Her voice-over explains: “There in the presence of God, I understood at last how my love could release us all from the powers of darkness. Our love is stronger than death.” We see a brief shot of the central crucifix, in which the stab wound inflicted by Prince Vlad four centuries before is miraculously sealed. The monster is then suffused with a divine light from above and is changed in appearance back to the Prince Vlad we saw in the beginning of the film. He begs Mina to give him peace and she forces the Bowie knife through his heart. As he dies, the scarlet brand she bears on her forehead disappears in a puff of smoke. Whatever else we might say about the way in which Francis Ford Coppola’s film interprets the novel by Bram Stoker, whether we would choose to describe it as a creative adaptation of the book or as a seriously misguided reading of the work, it is clear that communion imagery has an important role to play in the film. Yet, the haunting thing about James V. Hart’s screenplay is that it manages to build a consistent portrayal of Dracula as a man who has been forced to renounce the one thing that he held dear (the church and the cross of Christ) because of the all-consuming love that he has for another thing he holds dear (his wife Elizabeta and her reincarnation in the form of Mina).

b. The Lost Boys (1987) Joel Schumacher’s horror comedy The Lost Boys (1987) offers a vision of contemporary vampirism set in the picturesque coastal resort town of Santa Carla in California.43 The film stars Kiefer Sutherland in the role of a vampire named David, and has become something of a cultclassic, particularly with teenage audiences who respond to the occultic theme, punctuated as it is by a pulsing rock soundtrack. The film is clearly aimed at a younger audience, with the film’s promotional poster brashly declaring, “Sleep all day, party all night. It’s fun to be a vampire.”44 David is the leader of a group of vampires who terrorize Santa Carla, killing its inhabitants and visitors to the town at will in order to satisfy their need for blood. He invites a recent arrival to the town, a young man named Michael (played by heart-throb Jason Patric), to join the group. This invitation is formalized by drinking from an ornate, bejewelled wine bottle, the content of which (Michael is warned) is blood. In effect, drinking from this bottle of blood turns Michael into a vampire; drinking of the blood is the sacramental rite of passage to a new way of life for him, the means whereby he joins the vampire community.45 As one of the other vampires says to him after Michael has drunk from the bottle and is brought thereby to a near trance-like state, “You are one of us, Bud!” The rest of the film is given over to an exploration of how the initiate vampire Michael deals with his status as a vampire. In short, he is both attracted to T h e film was actually shot in the real resort town of Santa Cruz. Latham (1997) discusses the vision of a consumer youth-culture which is portrayed within the film. 45 Zanger (1997: 18) notes that one significant change in modem presentations of vampires is that the “new” vampire tends to live in communal settings. 43 44

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and repulsed by it. Catering to a younger audience, the film plays with many themes associated with teenage angst, including the pressures of a sex-crazed pubescence and the attempts to find identity within a like-minded peer group. Somewhat in keeping with the sexual imagery central to Stoker’s original novel, there is an equation of the losing of one’s sexual virginity with the making of a “first kill” as a vampire, something which Michael barely manages to avoid in the end.46 Although the film certainly panders to what might be described as the baser instincts of human beings, it nevertheless does explore the idea of the “drinking of blood” in a highly original fashion. In this sense, The Lost Boys is an intriguing example of how the sacramental element of Dracula mythology, most notably the drinking of blood, in mock imitation of the Christian celebration of the eucharist, is portrayed by a modern film maker. Direct reliance upon the New Testament testimony concerning the Last Supper is certainly not overt; indeed it could be said to be subliminal at best, but it seems (arguably) to me to be present nonetheless. Such is the degree to which communion imagery has powerfully, but subtly, influenced our contemporary world.

c. The Omega Man (1971) Finally, I turn to consider one of the most interesting cinematic interpretations of the Dracula myth. This is a science-fiction film which has included the idea of blood-sacrifice, and the salvation that it brings, as a prominent motif within it. Boris Sagal’s film from 1971 entitled The Omega Man starred Charlton Heston in one of his most mesmerizing roles.47 This is a highly original adaptation of the ground-breaking novel by Richard Matheson entitled I Am Legend (first published in 1954).48 Matheson’s novel is clearly an updating of the Dracula story in that it is set in 1976–79 and chronicles the life of a man named Robert Neville who lives in a small town which is overrun with vampires. Everyone in the town, indeed, everyone in the world (as far as Neville is aware), has been infected with a bacterium that lives in the blood-stream and causes a vampire-like condition. Neville is unaffected by the vampire plague, perhaps because he was once bitten by a vampire bat and his blood developed antibodies to the disease. Neville lives a haunted and lonely existence, his wife and daughter having fallen victim to the disease some months before. He has turned his house into a fortress and he defends himself against the nightly attacks of the vampires who want to kill him. During the day, when the vampires are sleeping, Neville hunts them down, dispatching them with wooden stakes. In short, many of the basic elements of the Dracula mythology are included within Matheson’s story, with the highly creative addition that vampirism is given a quasi-scientific explanation. In Boris Sagal’s film this scientific element is taken even further and is mixed with a political scenario to give it even greater plausibility. The setting for the film is the city of Los Angeles in the late 1970s, which allows for a powerful irony to be explored. Here we are presented with the tale of the survival of an individual in the midst of a modern city that has been all but emptied by Nixon (1997: 119-28) discusses the portrayal of sexuality offered within the film. Sadly, the temperamental Sagal was killed some years later while working on another film. He accidentally stepped into the whirling rear-rotor blades of a helicopter after disembarking from it. See Heston (1995: 44243) for details. 48 T h is is not the first time that Matheson’s novel was adapted for the cinema. A version was made in 1964, directed by Sidney Salkow, entitled The Last Man on Earth which starred Vincent Price. The has been enormously influential among horror writers, as Stephen King testifies: “Richard Matheson is the guy who taught me what I’m doing. When I read I Am Legend I realized that horror . . . could appear in the suburbs, on the street, or even in the house next door” (cited on the back cover of a four-part graphic comic-book adaptation of the novel adapted by Steve Niles and illustrated by Elman Brown, published in Forestville, California by Eclipse Books in 1991). 46 47

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the techniques of modern warfare. The basic story-line of Matheson’s novel is followed, wherein the central character conducts a campaign during the daylight hours against those who would destroy him at night. Yet there are also significant differences from Matheson’s original novel. In The Omega Man humankind is afflicted not with vampirism as such, but with a plague arising out of a conflict between China and Russia in which biological weapons of mass destruction were used. The plague is invariably fatal, causing those infected to break out in boils, become albino-like in appearance and to develop an extreme sensitivity to light. Everyone succumbs to the plague in the end, although some do so more rapidly than others. Those afflicted with the plague live out the rest of their days with the spectre of death hounding them. They are led by Brother Matthias (brilliantly played by the character actor Anthony Zerbe) who has attempted to re-organize society by rejecting everything associated with the technological world which brought destruction to the human race. Members of “The Family” wear black hooded robes, and give the appearance of belonging to a monastic order. Charlton Heston plays Colonel Robert Neville, a military scientist who was working on an experimental vaccine to combat the plague. He is involved in a helicopter crash (his pilot falls victim to the plague) but manages to inject himself with the vaccine just prior to passing out after the crash. This renders him immune to the effects of the plague and sets the stage for him being the redemptive agent against it. Neville’s antibody-charged blood carries within it the hopes of an ever-dwindling number of humans who (so far!) have managed to survive the ravages of the plague. In this respect he may be regarded as something of a Christ-figure. Indeed, there are several scenes within the film which support just such an interpretation. Two short examples will serve to illustrate the essential point. First, we note an exchange of dialogue between Robert Neville, Lisa, a young black woman whom he discovers one day during the daylight hours in a department store, and Dutch, a promising medical student who is the intellectual heart of the small group of people, mostly children, not yet fatally affected by the plague. They are all concerned that the younger brother of Lisa, whose name is Richie, is in danger of falling victim to the plague. Richie clearly has been infected and the immunity of Neville’s blood becomes a critical issue as they discuss the fate of the young boy: Neville: I don’t have it! Lisa: Have what? Neville: The plague! I’m immune. Dutch: Everybody has it! Neville: Everybody but me! There was a vaccine, just an experimental batch. We weren’t sure it would work. Dutch: Why, if you’re immune, you could . . . Neville: That’s right! My blood might be a serum. The stage that boy’s in, my antibodies could reverse the whole process. Stop it! Dutch: Christ, you could save the world! Lisa: Screw the world, let’s save Richie!

Dutch’s remark about Christ is, of course, not intended as a theological statement; rather it is uttered as a mild swear word prompted by the enormity of what Neville has revealed about his own blood. Yet, the irony of Dutch’s declaration is not to be missed: there is a sense in which Neville (the new Christ) could save the world, or at least what is left of it. Indeed, one of the children, sensing the importance of what Neville is attempting to do in curing Richie, asks him, “Are you God?” He does not answer her question directly, although the theological implication of

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it is left for the audience to contemplate. Neville goes about the business of offering transfusions of his blood to Richie, which eventually cure him of the disease. The second scene is much more involved and demonstrates the rich religious symbolism of the film. On the strength of the success of the blood transfusions with Richie, Neville decides to use his blood to create a serum that can be used to cure Lisa, Dutch and the other members of their group. The famous line from Stoker’s Dracula, that “the blood is the life!” is here powerfully expressed, and Neville fills a transfusion bottle with his blood serum, declaring it to be “genuine, 160-proof old Anglo-Saxon.” The bottle of blood figures in the final scenes of the film in which Neville is attacked by Matthias and other members of “The Family” in his penthouse fortress. He manages to rescue the bottle of blood serum from the refrigerator in his laboratory and escapes from the building with Lisa. Unfortunately, Lisa has “turned” and is beginning to show physical signs of the ravages of the plague; her hair has become white and she wears sunglasses to protect her light-sensitive eyes. Neville and Lisa retreat to the front of the building where there is a large fountain bathed in the spotlights of the now-compromised penthouse fortress. Matthias appears above on the balcony of Neville’s apartment beckoning Lisa to return to him and “The Family.” He hurls a spear at Neville down below, striking him in the chest. Neville falls backward into the fountain, struggling to remove the protruding spear. He manages to remove it and pull himself to a standing position, leaning heavily on an ornament at the centre of the fountain, but he is fatally wounded. A few minutes later Dutch arrives in a truck with the small group of surviving children. Neville pulls the bottle of blood serum out from beneath his shirt and passes it on to Dutch before slumping against an ornament in the centre of the fountain. The final scene shows Neville in what can only be described as a crucifixion pose, arms outstretched, head bowed. He has died, but not before providing a way of salvation through his blood. The water in the fountain is red, coloured by the blood of the Christ-like Neville. This closing scene offers a striking visual representation of the fountain image from Zech. 13.1, which I noted at the beginning of the study was so influential in the work of William Cowper. Here there is indeed “a fountain filled with blood,” and while the blood may not have been “drawn from Immanuel’s veins,” it certainly comes from an all-too-human saviour figure, albeit an unlikely one, Robert Neville.49

4.  Summary I began this study by noting the place that eucharistic imagery has within the Pauline letters, particularly as an expression of the apostle’s teaching concerning the reconciliation brought about by the shedding of Jesus Christ’s blood on the cross. The use of the cup of wine as a metaphor for “the new covenant in Jesus’ blood” was highlighted as an illustration of the importance that eucharistic imagery has in Paul’s thought. I then recorded the extensive use that Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula makes of such imagery, with the author creatively interweaving it with allusions to biblical themes and stories in the novel. These all help to illustrate how theologically profound a book Dracula really is. In particular, I noted that communion hosts served as one of the primary weapons used against Heston (1995: 443-44) briefly discusses the Christ analogy of the film. Interestingly, he notes that Warners, the film studio, altered the end of the film, dropping a scene which could be interpreted as a version of the Gospel story of the women at the tomb of Christ. Heston relates: “[Warners] asked us to cut a very short, silent scene I was sorry to lose: a ten-year-old girl bicycles up during the safe daylight hours to the fortified building where I live, leaves on the doorstep an offering of a few wilted flowers and some fruit, and pedals away. Even with the scene gone, I’m surprised at how often people mention the Christ analogy in the film.”

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the evil Count Dracula by his arch-rival, the vampire-hunter Van Helsing. I also noted how the idea of drinking blood builds upon the eucharistic texts of the New Testament and transforms such ritual drinking into a demonic perversion of the Christian sacrament. This is seen not only through Dracula’s drinking of the blood of his various victims, but also in the Prince’s invitation that Mina Murray drink blood from his breast and thereby become united with him in a sacred pact. Finally, I discussed three cinematic interpretations of the Dracula story, especially calling attention to the ways in which they made use of the shedding of blood and related eucharistic imagery within their retelling of the vampire myth. No doubt the infinite adaptability of the Dracula myth, together with the sexual innuendo which lies just beneath the surface of the neckbiting and blood-sucking, means that film-makers will continue to find it to be a vein which is worth further exploration (and exploitation!).

Part III

Cultural Studies and the Bible Cultural Studies Motifs and Methods Explored through the Bible If the previous section explored Bible in culture, these chapters examine the Bible and or as culture. Noticing where Bible appears in culture and probing the implications of that appearance upon popular interpretation or cultural trend have, as has been noted earlier, become increasingly recognized as properly within the realm of biblical studies and the expertise of biblical scholars. Such work, again as noted, is frequently associated with reception criticism. Less attended, however, has been scholarship that looked at the Bible via the insights derived from structural discoveries enabled by cultural studies. The chapters selected for this section are notable entries for that conversation. While potential places for analysis of this type of disciplinary intersection are myriad, the following three are particularly helpful (and would readily fall within the area of biblical studies known as “social scientific critique”). First, after a study of cultural studies insights regarding cultural organization, hegemony, and how social systems “work” via culture, scholars can turn to biblical text, noting the way its contents, collection, and dissemination reflect those structures and mechanisms. Such readings might look, for example, at the role of the Bible in the construction of appropriate gender roles and sexual expression (or how the text of the Bible reflects those of its own day—either in perpetuation or in nuance). Second, scholars can note the effects of culture upon the contents, composition, collection, or dissemination of the Bible. The Bible is an anthology. It is a compilation of writings composed over hundreds of years, in different nations, in varied languages, and it offers rich potential for cultural analysis of the same. Such a reading might, for example, expand traditional sourcecritical arguments for the composition of the Pentateuch by inquiry into how Deuteronomic or Priestly sources reflect ancient hierarchies and methods of control, or note how the subtle changes within synoptic texts reflect the cultural location of their authors. More directly, scholars can attune to the way biblical writers (or translators) reflect cultural structures of their day— whether pop culture (such as allusion to popular games or theater), cultural expectations (such as the description of “proper” gender roles), adaptation of other elements of culture (such as the adaptation of ANE literature and myth), or even more ethereal and structural dynamics (such as how the Bible reflects systems of hierarchy and control). Scholars might also attend to the same

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features in later interpreters or scholars (perhaps noting the differential between ancient and more modern, or noting how later culture or cultural structures have affected how interpreters understood their documents). Finally, as a third lens, one might readily examine the Bible itself as a product of culture. The question of what, actually, a Bible is can be trickier than is often imagined. Must a Bible be legible to be a Bible? Is it a symbol or marker of identity—in the same way it is often appealed to as an authority for identity? Does it matter how a Bible looks? Can a Bible be circulated with different contents and still be a Bible? For example, are psalters a Bible? Different confessional communities can have slightly different books in their Bible—different canons, different orders. Are these all equally “Bibles?” Are books with substantial annotation, cross-references, or particular market niches “Bibles,” and, if so, in what ways are these added elements engaging biblical content? The Bible has had a significant effect on the culture of the United States. For example, the Bible was influential in pre-Civil War debates regarding slavery. Both Abolitionists and supporters of slavery appealed to the Bible. Jennifer Glancey traces this division in the lead chapter in this section, “House Readings and Field Readings: The Discourse of Slavery and Biblical/Cultural Studies.” As she explores, the Bible has continued to shape US systems of alterity, and these divisions emerge in scholarship in parallel to culture. The Bible is, itself, a product of culture, and very much mass culture. Various aspects of this are explored in “The Bible John Murders and Media Discourse, 1969–96” by William T. Scott, and “The World’s Largest Ten Commandments” by Tim Beal. As Beal explicitly argues (and implicit in Scott’s review), in the United States, the devotion to the Bible often outstrips its actual reading; more people revere the Bible than actually read it (and among those who read it, few read all of it). Indeed, it is very much the case that devotion to devotion to the Bible often outpaces actual interest in the Bible’s content. Barry Matlock and Hugh Pyper use biblical scholarship (and the composition and collection of the Bible) as models for understanding cultural studies themes in “Almost Cultural Studies? Reflections on the ‘New Perspective’ on Paul” and “The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetis.” The latter is a particularly intriguing chapter, where Pyper anticipates shifts to posthumanism and new materialism (the subject of our Part V to follow).

Annotated Bibliography: Further Readings Baden, Joel and Candida Moss. Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby-Lobby. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. This volume focuses on the Green family of Oklahoma (the owners of the highly successful craft supply chain of Hobby Lobby). It follows both their (successful) suit for religious exemption to the Affordable Care Act (deigning to pay for various reproductive choice treatments) and their collection of rare Bible manuscripts. The volume explores how the Bible, itself, has become a symbol for political and community identity. Beal, Timothy K. Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, Strange and the Substance of Faith. Boston, MA: Beacon Hill, 2005. Beal’s book examines the way the Bible has become an integral part of folk/outsider art and practice via the device of a road tour to visit several Bible-themed roadside attractions in (largely) rural America. Readers will also enjoy Beal’s later work, The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book (New York: Mariner Books, 2011), which examines the Bible’s role as a cultural icon and identity symbol in US popular and political culture.

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Berlinerblau, Jacques. Thumpin’ It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today’s Presidential Politics. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. The Washington, DC, based Jacques Berlinerblau holds elite degrees in both biblical literature and sociology. In this book, he turns those skills to examine the use of the Bible in US political rhetoric, wryly observing its use to appeal to mass support and political allegiance. Though not specifically addressing Bible and cultural studies, per se, interested readers will also find much to consider in his earlier book, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Crossley, James. Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism: Quests, Scholarship and Ideology. New York: Routledge, 2014. In this book (as well as his later work, Cults, Martyrs & Good Samaritans: Religion in Contemporary English Political Discourse [London: Pluto, 2018]), Crossley examines the use of the Bible in UK political discourse—particularly in appeals for and against liberal parties and in support of Brexit initiatives. Edwards, Katie, ed. Rethinking Biblical Literacy. London: T & T Clark, 2015. Scholars of the Bible, as well as many faith leaders, have long lamented the decline of biblical literacy. Edwards’s volume interrogates this claim, noting that the Bible remains among the most widely read volumes in print, and even casual (or non) readers are acquainted with its basic characters and stories far more deeply than they are with other books. The chapters in this volume challenge the assumption of “ignorant” or illiterate masses, rooting their challenge in cultural studies sympathetic models of fusion for “high” and “mass” culture and knowledge. The chapters also offer a wealth of insight into the role of the Bible in culture, as well as the Bible’s role as a cultural product. Elliott, Scott and Roland Boer, eds. Ideology Culture and Translation. SemeiaSt, 69. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012. This excellent collection examines the way culture conditions reader expectations of Bible “translation” (including the adaptation of the Bible into other media venues such as film), revealing the hegemonic structures and cultural allegiances embedded in the process. Hicks-Keeton, Jill and Cavan Concannon, eds. The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction. New York: Lexington Books / Fortress Academic Press, 2019. This volume collects scholarly reactions to the Washington, DC, based Museum of the Bible. The chapters interrogate claims that the museum is ideology-neutral and explore the ways the Bible is used to form communities and identities in many US circles, and how these formations are, themselves, often presented as objective and neutral “scholarly” presentations. As such, it both explores the Bible as a cultural item and challenges assertions that there is a sharp division between “professional” or “objective” reading and “popular” or invested Bible-reading. Runions, Erin. Changing Subjects: Gender, Nation and Future in Micah. Playing the Texts, 7. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002. Erin Runions’s work is, on the whole, simply brilliant and often years ahead of other biblical studies discourse. Her work on Bible and cultural studies consistently not only pushes critical edges (she was among the first biblical studies scholars to note the potential of posthuman and affect approaches, which is discussed in Part V) but also returns to questions of the Bible, itself, as a culturally created product (particularly in the way the matrix of “meaning” and interpretation lay atop biblical text, mediating its encounter with readers). Readers should also consider her The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex and Sovereignty (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). Sawyer, John F. A., ed. The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture. New York: Blackwell, 2006. This collection, edited by Sawyer, is among the strongest set of chapters yet collected with regard to integration of critical theory and cultural studies. The topics surveyed consistently close the loop of inquiry, not only noting the Bible’s use in popular culture but also returning to the question of how that cultural engagement is transforming and redefining “Bible” itself.

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Setzer, Claudia and David A. Shefferman, eds. The Bible in the American Experience. The BibRec, 2. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2020. This volume of collected chapters traces the use and integration of the Bible into US history, literature, art, and identity, with chapters ranging in focus from colonial documents to digital media. It is also an early item in the new series The Bible and Its Reception published by the Society of Biblical Literature, noting how Bible and cultural studies, particularly as mediated via reception criticism, has matured in the field.

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House Readings and Field Readings The Discourse of Slavery and Biblical/Cultural Studies Jennifer A. Glancy

A headline in The New York Times, 10 May 1996: “Bible Backed Slavery, Says a Lawmaker.” In the context of a debate over whether the Confederate flag should fly over the Alabama State Capitol, a first-term Republican State Senator named Charles Davidson wrote a speech defending the institution of slavery. According to Davidson, “white, black, Hispanic and Indian slave owners” loved and cared for their slaves, who were the ultimate beneficiaries of the slave system. In addition, Davidson revived the argument that the Bible vindicated slavery; his textual allusions included Lev. 25.44 and 1 Tim. 6.1. “The issue is not race,” he said. “It’s Southern heritage. I’m on a one-man crusade to get the truth out about what our Southern heritage is all about.” Martha Foy, representing the Republican National Committee, expressed her “shock” at Davidson’s speech. The measure to approve official display of the Confederate flag was tabled, thus precluding Davidson from actually delivering his speech.1 Criticism over Davidson’s role in the incident caused him to drop out of a race for the US House of Representatives.2 This brief news item serves as a catalyst in my thinking about the convergence of biblical and cultural studies. Drawing on the political appropriation of biblical texts pertaining to slavery, this article considers two articulations of the conjuncture of biblical and cultural studies. The first approach follows the mandate of cultural studies to take the panoply of cultural productions as its subject matter, whether those productions are artistic, mercantile, pious, or, as in this case, political.3 (These are not, of course, mutually exclusive categories.) Interpretation is political. This is true of all interpretation, regardless of its location: classroom, conference, journal. At least in the United States, however, biblical interpretation remains political in another, more overt sense. The Bible is a cultural icon, and both major political parties remain publicly deferential to biblical authority. As biblical and cultural studies converge, the function of the Bible in constructing and maintaining ideologies dominant in the US today emerges as an important area of investigation. The second articulation of the conjuncture of biblical and cultural studies that I will consider is the movement to include a wider range of voices in the academic conversation of biblical studies. This movement acknowledges that, within the academy, a disparate if “Bible Backed Slavery, Says a Lawmaker,” The New York Times (10 May 1996, A20), column 4. “Ala. State Sen. Forced to Quit U.S. House Race After Defending Slavery,” Jet 90 (27 May 1996), p. 4. While some formulations of cultural studies focus on popular culture, to delimit the scope of inquiry in this way is to “repeat and reproduce the boundary between high and popular culture” (Antony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies [London: Routledge, 1991], p. 108). See also the treatment of “culture” in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 76–82.

1 2 3

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intersecting set of social locations informs and influences the readings of biblical scholars; it also acknowledges the legitimacy of readings and ways of reading of those who are not members of the guild of biblical scholars. Recent works by Fernando Segovia and Daniel Patte exemplify this trend within the field of biblical studies. I will argue that political readings of the biblical discourse on slavery point to some useful limits on the celebration of polyphonic hermeneutics.

House Readings Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be blasphemed. Those who have believing masters must not be disrespectful to them on the ground that they are members of the church; rather they must serve them all the more, since those who benefit by their service are believers and beloved. Teach and urge these duties . . . (1 Tim. 6.1–2, NRSV)

A state legislator in Alabama plans to give a speech defending the tradition of slavery in the American South, highlighting what he claims is biblical support for the institution of bond labor. When The New York Times picks up the story, the headline is not “Contemporary Legislator Dares to Defend Slavery,” nor is it “Lawmaker Cites Bible in Political Debate.” Rather, the headline focuses on the legislator’s assertion that the “Bible backed slavery.” What is newsworthy here? Does The Times really dispute Senator Davidson’s claim that a variety of biblical texts in some sense “back slavery”? What would constitute a “good” reading of 1 Tim. 6.1–2? As I read this brief news item, I try to reconstruct its implicit logic: 1. the Bible is normative for those of the Judeo-Christian tradition, perhaps even infallible; 2. slavery is wrong; 3. therefore, the Bible cannot “back” slavery. This logic is familiar to me from my own classroom. In a seminar I have taught on slavery and Christianity, many students cannot accept that the Bible (for them, a univocal and relatively uncomplicated text) tolerates slavery. Therefore, they are willing to argue, the text must mean something other than what it obviously says. We could try to reconstruct some other underlying logic to the story in The Times. For example: 1. the Bible supports slavery; 2. slavery is wrong and offends against US democratic ideals; 3. we reject the Bible as a political guide. In such a case, we would anticipate a headline focusing on the anomaly of an elected official citing the Bible in political debate. However, to challenge biblical authority is dangerous today in American politics. One may quibble with particular readings of the Bible, but in the context of political discourse, a more general rejection of biblical authority is not a viable option. While I cannot share the surprise implicit in The Times’s headline over the assertion that biblical authority supported slavery, neither do I share Senator Davidson’s hermeneutical

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perspective. Meaning is use, according to Wittgenstein’s dictum,4 and Davidson’s interpretation of biblical teaching about slavery is inseparable from its use justifying the degradation of human beings in slavery. In the course of a discussion of the scope of cultural studies, Raymond Williams writes that we “cannot understand an intellectual or artistic project without also understanding its formation; that the relation between a project and a formation is always decisive.”5 Davidson tells us that his motivation for revisiting the issue of slavery is his one-man mission to convey “the truth” about “our Southern heritage.” Consideration of that context may help us, then, as we assess Davidson’s biblical interpretation. Davidson denies that race motivates his defense of Southern heritage, but at the same time he trivializes the violence African-Americans experienced under slavery with an allegation that contemporary housing projects stand witness to a hundred times the rates of rape and murder as were present in slavery. (Aside from methodological questions about Davidson’s cliometrics, one notices that Davidson seems to be able to conceive of persons of African descent living only in slavery or in housing projects.) As Ronald Reagan once said, in his youth there was no race problem. The nexus of Davidson’s racism and his interpretation of biblical texts as justification of American slavery should alert us to the more fundamental problem of the role of biblical allusion and authority in political discourse. After all, Davidson argues not only that the Bible approved of slavery in the ancient world; he extends that to an argument that the Bible therefore legitimates slavery in later and radically different historical circumstances. Davidson claims that those who find the legacy of American slavery morally reprehensible “are obviously bitter and hateful against God and his word, because they reject what God says and embrace what mere humans say concerning slavery.”6 Biblical slavery is an embarrassment to many who claim the Bible as a normative text or collection. Davidson cites 1 Tim. 6.1–2, one of a number of passages in deutero-Pauline letters that direct slaves to submit themselves to their masters (Eph. 6.5–8; Col. 3.22–25; Tit. 2.9–10; see also 1 Pet. 2.18–25). Some commentators displace the difficulties of these passages by explaining them on the basis of Greco-Roman literary prototypes. In the Hermeneia commentary on Colossians, for example, Eduard Lohse writes, “These rules for the household are not, insofar as their content is considered, ‘a genuinely Christian creation’ and thus they cannot, without further ado, be considered to be ‘applied kerygma.’”7 Alternatively, or additionally, commentators imply that the authors of the deutero-Pauline epistles had no choice but to advocate submission to the authority of slaveowners. Ralph P. Martin writes of Col. 3.22–25: If this tone of advice seems pedestrian and accommodating, we should respect the limitations of what could be said in urging both slaves and owners to maintain the social order. The incitement to revolt would have been suicidal, as the earlier slave uprisings, led by Spartacus in 73–71 BCE, had shown.8 “[T]he meaning of a word is its use in language” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [trans. G.E.M. Anscombe; New York: Macmillan, 3rd edn, 1968], p. 20). See also Frank P. Ramsey, Philosophical Papers (ed. D.H. Mellor; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): “[T]he meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead . . .” (p. 51). Wittgenstein names Ramsey (who died in 1930) as one of the two greatest influences on his abandonment of the project of the Tractatus. 5 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 1989), p. 151. 6 “Ala. State Sen.,” p. 4. 7 Eduard Lohse, Colossians and Philemon: A Commentary on the Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), pp. 154–55 n. 4. Material in quotation marks attributed to Karl Heinrich Rengstorf. 8 Ralph P. Martin, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon (Interpretation; Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1991), pp. 128–29. 4

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Martin does not consider the possibility that the author of Colossians could simply avoid the question of slaves’ obligations to masters, or that there could be alternatives to submission other than revolt. Perhaps more striking from a theological perspective is his repudiation of the possibility that a Christian author could or should give “suicidal” advice. From a certain perspective, Jesus’ injunction to his followers to take up their crosses is an invitation to suicide, as is the glorification of martyrdom throughout the book of Revelation.9 Despite the tension biblical scholars exhibit when they turn to the slavery passages of the deutero-Pauline epistles, however, their interpretations of these writings support the contention that, in some sense, the Bible backs slavery.10 In the nineteenth-century debate over the abolition of slavery in the US, both proslavery and antislavery forces invoked biblical authority to bolster their causes. Proslavery forces relied on direct exegesis of particular passages; antislavery forces avoided discussion of particular texts and cited instead general underlying truths that they found in their reading of Scripture.11 Certain claims of the proslavery forces were hermeneutically egregious, especially their claim that Africans are cursed descendants of either Cain or Ham. Thornton Stringfellow, a Baptist minister from Virginia, cited Gen. 9.25–27 as he claimed, “Here, language is used, showing the favor which God would exercise to the posterity of Shem and Japheth, while they were holding the posterity of Ham in a state of abject bondage” (emphasis in original).12 Other than this notorious hypothesis situating the enslavement of Africans in an ancient curse, the proslavery forces were in fact able to marshal a range of textual evidence to support their claim that the Bible was tolerant of slavery, and even supported the institution. In debates with abolitionists, proslavery clerics would quote chapter and verse from both Old and New Testaments, and challenge their opponents to quote even a single biblical verse that referred to slavery that unequivocally condemned the institution. Abolitionists regularly bypassed this challenge. Eugene D. Genovese, who has written extensively on the slave system of the American South, writes of the hermeneutical debate: Regrettably, such formidable southern theologians . . . sustained themselves in scriptural exegesis with the abolitionists. Orthodox theologians demonstrated that neither the Old nor the New Testament condemned slavery as sinful. The abolitionists, displaying no small amount of intellectual dishonesty, never succeeded in making the Word say what they said it See Tina Pippin, Death and Desire: The Rhetoric of Gender in the Apocalypse of John (Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1992). 10 Louis Montrose suggests that “new historicism” tends to focus on the cultural politics of the past, while “cultural criticism” tends to focus on contemporary cultural politics. Thus, a new historicist writing about Shakespeare would write about cultural issues in Elizabethan England, while a cultural critic would write about the uses of Shakespeare today. It seems to me that whatever boundary exists between new historicism and cultural studies is a permeable one, although I also think the question of this boundary deserves further consideration by biblical critics interested in either the new historicism or cultural studies. The present article focuses on modern uses of the discourse of biblical slavery, but I think it could be within the purview of cultural studies to consider the cultural production of those texts, as well as their cultural implications in the ancient world. See Louis Montrose, “New Historicism,” in Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (eds.), Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (New York: MLA, 1992), pp. 392–418. For a relevant example of the usefulness of cultural studies in the analysis of historical instances of cultural change, see Homi K. Bhaba’s discussion of the obstacles encountered by missionaries in India when they tried to preach the gospel, in Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 33–34. 11 Larry R. Morrison, “The Religious Defense of American Slavery before 1830,” Journal of Religious Thought 37 (1980), pp. 16–29; John. R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 30–31. 12 T h ornton Stringfellow, “A Scriptural View of Slavery,” reprinted in Eric L. McKitrick (ed.), Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 86–98, esp. pp. 86–87. 9

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did, and eventually they had to spurn the Word for the Spirit. In consequence, they virtually reduced the Holy Spirit to the spirit (the conscience) of individuals. I do not say that an antislavery Christian theology remains an impossibility . . . But as a historian, I do insist that the abolitionists failed to construct one . . .13

Like Senator Davidson, Genovese concludes that the “Bible backed slavery.” Davidson’s biblical interpretation assumes the Bible’s normativity in moral and political discourse. Genovese, who is not tied to upholding the cultural authority of the Bible, identifies the biblical position on slavery as a flaw of Christianity. His evaluation of the quality of Christian debate over slavery in the nineteenth century points to the intellectual distortions that arise when the Bible dictates the parameters of cultural discourse: “Not always skillfully or even honestly, the abolitionists interpreted the Bible as antislavery, and we may thank God and the big battalions that, whatever their sins against intellectual integrity, they prevailed.”14 While antislavery forces questioned the use of the Bible by proslavery forces, they gave their consent to the authority of the same volume, locating the moral problem not in the Bible but in their opponents: “They have turned our Bible into a smith shop whence consecrated hands bring fetters for the feet and manacles for the mind. They make the Old and New Testament a pair of handcuffs; and the whole book a straight jacket for the soul!”15 Trapped within the debate, Christians who fought over the slavery question were unable to recognize that the Bible itself, or at least its use as an arbiter of cultural practice, was the source of ambivalence and embarrassment.16 Senator Davidson located his defense of slavery in the context of what he called a one-man crusade to disseminate the truth about Southern heritage. The narrative of a Southern heritage has been a deliberate fiction throughout the twentieth century. D.W. Griffiths’s Birth of a Nation supplied a genealogy for the Ku Klux Klan. Margaret Mitchell created a nostalgic plantation world where elderly servants were grateful to be in the presence of their owners; white men were too busy courting white women to rape black women. Gone with the Wind, along with other plantation epics, has perpetuated an image of genteel Southern life that generations of Americans (at least white Americans) have found both convincing and comforting. There are, however, other possible stories to tell about Southern history, from legends of slaves who organized slave revolts to biographies of the many Southerners (both white and black) who fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War. Davidson’s rhetorical claim that he is disseminating “the truth” about Southern heritage implies that Southern cultural traits pre-exist their representation.17 However, as Stuart Hall argues, cultural identities are constructed “within, not outside representation.” Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995), pp. 10–11. Genovese ranks among the most influential historians of slavery; for decades, an intellectual and political commitment to Marxism informed his work. The Southern Front represents a retreat from that commitment for reasons he confronts in an epilogue, where he attributes some measure of guilt for atrocities committed by socialist and communist regimes to American leftists. Readers of the volume may be surprised by the extent to which Genovese’s emotional reaction against his past informs the spirit of this work, especially in light of his vituperative attack on the expression of “feelings” in “objective” scholarly work (pp. 6–7). 14 Genovese, Southern Front, p. 131. 15 J. Blanchard and N.L. Rice, A Debate on Slavery: Held in the City of Cincinnati, on the First, Second, Third, and Sixth Days of October, 1845 (Cincinnati: Wm. H. Moore, 1846; repr.; Detroit: Negro History Press, n.d.). 16 T h is is not entirely true. The Garrisonian abolitionists challenged the infallibility of the Bible. However, to the extent to which the public perceived the Garrisonians as inimical to biblical authority, their influence was diminished. On the whole, more moderate antislavery rhetoric helped sway public opinion in the North against the institution of slavery. 17 Bhaba warns that the “representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition,” Location, p. 2. 13

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Though they seem to invoke an origin in a historical past with which they continue to correspond, actually identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not “who we are” or “where we come from,” so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves . . . not the so-called return to roots but a coming-to-terms with our “routes.”18

The fictive and poetic qualities of tradition and identity in no way lessen their effectiveness.19 Tradition, like the Bible, functions as part of the cultural apparatuses that sustain dominant ideologies in the US. Antonio Gramsci was instrumental in articulating the variety of ways that cultural forces (from the family to the arts) create a climate of consent that binds individuals and communities to a social order. Imprisoned by the Fascists in Italy, Gramsci studied the mechanisms by which political powers gain and reproduce their hegemony.20 For Gramsci, hegemony “is not limited to matters of political control but seeks to describe a more general predominance which includes, as one of its key features, a particular way of seeing the world and human nature and relationships.”21 Gramsci recognized that certain organs of the State exerted control by coercion—the police, say, or the military. However, he understood that the threat of coercion is more effective as a crisis tactic than as the ordinary apparatus of social control. He argued that State and civil society are inseparable, and that civil society exercises its control through a variety of cultural apparatuses that operate not through coercion but through consent. Families, religious bodies, the media, schools and other cultural institutions elaborate and reiterate a vision of society that advances the interests of dominant powers. Hegemonic thinking unites interests that would otherwise be at odds. Inasmuch as individuals and groups within society participate in this vision, civil society has managed to exert control without the overt exercise of violence.22 Working out of a Marxist background, Gramsci nonetheless emphasized the role of non-economic cultural forces in the ordering of society. He understood that hegemony was both an unstable and a conflictual achievement, always contested by emergent groups in society.23 Articulation of theory in Gramsci’s writings is inseparable from his investigations into Italian realities. He cannot describe the particular forms that hegemonic struggles will take in other historical and geographical circumstances; however, he does point to the real power that cultural productions and texts can exercise. The appropriation of the Bible in political discourse is a moment in a cultural struggle for hegemony—as is the invocation of regional tradition, or even a debate over whether the Confederate flag should fly over the statehouses of Southern Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs “Identity”?,” in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 1–17 (4). 19 By describing tradition and identity as “poetic,” I hope to imply that we are not simply handed our identities or traditions, but that in interesting ways we make them. 20 T h e standard collection of Gramsci’s writings in English remains the Selections from the Prison Notebooks (trans. Geoffrey N. Smith and Quintin Hoare; New York: International Publishers, 1971). As one might infer from the title, these writings are occasional and often fragmentary. 21 Summary of Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony in Williams, Keywords, p. 117. 22 Louis Althusser developed Gramsci’s ideas in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (trans. Ben Brewster; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–86. Although I have been influenced by Althusser, I find the larger framework of his thinking to be problematic, especially his ahistoricism and his faith in a clear division between ideology and science. For an accessible critique of Althusser, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 136–53. 23 For a helpful discussion of Gramsci’s continuing (or even increasing) significance for postmodern thought, see Marcia Landy, Film, Politics, and Gramsci (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 18

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capitals. Americans who may be utterly unacquainted with the Bible as text nonetheless consent in some vague way to its moral normativity. Senator Davidson’s reliance on the Bible to bolster his argument for the vindication of the institution of slavery illustrates the difficulty that arises in contesting the authority of ideological apparatuses. Davidson’s interpretation slips from the recognition that biblical texts do not challenge the institution of slavery in their own times to the implication that the Bible therefore legitimates slavery, and in an ahistorical manner. When the direct applicability of biblical teachings to today’s circumstances is assumed, interpreters are put in the awkward and disingenuous position of denying that the “Bible backed slavery.” What is at stake, however, is not a particular reading of the Bible on any single social issue, but the role of the Bible in ideological struggles in American political life. Davidson’s speech seemed to backfire, causing him to drop out of a race for the US House of Representatives. However, his campaign to spread the word of Southern heritage brought him 15 minutes of fame, which in turn allowed him to reach far more people with his ideas than he might have anticipated. Of greater relevance, by seeming to locate the moral problem solely in Davidson’s speech and not in the biblical texts he quoted, The New York Times illustrates the unimpeachable status of the Bible as a moral and cultural authority in the US today.

Field Readings Fernando Segovia and Daniel Patte have recently set forth theories of reading that focus on the interplay between the interpreter’s social location and his or her construction of meaning. Both theorists suggest that biblical critics need to honor the interpretations of “ordinary” readers as valid. Gramsci’s analysis of the role of intellectuals in cultural struggles for hegemony offers a framework in which to evaluate these recent forays by biblical critics into cultural studies. The discussion continues by considering Senator Davidson and his political reading of biblical slavery as an everyday intellectual offering an “ordinary” reading. In Gramsci’s formulation, the agents of cultural change are intellectuals. In the struggle for hegemony, intellectuals participate as cultural workers advancing the interests not only of the left but also of the right. His understanding of intellectuals is slippery, but several points are clear: 1. “All men are intellectuals . . . but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.” Each person “carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a ‘philosopher’, an artist . . . he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it.”24 2. Traditional intellectuals locate themselves in the historical lineage of intellectuals, and thereby disguise the nature of their ties to dominant powers in society. Intellectuals construct for themselves a “social utopia by which . . . [they] think of themselves as ‘independent’, autonomous, endowed with a character of their own, etc..”25 3. “Organic” intellectuals are those members of emergent social groups who help to articulate a conception of the world that reflects the group’s experience and helps the group to negotiate a position in society. Note: although Gramsci primarily linked organic intellectuals to economic classes, he understood that other cultural factors (such as regional location and urban or rural ties) shaped group affinities. Gramsci, Selections, p. 9. Gramsci, Selections, p. 8.

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Gramsci does not use “common sense” to refer to practical insights into everyday life. Rather, “common sense” refers to a person’s unreflective understanding of the world in which she or he lives. “Common sense” includes knowledge of tactics necessary to make one’s way through life; it also includes misconceptions, accretions from earlier cultural moments, subordination of original insights to hegemonic categories. Common sense is incoherent, reflecting piecemeal the ideas gleaned from participating in a variety of social and cultural environments. In other words, it is not reliable. But Gramsci’s claim that everyone is an intellectual, a philosopher, highlights his respect for common sense as the grounds of a more critical understanding of the world. Common sense contains much that is true, much that is useful. In order to help people understand their realities so that they can begin to shape them, Gramsci believes that education is necessary. But the starting point for such an education is common sense: In the teaching of philosophy which is aimed . . . at giving him [the student] a cultural formation and helping him to elaborate his own thought critically so as to be able to participate in an ideological and cultural community, it is necessary to take as one’s starting point what the student already knows . . . And since one presupposes a certain average cultural and intellectual level among the students, who in all probability have hitherto only acquired scattered and fragmentary bits of information and have no methodological and critical preparation, one cannot but start in the first place from common sense . . .26

In many ways this articulation of common sense serves as a positive introduction to the hermeneutical proposals advanced by Segovia and Patte. Gramsci acknowledges each person as an intellectual and a philosopher. Segovia states that for “cultural studies . . . all readers and critics are theologians,”27 while Patte focuses on the “legitimacy” of readings by ordinary readers. Gramsci writes, “In acquiring one’s conception of the world one always belongs to a particular grouping which is that of all the social elements which share the same mode of thinking and acting. We are all conformists of some conformism or other . . .”28 Likewise, Segovia and Patte emphasize that one’s social location and cultural attachments form the grounds of interpretive activity. Gramsci’s notion of common sense has a critical edge, however; common sense is as likely to lead a person to accept her circumstances as inevitable as it is to lead her see how to change those circumstances. For Gramsci, education is a necessary moment, helping everyday intellectuals become “organic intellectuals” who are able to articulate the interests of their social groupings and to make alliances with others in society who share common interests. Without this critical edge, deference to the productions of common sense would simply reify existing realities. Segovia sets forth an agenda for the conjuncture of biblical and cultural studies in his introductions to the first two (of a projected three) volumes of Reading from This Place.29 These volumes include the papers from two conferences held at Vanderbilt University that were coordinated by Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert. The volumes reflect the increasing diversity of social locations represented in the guild of biblical scholars, and highlight the influence of social

Gramsci, Selections, pp. 424–25. Fernando F. Segovia, “Cultural Studies and Contemporary Biblical Criticism,” in Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (eds.), Reading from This Place (2 vols.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), II, pp. 1–17, esp. p. 12. 28 Gramsci, Selections, p. 324. 29 Segovia and Tolbert (eds.), Reading from This Place. Volume 1 covers “Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States”; Volume 2 covers “Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective.” 26 27

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location on the interpretive process.30 Segovia’s understanding of cultural studies is consistent with a trend to equate cultural studies with the “theory and politics of identity and difference.”31 His essays situate the emergence of cultural studies in an overview of biblical studies in the late twentieth century. The story he tells is familiar: in the 1970s new movements in literary criticism and social scientific criticism began to displace, or at least compete with, historical criticism. These various critical movements share the myth of the disinterested reader who sets aside his or her particular concerns when interpreting the text; meaning is not contingent on the location of the interpreter. Against these movements Segovia sets cultural studies, “a joint critical study of texts and readers, perspectives and ideologies.”32 Segovia understands that readers read in all their historical specificity: “Different readers see themselves not only as using different interpretive models and reading strategies but also as reading in different ways in the light of the multilevel social groupings that they represent and to which they belong.”33 Furthermore, every interpretation, every historical reconstruction, is a construct reflecting the position of a flesh-and-blood reader. Meaning is situated in the interchange between “a socially and historically conditioned text and a socially and historically conditioned reader.”34 This understanding of meaning renders “the question of validity in interpretation as a problematic, since even the very criteria used for judgment and evaluation are seen . . . as themselves constructions on the part of real readers and hence as emerging from and formulated within specific social locations and agendas.”35 Segovia insists that cultural studies cannot demand any special training for readers, since all readings, “high or low, academic or popular, trained or untrained,” are equally constructs.36 Cultural critics are to regard readings emanating from marginal communities, such as base Christian communities or millenarian groups, just as they regard readings emanating from conventional scholars within the field of biblical studies: as social constructs reflecting the complex cultural locations of their authors. Towards the end of his essay, “Cultural Studies and Contemporary Biblical Criticism,” Segovia raises a series of problems with the agenda he has proposed for cultural studies, promising to return to these problems on a later occasion. One question he raises is this: “If no master narrative I will primarily direct my remarks to Segovia’s position papers on cultural studies. However, several questions about the conference and the larger project of cultural studies remain. First, does the arrangement of papers construct a “problematic chain of equivalences, between, say, women, people of color in the US, people from the third world, lesbians, gay men . . . [that falsely implies] these groups are caught in the webs of postmodernity in analogous ways”? (Lata Mani, “Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widow Burning,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paul A. Treichler [eds.], Cultural Studies [New York: Routledge, 1992], pp. 392–408, esp. p. 393.) Secondly, how do we evaluate the participation of Two Thirds world scholars in a conference primarily designed for the edification of First World American scholars? What efforts are made to avoid viewing these scholars as “natives” and “providers of knowledge about their nations and cultures”? (Questions raised in another context by Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993], p. 99.) 31 Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?,” in Hall and du Gay (eds.), Questions, pp. 87–107, esp. p. 87. Grossberg’s article is a critique of the conflation of cultural studies with the study of identity/difference. 32 Fernando F. Segovia, “‘And They Began to Speak in Other Tongues’: Competing Modes of Discourse in Contemporary Biblical Criticism,” in Segovia and Tolbert (eds.), Reading from This Place, I, pp. 1–32, esp. p. 25. 33 Segovia, “And They Began,” p. 31. 34 Segovia, “Cultural Studies,” p. 8. 35 Segovia, “Cultural Studies,” p. 11. 36 Segovia, “Cultural Studies,” p. 12. In a footnote Segovia denies that he sees education as “unnecessary and superfluous,” identifying it instead as essential for movements of liberation. He goes on, however, to say that “education and scholarship—a high socioeducational level—represent no privileged access to the meaning of a text . . . but are simply another constitutive factor of human identity affecting all reading and interpretation, and in this sense are no different from any other such factor” (p. 12 n. 20). Perhaps Segovia will clarify his understanding of this issue in the projected third volume of this series, which is to deal with pedagogy. 30

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is to be posited or desired, how does one deal with the continued abuse of the oppressed by the oppressor, the weak by the strong, the subaltern by the dominant?”37 How does one deal, that is, with an interpretation of biblical texts on slavery that claims the Bible legitimates the practice of American slaveholding? If the criteria by which we judge interpretive validity develop in the same cultural matrices as the interpretations we thereby evaluate, on what grounds do we disqualify any interpretation? Senator Davidson’s interpretation of biblical texts on slavery reflects his own social location, or at least the story he has created about that social location in his narrative of Southern heritage.38 Senator Davidson might even claim a marginalized status for himself, since the narrative of a Southern heritage imagines the South as a victimized geographic region occupied by an imperial power (the North, or the Union): “no one has a monopoly on oppositional identity. The new social movements structured around race, gender, and sexuality are neither inherently progressive or reactionary . . .”39 Senator Davidson, we might say, is an “ordinary” reader, one who has not formed his readings in the crucible of the biblical field, who does not rely on the tools of the biblical field. His readings reflect his social location, or at least, his interpreted social context.40 But his readings also correspond to textual elements that express acceptance of the institution of slavery. According to recent work by Daniel Patte on the ethics of biblical interpretation, those trained in the biblical field should accept the basic legitimacy of ordinary readings, and even assist ordinary readers in developing and defending their readings: “the different readings proposed by ordinary readers should be welcomed and affirmed as legitimate by critical readers, whose task would be to discover the meaning-producing dimension of the text that is reflected by this reading.”41 Patte argues that critical readings are simply refined versions of ordinary readings.42 He concludes that “the goal of critical exegesis is the bringing to critical understanding of an ordinary reading.”43 Even the readings of fundamentalist evangelical interpreters are legitimate, Patte says, although he finds the attempt to universalize such interpretations to be illegitimate (as he would find any attempt to offer a universalizing interpretation). Patte suggests that critical readers have Segovia, “Cultural Studies,” p. 17. In an article prepared for the Vanderbilt conference, Mary Ann Tolbert raises the question: “what do we mean by ‘right’, ‘legitimate’, and ‘valid’ in the context of biblical interpretation?” She sketches two readings of Mk 13.9–27, one a historical reconstruction of the interpretation of first-century Christians, and the other a version of a contemporary and conservative interpretation. After rejecting historical soundness as the chief criterion of interpretive legitimacy or validity, she notes that many scholars who would embrace liberationist readings would reject the readings of more conservative congregations. By what criteria, she asks, do we designate “one modern community’s appropriation of the Bible commendable and another’s not?” Tolbert recognizes many of the interpretive problems I am struggling with here. However, she ultimately seems to conflate the question of validity in biblical interpretation and the validity of the Bible itself (Mary Ann Tolbert, “When Resistance Becomes Repression: Mark 13.9–27 and the Poetics of Location,” in Segovia and Tolbert [eds.], Reading from This Place, II, pp. 331–46, esp. pp. 339 and 343–46). 39 Kobena Mercer, “‘1968’: Periodizing Politics and Identity,” in Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies, pp. 424–49, esp. p. 426. 40 “How can one explain the difference between the reading of the Bible in the base communities and the reading of the Bible by popular Pentecostals who live in the same social context?” asks Paulo Fernando Carneiro de Andrade. He answers that “the ‘social context’ that characterizes the reading of the text must be always understood as ‘interpreted social context’” (P.F.C. de Andrade, “Reading the Bible in the Ecclesial Base Communities of Latin America: The Meaning of Social Context,” in Segovia and Tolbert [eds.], Reading from This Place, II, pp. 237–49, esp. pp. 246–47). 41 Daniel Patte does not locate his “ethics of interpretation” in the rubric of cultural studies; I include this discussion here because Patte’s project coheres with the critical agenda Segovia has articulated explicitly for cultural studies. Daniel Patte, Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: A Reevaluation (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995), p. 11; emphasis his. 42 An insight that I find both valid and significant. 43 Patte, Ethics, p. 74; emphasis his. 37 38

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much to learn from ordinary evangelical readers about the power-authority of the text, which precedes and grounds the interpretive process. Finally, Patte proposes that “we ask each of the various legitimate interpretations the following questions: What is its relative value? Is it helpful? Is it harmful? Who benefits? Who is hurt?”44 We could apply these questions to the entire process of interpretation that Patte outlines. For example, would it be helpful or harmful for a critical reader to work with an ordinary reader such as Senator Davidson to help him articulate and defend his interpretation more clearly? And for whom would it be helpful or harmful? For when we turn to the real world, we will find many ordinary readers who share Davidson’s agenda. Is it beneficial or harmful to emphasize the meaning-authority of the biblical text when we remember what the Bible actually says about slavery (not to mention issues of gender and sexuality)? And for whom would it be beneficial or harmful? Patte’s stated purpose in his ethics of interpretation is to include in the conversation of biblical studies the voices of those who have often been excluded: the voices of women and ethnic minorities, for example, but also the voices of ordinary people sitting in the pews of their churches. Those ordinary people, however, are not necessarily without power. Although they may not have voices at meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, they do have voices that are heard in letters to the editor, local politics, the Internet, and a variety of other locations. Assuming the basic legitimacy of a reading such as Davidson’s and abetting its development seem to me a curious project, yet it seems to be the very project that Patte advocates. The proposals advanced by Segovia and Patte raise fundamental questions for the conjuncture of biblical and cultural studies. Cultural studies analyzes the productions of popular culture, often turning a critical eye towards those productions and their function in society. Segovia and Patte, however, simply assume the basic legitimacy of the ordinary readings they advocate. Gramsci acknowledges each person as an intellectual, yet also notes that the “common sense” that is the basis of most people’s intellectual interactions with the world is an uneven mix of insights, prejudices, contradictions, and images imposed by hegemonic discourse. The lack of this critical edge in the acceptance of “ordinary” readings perpetuates those prejudices, contradictions, and hegemonic impositions. A cultural studies agenda that defers to popular readings without emphasizing the effects of those readings in the social sphere is in danger of repeating and confirming the liabilities of those readings. Senator Davidson is not a scholarly construct, but a real reader attempting to draw on the cultural authority of the Bible to promote his regressive political position. This authority transcends any particular interpretation of the Bible, and is thus a formidable weapon in ideological discourse. In the absence of other interpretive criteria, power determines which interpretations will gain a hearing: the power to manipulate the press, the power of those with access to the airwaves or the Internet, the power to convince racists that their racism has theological merit. We might raise, therefore, the pragmatic question: what does Davidson’s biblical interpretation allow him to do? Davidson’s biblical interpretation (like many other instances of biblical interpretation outside our ivy-covered towers) relies on the cultural authority of the Bible to persuade people to consent to a particular ordering of society. A pragmatic approach bypasses the question of truth or validity in interpretation and focuses instead on the consequences of adopting a particular interpretation, or indeed on the consequences of relying on biblical authority in political discourse.

Patte, Ethics, p. 125.

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The Bible John Murders and Media Discourse, 1969-1996 William T. Scott

1.  Preliminary Considerations a. Metatheoretical Issues It should perhaps be obligatory for all scholars to begin each contribution to the literature with a clear statement of where their work stands on the two fundamental axes that structure debates about understanding and interpretation. These are present in all epochs, but are particularly foregrounded in these distempered times currently labelled “postmodernity.” Not surprisingly, this obligation is most obvious in the work of the hermeneutic, metainterpretative disciplines, which offer texts-for-interpretation about texts (perhaps themselves interpretative texts about texts, and so on). Of these, two are particularly burdened with the need to justify transcendent textual interpretation, law and religion, most especially when these institutionalized practices are book-based, and operate in literate cultures. The first axis may be presented as a continuum from the universalizing tendency at one extreme to the relativizing and particularizing tendency at the other. Scholars undisturbed by the blasts of critical theory might consider themselves to be concerned with making significant generalizations, ideally, establishing immutable laws, about the phenomena they study. This they might claim to do by discovering whatever salient similarities and commonalities, even uniformities, underlie the superficially diverse particularities displayed by members of all classes of phenomena. (Note that these remarks apply equally to the object and theory levels of our efforts to understand the world and our experiences.) The concern for essences and uniformities immanent in heterodox reality shifts our attention to the other axis, where broadly positive and negative approaches are arrayed. The universalizing (also “totalizing” or “foundationalist”) approach summarized above is, typically, positive, in several respects: 1. it assumes and reifies stable reality—a real text and real recoverable meaning, for example; 2. it assumes that the transparent truth about these texts and their embodied meanings can be both identified and uttered reliably as well as validly, such that everybody, everywhere, always must, by force of reason or persuasion, experience these perennially true meanings uniformly; 3. it assumes that extending our enlightenment in all spheres of experience, not just the study of scriptural and other texts is not only possible, but a good thing . . . and so on.

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Just as the universalizing and the positive/positivist tendencies intertwine, so too do their opposing tendencies. Here, destabilizing exceptions, changes and deviations are emphasized in opposition to the normative forces at the other extreme, in order to resist specific foundationalist interpretations and statements. More fundamentally, the very possibility of identifying the truth and telling it validly or reliably—the possibility of understanding—may be denied outright in such work. The radical relativism so noticeable in much of critical theory, and in much cultural studies work, illustrates one problematic outcome of the attitudes to understanding summarized here. Relatedly, and as part of the oppositionalist agenda, mainstream scholarship—along with other structures of understanding—is particularly indicted for the twin crimes of merely reifying the status quo, thus serving its beneficiaries, and of doing so behind the pretence of disinterestedly pursuing truths/the Truth. The two continua, or irreconcilable polarities as some still enamoured of structuralist digitizing would insist, can be arrayed as in Figure 1. This is offered as a simple map that all of us (sic) contributing to gatherings such as this might agree that we navigate by, and on which we should declare our current coordinates, so that others may make sense of the sense we are attempting to make. In shorthand terms, at the top of the vertical axis we might locate all the key terms of the enlightenment and modernity, such as: reality, truth, trust, progress, optimism, logic and reason, agreement, collaboration. At the opposite extreme, we find the conceptual currency of what has become known as postmodernism, more broadly critical theory, with which cultural studies has strong affinities, such as: artefactuality/falsity, illusion/error, suspicion, stasis/decline, pessimism (of the intellect and/or the will), rhetoric/deceit, coercion. Similarly, at the left of the horizontal axis we locate interest in laws, or at least strong generalizations, the possibility of a common human nature and shared experience, including understanding in all senses, an emphasis on stable uniformities in the world and in ourselves. By contrast, at the right of the axis we find an emphasis on exceptions, deviations and misfits of all sorts, discontinuities, breakdowns and barriers, misunderstanding and confusion, unpredictable change. In slogan terms, we here add to Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” and Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives,” the insistence on resistant reading, reading for absences, subversion of author-ity, and all the other centripetal tactics whereby normativity in life or in scholarship has been assailed, to an unprecedented extent in our dystopian times. Conventional scholarship starts from and returns to the top left, having toured the other quartiles, particularly bottom right. Here, putative generalizations are subjected to the falsifiability test, while, top right, alternative hypotheses and evidence are generated. Critical theory, in its various forms, generally orientates to and from the bottom right quartile, although, in its most militant form, it moves bottom left, postulating the universal impossibility of ever knowing anything, of ever being understood, indeed, of postulation itself. On the enabling assumption that the continua really are continua and not sheerly disjoined polarities, the present essay will be orientated to and from the top left. It will presume to use core elements of broadly received scholarship in the hope of making better rather than worse sense, in this case of the way in which a series of murders was presented to “the public” by “the media.” In answer to the question “why?,” with its implication of sleeping with the enemy and, typically, its deeper claim that there are no valid criteria for any such hermeneutic effort (or any other intervention in the real world and its problems), one might reply “why not?,” and point to the disabling nihilism—although rarely silence—that awaits persistent denial of both knowability and effability. The late Paul Feyerabend’s assertion (Feyerabend 1968) that the only

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real principle at work in the knowledge-generating business is “Anything goes” notoriously leads to the practical outcome that everything stays, there being no basis for critique (his own excepted, of course). Similarly, Derrida offers many reminders that his strictures require that which they deny, not least somehow efficacious writing, if we are to make necessarily fleeting sense (hence the reminders) of that denial. To engage further in the ludic pastime of paradoxification, we might counter such counter-principles, and their myriad congeners mustered under the self-effacing banners of postmodernism, just by adopting them. We thereby access the right to proceed as if their very opposite were true, mirroring those who write against writing, theorizing against theorizing, and so on. As ever, those who are uncomfortable with this seeming capitulation to the hydra-headed enemy usually demonized as a WASP patriarch will stop at this point, there being nothing to say and no way of saying it in any case, as we knew from the outset. (One of the best brief accounts of the broad perspective being turned back on itself here, and one of particular relevance to biblical scholarship, is Moore 1994, but there are many other contributors to a frequently fractious and mischief-rich literature.)

b. Cultural Relativism/Relativity The study that follows considers aspects of a particular set of texts and their cultural context, and speculates as to whether or not such a text would “mean” in similar ways now. In particular, it questions whether or not a reporter could nowadays take for granted the knowledge of, and attitudes to, the Bible assumed in these texts, along with other key assumptions, such as the existence of a community partly formed by these cultural possessions. The moral certitude and assertiveness displayed was, it is argued, grounded in these cultural conditions. As these no longer exist, the style and certainly the content of the reporting are no longer possible. From the contemporary perspective, we must therefore reconstruct something of the original context in order to make the same sense of the texts that the audience at the time would have made. This essay thus raises a particularly acute version of the tensions starkly caricatured in the opening section above, a version sometimes referred to as “the anthropologist’s problem,” which we may generalize as follows. The anthropologist’s chosen task is to enter an alien culture as free of presuppositions as possible, and, almost re-enacting the process of primary socialization, to find out the contents of its constituent institutions, for example, religious beliefs, traditions, social mores and practices enacting the essentials of life everywhere, such as families, marriage, conflict-management, and so on. The ambient language is both one of the social institutions to be investigated, and, as a repository of the community’s accumulated experiences, a tool necessary for the asking of questions that the anthropologist needs to ask. Clearly, the summary just given reveals that presuppositions are irreducibly present when we approach even the most “exotic” or seemingly undisturbed culture, among them the idea that a more rather than less organic, functionally integrated, way of life will normally be there awaiting the investigator’s analytic and descriptive skills. This particular presupposition is evident even in recent work, such as that of Macdonald (1993) or Maffesoli (1996), studying the fractured and variously partial microcultures that those of us inhabiting modern/Western societies also belong to, albeit self-consciously and often ironically. The extreme relativist, whether an anthropologist or a general purpose sceptic, contends that an alien culture (or, indeed, an alien mind within “the same” culture) is not only unknown prior to investigation (or so deemed, by the minimum presupposition principle) but truly unknowable, ever, to any outsider. To know that, of course, the extreme relativist has to know at least two

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cultures well enough to have convinced herself that Culture A is wholly different from Culture B, precisely the possibility being denied. She also has to assume the possibility of knowing, if not in general then at least in this regard, for herself and for the rest of us receiving, somehow, her message. To complete the declaration of credentials, then, the work that follows will assume that we can adequately recreate a cultural context within which certain powerful mass media texts functioned in ways that we can also describe accurately, and that we can make comparisons and contrasts with the ways in which these and other texts functioned when they, and the story they helped to carry and create, re-appeared a generation later. The key point will be that the cultural circumstances into which the story and its accumulated texts re-emerged are significantly different, and so the texts work differently, but in ways that we can identify and calibrate. Notably, the awareness of and respect for biblical knowledge and associated values, on which the earlier texts rely, have substantially vanished. To use the useful distinction of Hollis and Lukes, relativity in the sense of selective contextualization will thus be adopted rather than the extreme and disabling relativism so characteristic of critical and cultural studies: we will travel between top left and top right in Figure 1, attempting to make the “best text,” in Dworkin’s phrase, we can of the text we are studying.

2. Background Almost thirty years ago, in Glasgow, Scotland, three murders took place over a period of about a year, the last occurring on 30 October 1969. Each of the victims was a married woman who had been enjoying an evening, without her husband, at a famous dance hall in the city. The evening—a Thursday—was well known as one when wedding rings would be temporarily removed by men and women alike, and flirtation, titillation and more might be available. There was and is no suggestion that any of the women who died was there for extramarital sex. However, the reputation of those Thursday evenings was known to many, but mentioned explicitly by few, even in the many media reports that appeared as the story evolved. Such restraint would be unlikely now, to make an obvious relativizing point. One witness had shared a taxi with the likely killer and his last victim, who was her sister. She told police, in her very detailed evidence about the man’s demeanour and appearance, that he had made use of at least one biblical quotation (never finally tracked down), having been asked if his claimed agnosticism meant that he was an atheist. The man had also referred to dance halls as “dens of iniquity,” and spoken of the “adulterous” people who used them. Lastly, he had spoken of his strict upbringing, and displayed many of the nonverbal characteristics recognized locally, and more widely, as typical of repressive Presbyterian rectitude. The suspect was swiftly dubbed “Bible John” by the press, when these scanty scraps of evidence were revealed, and he has been so referred to in almost all reporting then and since. Before that, he had occasionally been referred to in the media as “the ladykiller,” a somewhat ghoulish borrowing of an everyday expression for the sort of man he had been described as being (charming, highly-mannered, etc.). The term had also been given additional currency by the success of a popular film of that title. This, in passing, is an illustration of the tendency, in media discourse, to establish a “hook” term for a running story. Ideally, a hook should be short, and already familiar to the public, who can use it to contextualize each new development as it arises. Recent examples in British culture

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have been “sleaze,” which immediately calls up an extensive catalogue of financial and/or sexual failings on the part of public figures, mainly politicians. Another is “Camillagate,” a raunchy royal rompings saga featuring the heir to the British throne and a lady also married to someone else at the material time. (Note the durability of the original Watergate hook, of which this use involving the name of Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles is one of many since the original apartment block address came to stand for an entire set of events, actions, attitudes and values, also almost 30 years ago. An obvious question is what sense is made of such constructions by those who remember or know nothing of the events that led to Richard Nixon’s disgrace.) Another crucial piece of media shorthand used in the Bible John story was the “artist’s impression” portrait (shortly to be improved by the then new Identikit representation). This was constructed with the aid of the same witness in the main, and gives the suspect a curiously serene, almost Christ-like persona. Perhaps the artist’s depiction was influenced by the newlycoined name for the suspect and the other information summarized above, all of which were dominating the media in the days following the last murder. Certainly, unlike the blank, expressionless face usually presented for identification purposes, this face has “a look”: it gazes with a hint of self-assured contempt. Bible John’s image, and the associated, imagined person, dominated posters and billboards, front pages and television screens for many months. As we will see below, John’s media persona became, in the particular cultural context, a powerful element in the search for the killer. This amounted to one of the most extensive manhunts ever conducted by the local police, who were aided not only by a description even more detailed than was revealed to the public (he had very distinctive front teeth, for example, and that was the first detail that detectives looked at with each new suspect) but by exceptional public interest and involvement. However, the culprit was never caught. During 1995, the local police force, in the ongoing process of transferring paper files to computer, found themselves reconsidering this case, particularly given that DNA testing of semen samples found on the last victim’s clothing, still stored in the archives, had become available since the original investigation. In addition, one individual who had been a strong suspect and had committed suicide in 1980 at the age of 41, had re-emerged in the minds of officers still fascinated by the case as a candidate for such attempted matching. On 1 February 1996, the man’s body was exhumed, amid intense publicity, and taken away for analysis, first in Glasgow and then in Cambridge. After nearly six months of tests, on extremely unpromising material it should be stressed, the tests proved inconclusive. The body was reburied, and with it, perhaps, the still unsolved case of Bible John.

3.  Text and Context The main text to be examined in this essay is a television broadcast, transmitted by BBC Scotland at the height of the public interest in the case. Parts of the text are transcribed at the end of this article. Before considering that, however, a number of general concepts and concerns remain to be dealt with. The power of naming is well understood and respected in all cultures, and is one of the most important of the many taboos and restrictions that bear upon language use. Naming a child is not simply a matter of family or cultural tradition, of taste or fashion: few of us court bad luck, second-hand opprobrium or ridicule for our children, and even our dogs. We need not fall into facile linguistic determinism in noting that the broader notion of labelling an object or

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whatever, especially with a single morphological unit, somehow institutionalizes and legitimates the existence of what might in fact be illusory: we still speak of “the ether,” for example, and many other useful concepts that only exist through talk and/ or writing. (This is but one aspect of the creative power of language, a power that can be used destructively, of course.) Where individuals are concerned, one’s given name (even if John Smith, or the equivalent) is a crucial part of one’s identity, self-identity as well as public and social identity; so also are nicknames, pet names and the rest. When uttered by a person in authority in threatening circumstances, one’s full set of names carries great semiotic effect, as do any attendant titles which may be available. Name in the sense of one’s good name, or having a name for some skill or talent calls up other senses that confirm the importance of names, particularly in mediated cultures where stardom, celebrity and villain status are so much part of our voyeuristic cultural consumption. Therefore, while names are arbitrary strings of signifiers, as Shakespeare reminded us somewhat more elegantly, they are also conventional, constructed in response to what is current in the interpretative community. John Smith, for example, really is the name of many people, but is also used as an alternative to Mr Average, and even as a self-advertising false identity. In the case of Bible John, his use of the Christian name was probably just that, a conventional means of disguise that simultaneously advertised to other participants his own participation in the game of suspended identities. Considering that, however, a number of general concepts and concerns remain to be dealt with. The power of naming is well understood and respected in all cultures, and is one of the most important of the many taboos and restrictions that bear upon language use. Naming a child is not simply a matter of family or cultural tradition, of taste or fashion: few of us court bad luck, second-hand opprobrium of ridicule for our children, and even our dogs. We need not fall into facile linguistic determinism in noting that the broader notion of labelling an object or whatever, especially with a single morphological unit, somehow institutionalizes and legitimates the existence of what might in fact be illusory: we still speak of “the ether,” for example, and many other useful concepts that only exist through talk and/or writing. (This is but one aspect of the creative power of language, a power that can be used destructively, of course.) Where individuals are concerned, one’s given name (even if John Smith, or the equivalent) is a crucial part of one’s identity, self-identity as well as public and social identity; so also are nicknames, pet names and the rest. When uttered by a person in authority in threatening circumstances, one’s full set of names carries great semiotic effect, as do any attendant titles which may be available. Name in the sense of one’s good name, of having a name for some skill or talent calls up other sense that confirm the importance of names, particularly in mediated cultures where stardom, celebrity and villain status are so much part of our voyeuristic cultural consumption. Therefore, while names are arbitrary strings of signifiers, as Shakespeare reminded us somewhat more elegantly, they are also conventional, constructed in response to what is current in the interpretative community. John Smith, for example, really is the name of many people, but is also used as an alternative to Mr Average, and even as a self-advertising false identity. In the case of Bible John, his use of the Christian name was probably just that, a conventional means of disguise that simultaneously advertise to other participants his own participation in the game of suspended identities. The name Bible John also has particular resonances. The legendary figure of Pastor John, and the many priests who would be known as Father John, provide familiar phonological analogies

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for the construction. In addition, there was a tradition locally and no doubt elsewhere of referring to enthusiastic lay Christian and Bible Jack, and so on, as part of the widespread process where given names are adapted or added to for satirical or other semantic effect. The journalist who first labelled the elusive killer “Bible John”; was, therefore, exploiting, in the usual way that all communicators must, the potential of what was already shared for making new information intelligible in convenient and ready form. This raises once again the issue touched upon in earlier remarks about relativism/ relativity. At one extreme we may imagine a perfectly whole, sealed and crystalline culture, where everybody of adult age and in possession of normal faculties as equal and identical possession of a uniform stock of cultural capital, including the language and other semiotic resources through which social life is enacted. There would be little need for social life in these circumstance of high redundancy, in information-theoretic terms, less for communication, given that everybody knows everything (and knows that about everybody else, etc.) already. At the other extreme, we can imagine a high entropy society, where difference and chance and maximized person to person, situation to situation, moment to moment. We can imagine such a volatile and unstable society in principle, but it is difficult to conceive of the detailed life experience of its unfortunate inhabitants. Such utter derangement denies not only sociality but, perhaps hence, sanity. Somewhere between the two extremes, the banal conclusion is that real individuals and their social being, above all what they know as communicatively competent performers of that social being, negotiate positions. Notoriously, in the so-called hot or dynamic societies, this is hard work. We yield to the nostalgic notion that previous generations enjoyed a more stable and nourishingly organic solidarity, that the core of shared values, beliefs and lifestyle was larger, more widely dispersed in the community, more respected in every sense, that there were stable “places” and people knew theirs, who were less “disturbed,” and so on. Most nationalist movements, irredentist or not, have constructed some such lost golden age but even societies we judge to be relatively undisturbed and unpoliticized tell tales of past glory and present decline. Debates about education, and all other forms of public communication in countries such as Britain and the USA often invoke the need to instil, foster and protect the content of the somehow identified shared core. In the USA, with its history of deliberate assimilation programmes for diverse minorities (many members of which remain stubbornly “hyphenated” Americans), the work of Hirsch and others on the knowledge, values and attitudes one should possess in order to be a fully competent participant in the culture has been especially controversial. That it is a political matter involving the exercise of power through the various institutions and media of communication, including schools and churches, is evident. For our purposes, these wider debates about what our companions, or co-culturalists, know or ought to know need not be explored in any more detail. What is given here is sufficient to serve as a framework in which to raise the question of religious, and biblical, knowledge in the community that received the original Bible John reporting, and in the descendant community in which the story was relaunched. Since the mid-sixteenth century, Scotland has been, in religious terms, “Reformed.” The strongly Calvinist brand of Protestantism associated with John Know weakened and diversified over the centuries, but some of its essential features maintained a grip on the minds of many, affecting public institutions and practices in numerous ways. In terms of international politics, the doctrine of divine election even extended to Scotland’s destined role and the world’s finest example of Reformation, both in church and society (see Stevenson 1988 on “the marriage with God”).

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A characteristically schizoid combination of God-fearing righteousness and homicidal wrath is an enduring theme in Scottish literature, for example in Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or Galt’s The Sins and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Many other writings deal with the contradictions, typically polarized, that emerge from the notion of a predestined distinction between the saved and the damned, the rational and the irrational, and so on. Burns’s great, ironic poem, Holy Wilie’s Prayer, is but one exploration of the Manichean tendency, the prevalence of which in Scottish culture is considered so fundamental that one critic was written of the Caledonian antisyzygy (Smith 1919). Tellingly, one Burns story known to most Scots is his quasilegal trial by church elders for immortality, and the subsequent punishment of being forced to sit in the “sin-bin” of the local church during Sunday services. At a more mundane level, Sabbatarian restrictions were still powerful, even in the large cities, as late as the 1950s. They are complied with to this day in parts of the country where the various sorts of Free Church, which split with the mainstream, Presbyterian Church of Scotland early in the last century, survive. By the mid-1960s, the great majority of the population remained more or less associated with the Church of Scotland. However, as elsewhere, the second half of the twentieth century has seen a catastrophic decline in membership (especially new communicants) and attendance. I. Smith writes: “Historically, the post-war period is particularly startling due to the rapidity of decline, unprecedented both in absolute terms and growth rate” (1992:4). He adds later: “The unabated decline in the stock of Church of Scotland members since 1957 primarily reflects falling inflow rates among young people” (1992: 12)). By the end of the 1960s, then, the ambient culture, certainly for the relatively young people who featured in the Bible John murders, was one in which, to use Matthew Arnold’s image, the sea of faith was retreating noticeably. However, it was also one in which the mores, including the linguistic customs and practises, or previous generations lived on, albeit etiolated and no doubt ironicized, but still part of the linguistic currency. Most adults at the time would have had acquired their familiarity with these cultural tokens in their considerable exposure to biblical and otherwise religious discourse, at school, Sunday school or other “faith-related” groups such as youth organizations and evangelical “missions” and “crusades,” in addition to whatever church-going they had experienced in childhood. Religious broadcasting was also still taken for granted, and was by no means restricted to Sundays. Given the decline in active participation noted above (which also affected the other major denomination, Roman Catholicism), “the God-slot” on television or Thought the Day on BBC radio were for many the only direct link they retained with religious experience and knowledge, once fundamental to the culture around them, and still recognized, in various senses, not least in the details of a suspected murderer’s speech, and in the great eight placed upon these by police, reporters, and public.

4.  A Text Resurrected The main text from the period of the murders that is of interest here is an extract from a television news feature, broadcast after the third murder, when public interest in the man later titled— debatably—“Scotland’s first serial killer” was at its height, and his oddly serene image (publicly endorsed as an extremely good likeness) was everywhere (see script below). Visually, the film borrows heavily from film noir conventions, and from the detective film genre. Black and white broadcasting was the only format available at the time, but the darkness

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and starkness of the imagery here is deliberately exaggerated in the “reconstruction” sections, and in the passages where the reporter addresses John directly. Light sources are shot so as to emphasize the glaring and bleary quality of such illumination as there is the subfusc world the viewer is shown. This is a shadow world, the habitat of morally—and otherwise—dubious individuals consorting in dance halls, secreting themselves in taxis—something of a luxury for most Scots at that time, only used for very particular reasons—and suchlike. The doom-laden and somewhat menacing atmosphere is greatly enhanced by the voice of the reporter, firstly in its timbre and resonance. It is the voice of respectability, of decency and dependable normality, the voice of reason. Many middle-aged male actors, in countless series and soap opera, have provided versions of this acoustic centre of gravity/gravitas. The speaker intones, in a clearly hortatory or suasive mode. If all preaching is suasive, then this is a form of preaching, directed personally to the man he addresses using the Christian name, John. Unlike the politician delivering the televised fireside chat, almost conversational in style and delivered straight to the viewer quasi-individually, this text is delivered to an unknown individual person. We the viewers/listeners eavesdrop, providing an over-the-shoulder supporting chorus, as the reporter strives to persuade the individual to come in from the shadow world. There is specific reference to, and exploitation of, the most infamous details known about the man, his familiarity with passages from the Bible. Leviticus 20, which provides strictures against whoring, adultery, incest, and so on, is mentioned as one text that he may know. The other is Exodus 2, the story of Moses, with its theme of the stranger in a strange land. The reporter’s climactic rhetorical ploy, however, is not to mine either of these sources for meanings that might have moved his target appropriately. He turns to Jer. 23.24: “‘Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him?’ saith the Lord. ‘Do I not fill heaven and earth?’ saith the Lord.” These words, and the accompanying images suggestive of the allseeing eye that the spectatorial powers of the camera provide to the viewer (not unlike the judgemental role Burns manoeuvres his readers into in the poem mentioned above), are aimed at exacerbating whatever guilt and isolation the fugitive may have been feeling. If, of course, he was motivated by some debased remnant of the Calvinist mindset, believing himself chosen as God’s instrument in the war against whores and adulterers, that argumentative strategy would have had little chance of success. It is perhaps the very likelihood that the killer was a man with a clean conscience that gave the story such fascination for people living lives still shaped by a belief system that endowed a diverse cast of authority figures with the right to be right, especially in their manifest conformity to the laws of God and “man.” That a seemingly “churchy” and respectable person could perpetrate such crimes in such a milieu was shocking in the extreme to that public. Certainly, such a piece of current affairs broadcasting is difficult to imagine in current circumstance. When the body of the suspect, John McInnes, was exhumed on 1 February 1996, little of the religious and moral resonances around the story, so powerful at the time, were reactivated by the media professionals, who were nonetheless aware of the lingering fascination that older people still retained. That emotionality was partially recreated by showing the archive film discussed here. However, the reporting of the exhumation and related information was considerably less theatrical. The dramatic charge created by the combination of a triple murder and a respectable suspect who also knew his Bible is simply no longer possible. Even in a country such as the UK, with its tiny annual rate of murders-per-thousand of population, we are much more hardened to such crimes than previously, particularly after Hungerford or Dunblane. These have many rivals in both peace and war situations brought to us ever more dysphemistically, and often live, by

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the ever more global and efficient media, and so few of us would give much time to the story examined here. Also, it is difficult to imagine a modern reporter attempting such a theatrical, moralistic and confidently grounded piece. This last point returns us to issues raised above. The reporter who scripted and planned the text seems very confident of speaking for and in the presence of a community that shared certain categories of knowledge and experience, and whose emotional reactions to the combination of “ingredients” mentioned above he could equally confidently assume (in both senses) and exploit. Neither that confidence nor the assumption is imaginable today. Indeed, what appears to be a personal intervention by the journalist in negotiating directly with, and playing upon the emotions of, the suspect might even be considered a breach of professional ethics. Screenshots taken from television broadcast, BBC Scotland, October 1969 Transcript from “Reporting Scotland” on Bible John Murders—Leslie Anderson Reporting, February 1996 (1969 material in italic). Hugh Cochrane: John, if your name is John. John, if you’re out there now, watching and listening, maybe it’s time to come in out of the glare for your own good. The police want to talk to you, wherever you are you should know that. Leslie Anderson: It was at the Barrowland Ballroom that the story of Bible John began. Helen Puttock and her sister Jean left the dance hall accompanied by two men. One went to catch a bus, the other, called John, went with the sisters in a taxi. During the drive, and before that, as they walked to Glasgow Cross, the reddish-haired man allegedly made reference to the Bible. Jean left the taxi, Helen and the man continued. The next morning she was found brutally murdered, sparking what was then the largest manhunt ever mounted by Scottish police. Detective: I would say that this man is possibly a loner. He lives, I would think, with a relative. He’s a personable man, good looking. He possibly occupies some place in society where he has a little authority.

Telephone rings. Policeman answers: Marine Division CID murder room. Voice on telephone: Is that the Bible John enquiry room? Policeman: Yes it is. Voice on the telephone: I think I’ve seen this fellow you’re looking for, you know, this Bible John. Leslie Anderson: Hundreds of men had the finger of suspicion pointed at them as the public was gripped by the hunt for Bible John. Hugh Cochrane: A man on a taxi journey to Edinburgh innocently quotes the Bible to the driver and finds himself deposited at Police Headquarters as a suspect. Detective: Any tall red-haired men with a Bible going to church on a Sunday morning, there’s a call arrives here. Hugh Cochrane: You are still hoping that you’ve got a million pair of eyes working for you? Detective: Well you say a million pair of eyes, Mr Cochrane, I would like to think perhaps ten million pair of eyes. Leslie Anderson: The hunt stretched across the world as sightings of Bible John were reported from as far away as Australia.

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Hugh Cochrane: The quest impinges on the life of ordinary people nearly everywhere. Day in, day out, something new. Faces in the busy streets being studied closely. Twenty-six years on, that quest for Bible John may at last be over. Hugh Cochrane: John, it seems probably that you may know Leviticus, Chapter 20 and Exodus, Chapter 2, but do you remember Jeremiah 23 verse 24? “‘Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him’, saith the Lord.” (Acknowledgments to BBC Scotland)

Bibliography Bodine, W.A. (ed) 1995 Discourse Analysis of Biblical Literature: What It Is and What It Offers (Semeia Studies; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature). Derrida, 1985 “Des Tours de Babel,” in J.F. Graham (ed.), Difference in Translation (trans. J. Graham; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press); reprinted in Semeia 54 (1992): 3–35. Feyerabend, P.K. 1968 Against Method (London: Verso). Hollis M., and S. Lukes 1982 Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Jobling D., and S.D. Moore (eds.) 1992 Poststructuralism as Exegesis (Semeia, 54; Atlanta; Scholars Press). Macdonald, S. 1993 Inside European Identities (Providence, RI; London: Berg). Maffesoli, M. 1996 The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society (London: Sage). Moore, S.D. 1994 Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross (Minneapolis Fortress Press). Patrick, D., and A. Scult 1990 Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation (Sheffield: Almond Press). Porter, S.E., and T.H. Olbricht (eds.) 1993 Rhetoric and the New Testament: Essays from the 1992 Heidelberg Conference (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). Smith, G.G. 1919 Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (London: Macmillan). Smith, I. 1992 The Economics of Church Decline: The Case of the Church of Scotland (Discussion Paper Series, 9210; St Andrews: Department of Economics, University of St Andrews). Stevenson, D. 1988 The Covenanters: The National Covenant and Scotland (Edinburgh: The Saltire Society).

12

The World’s Largest Ten Commandments Timothy K. Beal

These days the thousands of white water rafters, motor-homers, and gamblers filling the rivers, campgrounds, and casinos of Cherokee County, North Carolina, in the Smoky Mountains of Nantahala National Forest are enough to make you forget this region’s rich and often painful history. For centuries it was heartland for the Cherokee Nation, whose peoples thrived in great numbers near the waters of the Hiwassee and Tuckasegee rivers. But in the late 1830s, the United States Army built Fort Butler there as a headquarters for some 7,000 troops sent by President Andrew Jackson to carry out the Great Removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma along the infamous Trail of Tears. Sixty years after the Great Removal, the same region experienced a Great Awakening of the Holy Ghost, known as the Christian holiness movement, initiated around 1895 by a radical reformer named Benjamin Harding Irwin. As with the Pentecostal movement which had its start around the same time with the famous Azusa Street Revivals in Los Angeles, Irwin and other adherents of this new movement proclaimed that one’s conversion to Christianity and baptism by water must be followed by a second baptism, a “baptism by fire” performed by the Holy Spirit and manifest in spiritual gifts, above all the gift of tongues. They also believed in the total sanctification of Christians through the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. For this movement, conversion is only the beginning, and leads ultimately to one’s complete spiritual purification and perfection. The holiness movement quickly took hold among Christians who had become dissatisfied with the creedal orientation of their denominations, and the holiness revival had begun. Mainstream church communities and leaders in this predominantly Baptist and Methodist region of North Carolina and Tennessee did not respond positively to the new movement. Meetinghouses were burned. Proponents of holiness doctrine and practice were disfellowshipped and even horsewhipped. Yet, despite these persecutions and other pastoral prohibitions and condemnations, the movement continued to grow. By the turn of the century, a new leader had arisen in the Holiness Church at Camp Creek, near the Tennessee/North Carolina border: Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson (1865–1943). Under the influence of other local ministers, this former Quaker Sunday school superintendent came to believe that the radical holiness movement sweeping the region was in fact a reawakening of the New Testament Apostolic church, a sign that Jesus would be returning very soon. In 1906, a few years after becoming head of the Camp Creek congregation, he called together a number of revivalist congregations and their ministers from Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia to form a new denomination. In 1907 the members approved Tomlinson’s proposal to call themselves “the Church of God” (and he did mean the Church of God), and in

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1909 Tomlinson was appointed its first General Overseer. In 1923, with church membership in the tens of thousands, Tomlinson was deposed by other leaders within the Church of God on account of financial mismanagement and his unwillingness to share power. He took two thousand loyal followers with him and formed what eventually came to be known as the Church of God of Prophecy. He remained General Overseer until his death in 1943, after which his son, Milton, led the church until his death in 1995. Today, the Church of God of Prophecy claims to have over five hundred thousand members. The strong conviction that this new church was the Church of God—the reawakening of the original “New Testament church” of Jesus’s first Apostles—led to a practice of biblical interpretation that saw literal fulfillments of particular passages from scripture everywhere. Central here was the doctrine of visible signs, that is, the belief that the various events of the time were literal, visible fulfillments of specific biblical passages. In the biblical book of Habakkuk, God tells the prophet, “Write the vision, . . . for the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak.” That is, write what you see now, even if you don’t understand what it means, for in the end its meaning will be revealed. Tomlinson and his church took this quite literally. They believed that they were living in that appointed time, “at the end,” and that the visions of scripture (which its writers faithfully wrote down without fully understanding) were now being made plain. They believed that it was no accident, for example, that the Wright brothers first took flight in North Carolina in 1903, the same year in which Tomlinson became the leader of the Camp Creek congregation, and the same year he received a divine revelation on a nearby mountaintop of the restored New Testament church. For the airplane was the visible fulfillment of the prophet’s vision of the winged chariot in the first chapter of Ezekiel. Soon the Church of God had amassed one hundred and ten planes, the “White Angel Fleet,” which they used to drop tracts all over the world. Ezekiel didn’t know what he was seeing in his vision, but Tomlinson and his followers believed that they did. They saw themselves as living in the final days before the return of Jesus, a time in which all the scriptures would be fulfilled, made plain in visible, concrete form.

Axis Mundi Today, the most visible, concrete (and I do mean concrete) sign of Tomlinson’s legacy with the Church of God of Prophecy is Fields of the Wood. Located on Highway 294 in western North Carolina, a few hundred yards north of Camp Creek and about eighteen miles east of the town of Murphy (in the news recently as the hiding place of Eric Robert Rudolph, who eluded the FBI for six years before his arrest in 2002 for bombing Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, an Atlanta women’s clinic, and a gay nightclub), this two-hundred-and-sixteen-acre complex is both a visible sign of the church’s presence in the world and a memorial to Tomlinson’s inaugural vision. Fields of the Wood was established as world headquarters of the Church of God of Prophecy in 1941, but the location’s significance is rooted in the very beginnings of the movement. For it was there, in 1903, atop a mountain on the west side of the property, that Tomlinson had his original revelation of the restored New Testament church. Nearly forty years later, in his twilight years, Tomlinson led his church to establish Fields of the Wood to commemorate and sanctify that original revelation and to provide a cosmic center for the church itself. Fields of the Wood, then, is the Church of God of Prophecy’s Mount Sinai and Jerusalem all rolled into one.

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Even the name of the place, “Fields of the Wood,” refers to the visible fulfillment of a biblical passage. Psalm 132 recalls how the Israelites recovered the Ark of the Lord and established it in Jerusalem after finding it in a place that the King James Version translates as “the fields of the wood” (most modern translations identify the place as the “fields of Jaar”). Most would read that to mean that the Israelites found the lost Ark in a field amid woods, a clearing. For Tomlinson and his followers, however, it was understood—or rather revealed—to be a reference to a specific place that would only be realized millennia later in the woods of North Carolina. “Fields of the Wood” became the proper name of the place where Tomlinson found the lost Apostolic church, prefigured by Israel’s lost-and-found Ark of the Lord. Like the New Jerusalem described in the New Testament book of Revelation (chapter 21), Fields of the Wood has twelve gates, three each in the north, south, east, and west, thereby presenting itself quite literally as the visible sign of the restored church, the New Jerusalem, of the final days. Seen from the air, these four sets of gates are also four ends of a cross that points roughly northward. Visitors enter through the large archway of the southern gate. The northern and southern gates are connected by a wide paved road and parking area that runs along a valley between two hills, forming the long vertical line of the cross. In this north–south valley area are eighty-six flags, representing all the nations in which the Church of God of Prophecy has congregations, along with several installations, including: an aqua baptismal pool, which, if it weren’t for the wrought-iron gate and wide white stairway on one end, would look very much like a backyard swimming pool; a Golgotha Crucifixion scene, made of concrete and piled stones with three neatly planed whitewashed crosses on top; and an empty tomb, complete with a perfectly round roll-away “stone,” made of wood and covered with lumpy plaster for that much-sought-after rugged look. Inside the tomb I experienced one of the more disturbing moments of my travels. Behind a wrought-iron gate are two stone beds set parallel to one another on opposite walls. One is empty, but the other isn’t. Lying there is a humanoid form on a wooden stretcher, covered top to bottom with a badly stained sheet. I presume this figure was placed there to be realistic. It is, after all, supposed to represent a burial place. What would be more surprising would be the empty bed, not the full one. Right? Be that as it may, children having fun rolling the stone away wouldn’t find this nearly so amusing. I sternly advised mine not to go in.

Size Matters The two east-west arms of the cross are formed by grassy areas that run up the hillsides of the valley, each touting at least one “world’s largest” religious object made from concrete. Indeed, although I’m not sure whether there’s much biblical theology to back it up, it’s clear that size matters at Fields of the Wood. Running up the western hill is a pathway lined on both sides with large concrete slabs. Along the right side of the path are the Tables of Bible Doctrines, which describe the central tenets of the Church of God, such as eternal life for the righteous, eternal damnation for the wicked, and prohibitions against personal adornment, swearing, strong drink, and membership in lodges. Along the left side are the Five Auxiliary Tables, which recount the major eras of ecclesiastical history according to Church of God doctrine, beginning with the New Testament church and its apostasy and culminating with the “latter days” outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the Holiness and Pentecostal movement led by Tomlinson and others. At the top of the path is the Place of Prayer,

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the centerpiece of which is “the World’s Largest Altar,” eighty feet wide, marking the spot where Tomlinson had his original vision of the restored church. The western hill is not particularly well traveled by visitors, the majority of whom, these days, are not Church-of-Godders. For most visitors, the real attraction, the pièce de résistance, is on the eastern hill. As Tomlinson reflected back on his life in his twilight years, he came to believe that his original mountaintop experience was prefigured in the Old Testament by the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. Not known for his modesty, Tomlinson saw Moses as his precursor and Israel as the precursor of the Church of God. So it seemed appropriate that an image of the original law revealed to Moses be built on the hillside opposite the one he descended after his revelation. Behold, the World’s Largest Ten Commandments. Written with concrete block letters across the neatly mown east hillside in King James Version English, its ten laws are divided into two tablet-shaped sets of five. The letters themselves are about five feet tall and the Roman numerals are about ten feet tall. Purportedly visible from outer space, it draws Christians and a few curious others miles down state highways and country roads to experience it for themselves in all its awesome glory. Between the two tablets is a stairway from the parking lot to the top, where there sits yet another record-setting textual body: the World’s Largest New Testament. Thirty feet high and fifty feet wide, this concrete book is opened to the Great Commandment from Matthew 22, to “love the Lord your God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” and to “love thy neighbor as thy self.” On this, Jesus declared, hang all the law and all the prophets.

Awefully Big Fields of the Wood hosts over a hundred thousand visitors every year, nearly all of them evangelical Christians. The complex is operated by seventeen full-time staff people and has an annual maintenance budget of $150,000, which is paid for by membership dues in the Church of God of Prophecy’s Heritage Ministries. In the early years, almost all visitors were members of the church. Arriving from all over the country for annual general assemblies and other meetings, they would run through the gates, arms waving, speaking in tongues, rapt in the Holy Ghost. These days, however, the vast majority of visitors have nothing to do with Tomlinson’s church. Most are Baptists. They arrive in tour buses and cars, placidly, sticky from long hot drives, with little or no visible signs of the spirit. I parked our motor home in the lot at the base of the Ten Commandments. It was early morning, and the sun was just beginning to peek over the World’s Largest New Testament above the World’s Largest Ten Commandments. Gospel music was being broadcast from tinny loudspeakers like the ones used at county fairs. By ten in the morning, a steady stream of cars and buses were pouring through the gates and filling the parking lots. Some visitors headed straight for the air-conditioned gift shop and café. Others gathered in a circle of folding chairs for a Bible study under a shade tent near the baptismal font. But most didn’t leave the parking lot. They stood there, mouths hanging open in rapt awe, staring at the main attraction, the World’s Largest Ten Commandments. What did they see?​ “They can’t be reading it,” Sophie commented. “It’s too big to read.” She was absolutely right. From the vantage point of the parking lot, this giant text is, let’s say, largely illegible. You can recognize letters and Roman numerals, but it’s nearly impossible to read whole commandments, let alone the whole Ten Commandments. You’re too close. In order to

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Figure 12.1  World’s Largest Ten Commandments, Field of the Wood.

make it legible, you need to gain some distance by climbing the stairs on the opposite hillside. Few that I saw in this predominantly older church crowd were even considering that. Besides, most were plenty familiar with the words, which are not semantically altered by size. Indeed, whatever Tomlinson’s original intention in creating it, the effect of this attraction has little to do with its theological content, the meaning of its actual text. It’s not about saying the Ten Commandments in a big, loud way. It’s about overwhelming viewers with illegible bigness. The intent here seems to be to elicit a religious experience of awe in the face of a sacred law that is overwhelmingly, ineffably huge in a most literal way. As I mentioned earlier, Clover grew up in a small charismatic church, and continues to have a warm spot in her heart for that tradition. What endears her to that movement is its orientation toward the local congregation, the church family, and its base among working-class people of modest means and little formal education who live out their faith with integrity and sincerity. On the one hand, she says, people in this tradition have a kind of assurance of faith, which comes from the gifts of the spirit (tongues, for example). This is seen as a mark of the spirit’s presence. On the other hand, there is a real humility among them, because salvation is never secure; it’s a process of self-sanctification. Here at Fields of the Wood, with all its gigantic monuments and scriptural proof texts, she felt that that tension had been lost. The feeling this place conveys is one of spiritual superiority and spiritual security that you don’t see on the ground in the real spiritual lives of people within this movement, who work out their salvation in fear and trembling, as the Apostle Paul put it. Here, it seems, charismatic enthusiasm about the presence of the spirit has been amplified into a kind of whitewashed hugeness that seems alien from the grassroots authenticity that marks local congregations within the movement.

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Idolizing the Word The proprietor of Fields of the Wood when we visited was Dr. Wade Phillips, who was also serving as a leading church historian of the Church of God of Prophecy and doing some teaching at the Church of God Theological Seminary in the nearby town of Cleveland, Tennessee. I met him in the café, where he was just finishing up a couple burger baskets for customers. “I’ll be right with you, Tim,” he said cheerfully with a warm southern accent. “Our cook is running late and I need to cover for him.” The air-conditioned indoor dining area was full, so I waited at a picnic table outside. Eventually Dr. Phillips took off his cooking apron and joined me for a conversation about the story of Fields of the Wood, most of which I’ve already shared. Although he can grill a burger or mop a floor when he needs to, Dr. Phillips is first and foremost a scholar, and his primary interest is in the history of the Church of God of Prophecy. He describes his own conversion to Christianity, nearly forty years ago, as beginning with a very deeply felt “desire to know,” and his entire ministry has been one of historical research, which he has carried out with great passion. Indeed, one of the things that attracted him to the position of church historian at Fields of the Wood was that it allowed him to conduct primary research on the early history of Tomlinson and the holiness movement in local church archives and through personal interviews with Church of God old-timers. As a leader in a movement whose history he studies, Dr. Phillips’s scholarly research and his personal faith life are inseparable. Indeed, he sees himself as a reformer. He expressed particular concern that Fields of the Wood has become something of a sacred center, a “Salt Lake City or Mecca,” as he put it, for the Church of God of Prophecy. He’s absolutely right: as I suggested earlier, it is both Mount Sinai and Jerusalem. Seeing such a sanctification of this place as “cultish,” he was working to make it more of a center of historical education for the church. Although put in conservative Christian terms that Clover would not use, he was expressing a concern about this place that was very similar to hers—namely, that the living spirituality of the charismatic movement was here being in some way monumentalized into a concrete institutional form of spiritual dominance. Put another way, we might say that Dr. Phillips worries that the movement’s early twentieth-century revival and reawakening that began with the movement of the Spirit, which goes where it will, now finds itself sacramentally set in concrete. The visible sign of the church here at Fields of the Wood is at risk of becoming a graven image in itself. Dr. Phillips’s concern reflects a deep-seated conviction, shared by many conservative Protestants, that Christianity, unlike other religions, is essentially immaterial, even antimaterial. In fact, many Protestants insist that Christianity is not a “religion” at all. To get back to the New Testament church is to get out from under all the “cultish” layers of tradition—those sensual smells and bells and sacred grounds that have smothered right doctrine with religious aesthetics. For Phillips and many other Protestants, human fascination with the materiality of religion seduces Christians away from the true foundations of faith, which are essentially dogmatic and grounded in the Word, not the image. Too much focus on the things and images of Christian tradition leads to the sin of idolatry. Since our visit, Dr. Phillips has left his position at Fields of the Wood and broken from the Church of God of Prophecy. Convinced that that church is neglecting some of its oldest and most fundamental principles, he has started a new church in nearby Cleveland, Tennessee. It would be understandable if part of Dr. Phillips’s reason for leaving was also frustration in the battle against “cultish” idolatry at Fields of the Wood. He certainly had his work cut out for him there.

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Whether or not we identify with the fundamentalist aversion to the material aesthetics of Christianity (I don’t), it’s doubtful that Fields of the Wood will ever free itself entirely from its sanctification of material objects. Indeed, if anything, what Fields of the Wood has done is make the Word into a material idol. If you climb the hill opposite the World’s Largest Ten Commandments, so that you can read them, you’ll note that the Second Commandment is the prohibition against idolatry: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” In its reverent display of this and the other nine commandments, it seems to me that Fields of the Wood idolizes the Word itself. It has turned the Ten Commandments, with their prohibition against graven images, into a graven image—“the World’s Largest,” in fact. Not that it’s a graven image of God her- or himself. Yet the Ten Commandments themselves, which for many Christians symbolize the Word of God, holy scripture, are here concretized as a sacred object, eliciting a worshipful response of reverence, awe, even praise. What compels and overwhelms visitors about the World’s Largest Ten Commandments is not what they say but how big they are. This ginormous text does not assert its theological content so much as it overwhelms the senses. It does not elicit a theological or doctrinal experience, a revelation of the authoritative truth of scripture or divine law. Rather it elicits an aesthetic religious experience of the Word of God as image, and I dare say idol. In even the most iconoclastic religious traditions, sacred objects and images have ways of getting around all the prohibitions against them. One way is by making the written word itself into a sacred image, thereby undermining the priority of word over image. In Islamic and Jewish calligraphy, for example, we find images of texts that are so ornately beautiful that they are nearly unreadable. The aesthetics of the word as image has overtaken its literary content. Bordering on illegibility, the word has essentially become image. Granted, the Word made image at Fields of the Wood is not nearly so beautiful as these Islamic and Jewish calligraphic texts. Yet, as a remarkable instance of the return of the religiously suppressed, these giant hillside tablets do deserve a prize for irony, making a graven image of the prohibition against graven images. Not that irony is much prized among those biblicists most susceptible to this particular form of it, whether we find them gazing in awe at the massive Roman numerals on the hillside of Fields of the Wood or kneeling in a prayer circle around the Alabama state Judicial Building wherein Chief Justice Roy Moore was fighting to keep his 5300-pound monument of the two tablets prominently and reverently displayed. Near the lower right-hand corner of the second tablet, next to the Tenth Commandment, there are three life-size concrete sheep. One is lying down, its head turned toward the parking lot, and the other two are grazing in the dry, pale green grass. Pastoral images of peace and contentment, they are sinking ever so gradually into the ground. Their legs are no longer visible, and the faces of the two that are grazing are burrowed underground as though they’re grubbing for worms. More than a half-century of gravity must be having the same effect on the Ten Commandments themselves. Eventually, without some major digging and foundation work, they will bury themselves on that hillside. Perhaps, in the end, nature will be Dr. Phillips’s greatest ally in deterring idolatry at Fields of the Wood.​ As we climbed the stairs between the two tablets a little dog came trotting our way along the grass above number V, “Honor thy father and mother.” She was clearly a new mother and had left her nursing puppies in the woods somewhere in search of food. Her ribs and hips poked out of her mangy coat. She looked to be starving. Sophie and Seth ran to meet her and soon had made fast friends. Realizing how hungry she was, and that she had puppies somewhere, they took her on as their mission for the day, buying her food and playing with her on the grassy slopes of the Ten Commandments. Whenever she would trot over near the gift shop and café, the kids close

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Figure 12.2  Sinking Sheep, Field of the Wood.

behind, she was shooed away by clapping and yelling visitors. Witnessing this, Sophie and Seth were filled with righteous indignation. To this day, ask them about Fields of the Wood and they won’t tell you about the baptismal pool, or the rolling stone in front of the tomb, or even the huge Ten Commandments. They’ll tell you about the stray mother dog and how poorly she was treated. “These people say they’re Christians, and they treated that dog like that,” Seth said, his voice shaking with anger. For our kids, as the Commandments were amplified, another more important biblical lesson had been ignored: “Truly I say to you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (Matthew 25:45).

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Almost Cultural Studies? Reflections on the “New Perspective” on Paul R. Barry Matlock

It is a fair guess that Pauline studies is, in terms of methods and approaches, the most conservative enclave of biblical criticism. I say this with little fear of wresting the dubious honor from other, more deserving hands, and my reasoning runs something like this: as a result of the Christian reflexes that still seem to typify the (“mainstream”) discipline, the “new fangled” sorts of criticism are much more readily turned loose on the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible than the New Testament, which makes New Testament studies as a whole more conservative than the Old Testament counterpart; the Gospels have going for them both their narrative character (facilitating the application of “new” literary readings, as in “new critical,” which is to say “old”—“new fangled” is a relative term) and their perennially interesting central figure, Jesus (on account of whom Gospel criticism can always be counted on to generate some heat, if not light— witness the Jesus Seminar); and since the General Epistles arc largely ignored and Revelation comes more or less under the Old Testament rule (anything goes), that leaves Pauline studies, as I said, bringing up the rear. Now whether this is down to limitations in the source material or in scholarly imagination, or some combination of both, is subject to debate; but at any rate, one does not expect Pauline studies to be a particularly prominent site of the transposition of “Biblical into Cultural Studies.” So what does one do when one’s main area is Paul and one is called upon to contribute in some small way to a colloquium on just such a disciplinary transposition? What I propose to do here is to suggest some ways in which contemporary “new perspective” discussion in Pauline studies carries, at least implicitly, concerns relevant to cultural studies. Granted, this cultural studies potential will, for the most part, be of a relatively low order theoretically: the significance of cultural location in biblical reading will be seen to be the most obvious bridge between familiar Pauline interpretation and cultural studies. I can also point, though, to a recent effort by a cultural critic (predictably, an “interloper” into Pauline studies!) to develop and extend the “new perspective” into an explicit reading of Paul as himself a cultural critic; here, the matter of the construction of “identity” will be seen to belong quite properly to the reading of Paul. (Perhaps I can simply say that my modest engagement with cultural studies via Pauline criticism might serve as a softening-up move for others, revealing how even “real biblical scholarship” itself already takes us to the borders of cultural studies, if not beyond!)

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The “New Perspective” in Ironic Perspective William James described with considerable insight “the classic stages of a theory’s career. First . . . a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.”1 That this description came to my attention in a more recent application of it to the fortunes of Thomas S. Kuhn’s theory of scientific paradigms and revolutions is apposite, for in recent years Pauline studies has proudly marked a “paradigm shift” of its own, known broadly as “the new perspective on Paul,” a shift associated in particular with Krister Stendahl and E.P. Sanders.2 When sufficient distance is achieved from this interpretive sea change in reading Paul, perhaps it will be seen that it, too, suffered such a fate or enjoyed such a fortune, a movement from an initial urge toward dismissal of the perspective on the part of many, to an effort to reveal the degree to which the “new” agenda was anticipated and preceded by earlier work and thus represents nothing really new at all, to, in the end, a quiet assumption of the heart of this new perspective. Where we might now stand on such a trajectory—let alone where my own effort here fits in—is difficult to say. Things have yet to settle down to a clear, singular consensus (which is, these days, perhaps too much to hope for in biblical studies anyway, if it ever was a realistic goal). Still, we seem to be far enough along to achieve some degree of perspective on the “new perspective.” Moreover, it is imperative that self-reflective questions be raised, and a significant part of this disciplinary stocktaking ought well to be hermeneutical (indeed, cultural). There is no need to rehearse the matter of the embeddedness in its own time of the “old perspective,” the Reformation’s “new look” at Paul—indeed, as we will note, this has been a staple theme in “new perspective” argument. But the ways in which our own contemporary new readings of Paul are implicated in our time—inasmuch as this is transparent to us—will, in the nature of the case, be less familiar (a matter, furthermore, on which the “new perspective,” given its rhetoric, is less eager to dwell). For my purposes, I must assume a degree of familiarity with the “new perspective” on Paul.3 I will, though, give the briefest of characterizations. First, it might be helpful to point out that, at least according to my usage here, the “new perspective” signifies not a singular, settled position but a broad family of related interpretive tendencies. And “new” though it may be, its concerns are still broadly traditional, that is, theological (particularly soteriological). We might describe the perspective as resting on two “pillars,” two fundamental axioms: that Paul was not really about individual sin, guilt and forgiveness, but rather that communal and social concerns to do with Jewish and Gentile relations, practical concerns arising from Paul’s mission, were his primary context and focus; and that the Judaism of Paul’s day was not a “legalistic” religion of meritorious “works-righteousness,” so that Paul’s “opponents,” and his position over against W. James, Pragmatism (ed. F. Bowers and I.K. Skrupskclis; The Works of William James; Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 95. 2 R.J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), p. 51. For such reference to a “paradigm shift” in Pauline studies, see, e.g., D.J. Moo, “Paul and the Law in the Last Ten Years,” SJT 40 (1987), pp. 287-307 (287). The pivotal works of Stendahl and Sanders here are K. Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” HTR 56 (1963), pp. 199-215, reprinted with other relevant studies in idem, Paul among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976); E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977). 3 A minimal remedial reading list would include at least Stendahl’s “Introspective Conscience” essay, a selection from Sanders (his “Jesus, Paul and Judaism,” ANRW, 11.25.1 [1982], pp. 390-450, nicely summarizes his work on these three entities), and J.D.G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” BJRL 65 (1983), pp. 95-122, reprinted in his Jesus, Paul and the Law (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), pp. 183-214. 1

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them, must be reassessed.4 Notice that each axiom begins m a negative: the new perspective defines itself polemically over against what it typically identifies as the “Lutheran” reading of Paul, this negative self-definition providing the real unity for what is otherwise an internally divided and still developing set of views. If we may take this new perspective broadly as an ongoing research program, the questions it brings, particularly to Paul’s Epistles to the Galatians and Romans, concern Paul’s overall argumentative context: is there, in Paul, a principled contrast between “doing” (the law) and “believing” (the gospel), or is the contrast between an “exclusive” (a Jewish law) and an “inclusive” (a universally accessible faith) approach to God’s saving prerogatives? Larger interpretive issues concern, on the one hand, Paul’s relative continuity and/or discontinuity with his own religious past and its traditional expectations and Scripture readings, and, on the other, the structure of his thought (in particular, its division into two strands, the “juristic” and the “participatory”) and the meaning and relative place of Paul’s “righteousness/justification by faith” language. A defining moment in the interpretive shift we are considering is Krister Stendahl’s justly famous essay, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.”5 Stendahl’s title itself, in its juxtaposition of Paul and “the West,” implicitly suggests cultural studies import in terms of the significance to biblical reading of social and cultural location. His reading emphasizes the unfortunate interpretive consequences of the individualistic and subjectivistic tendencies of “modern” reading of Paul as defined by the tradition of Augustine (“the first modern man”), Luther (that “truly Augustinian monk”), and the Protestant Reformation (the cradle of modernity).6 Paul was actually concerned with proper Christian-Jewish relations. Of the many matters touched upon in E.P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism, nothing dominates the whole so much as the exposure of typical Christian readings of Judaism, particularly those beholden to the tradition critiqued by Stendahl, as self-serving caricatures (an insight against which Sanders’s Paul is careful not to offend), again, implicitly a matter of reading location. To these we may add the perspective of James Dunn, who follows up Stendahl and Sanders by working to make the new Paul fit more closely the new perspective on Pauline interpretation (our individualism has hidden Paul’s corporateness from us) and Judaism (Paul critiques Judaism as it actually was). According to Dunn’s reading, Paul’s own characteristic struggle is actually against nationalism, against ethnocentrism, against racial bigotry—implicitly making Paul himself something of a “cultural critic.” But the cultural studies legacy of the new perspective on Paul is not without its ambiguities, its ironic turns. This is evident at those many moments when the debate itself goes hermeneutical. Typically, those associated with the new perspective have wanted not merely to present their new picture of Paul but also to say just where, how, and why the old picture went wrong. The history, or story, of interpretation is told with a very strong moral offering a self-consciously hermeneutical lesson.

On such a twofold description, cf. Moo, “Paul and the Law in the Last Ten Years,” pp. 287–89; similarly, e.g., D.A. Hagner, “Paul and Judaism: The Jewish Matrix of Early Christianity: Issues in the Current Debate,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 3 (1993), pp. 111–30 (111-13). This characterization is readily confirmed in the literature; we may regard Stendahl as serving more to make the former point (about Paul’s salvation-historical context) and Sanders the latter (about the Judaism of Paul’s day)—though each figure is relevant to the other point as well. Other fine surveys of the interpretive debate include, in brief, J.M.G. Barclay, “Paul and the Law: Observations on Some Recent Debates,” Themelios 12 (1986), pp. 5–15, and, at length, S. Westerholm, Israel’s Law and the Church’s Faith: Paul and his Recent Interpreters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988). 5 Stendahl, Paul, pp. 78–96. 6 Stendahl, Paul, pp. 83, 85. 4

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Stendahl plays heavily on the irony that, at the very point where Western interpreters have felt most near to Paul, they are in fact most distant: In Protestant Christianity—which, however, at this point has its roots in Augustine and in the piety of the Middle Ages—the Pauline awareness of sin has been interpreted in the light of Luther’s struggle with his conscience. But it is exactly at that point that we can discern the most drastic difference between Luther and Paul . . .7

But having thus emphasized the significance of perspectival reading, Stendahl does not become an advocate of “reading from this place” (to borrow a recent title),8 but instead he notoriously promotes “reading from no place.” He concludes his exposé of Western misdirection of interpretive energies with the pronouncement: “Few things are more liberating and creative in modern theology than a clear distinction between the ‘original’ and the ‘translation’ in any age, our own included.”9 As his programmatic hermeneutical piece “Contemporary Biblical Theology” has it (commenting here on Karl Barth): To say that the Reformers interpreted Paul by equating the problem of the Judaizers and the Torah in Paul with the problem of work-righteousness in late medieval piety and that this ingenious translation or application of Pauline theology may be 80 per cent correct but left 20 per cent of Paul inexplicable—and consequently distorted in a certain sense the true picture of Pauline thought—to say this is to call attention to a problem which could not be detected, let alone criticized, by Barth or any truly Barthian exegete. Thus biblical theology along, this line is admittedly incapable of enough patience and enthusiasm for keeping alive the tension between what the text meant and what it means. There are no criteria by which they can be kept apart; what is intended as a commentary [i.e. Barth’s Romans] turns out to be a theological tractate, expanding in contemporary terms what Paul should have said about the subject matter as understood by the commentator.10

Thus, to depart hermeneutically from Stendahl’s “two stage” method (what the text meant, what the text means) is both to be doomed to interpretive failure and to an interpretive inability even to perceive the problem—one would be unable both to see the real Paul and to see that one could not see the real Paul—blinded, presumably, as one would be by the perspective of the present. To Stendahl we may add hermeneutical statements from Sanders and Dunn. Sanders complains of the traditional Protestant interpretation of Paul and Judaism that it is an example of “the writing of theology as if it were history,” and he later declares: “I have been engaged for some years in the effort to free history and exegesis from the control of theology.”11 “Augustine, Luther, and Barth . . . all read Paul through their own spectacles and interpreted him in ways appropriate to their own circumstances,” whereas it is Sanders’s aim “not to use Paul to address the present situation, but rather to try to reconstruct what he Stendahl, Paul, p. 79. F.F. Segovia and M.A. Tolbert (eds.), Reading from This Place (2 vols.; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994, 1995). Stendahl, Paul, p. 96. 10 K. Stendahl, “Biblical Theology, Contemporary,” in IDB, I, pp. 418-32 (420). 11 Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, p 57; idem, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 333 (Sanders goes on to explain that he is not guilty of any such control of history and exegesis by theology, since his own liberal, modern, secularized Protestantism is able to sit rather loosely with respect to Jesus [p. 334]). 7 8 9

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thought, and why he thought it, and to do so in the categories of his own time and place.”12 We, presumably, are now able to remove our spectacles, or at least to render them transparent and distortion-free, interpreting thus to no particular circumstances or situation (our own perspective being excluded as only getting in the way of our access to Paul).

Finally, in similar vein James Dunn declares: “Luther read Paul and the situation confronting Paul through the grid of his own experience . . . Now, however, in the light of Sanders’ contribution the scales have fallen from many eyes.”13 No lesser language than that of Paul’s own conversion is borrowed to express how we, with unclouded vision, have finally seen the light (a no doubt tongue-in-cheek analogy perhaps telling in more ways than it intends14). Thus encouraged by the debate itself to take a hermeneutical view, I shall proceed to make a series of ironic observations on this recent shift in interpretation. (As to what my ironic emplotment of the story says about my interests, that matter I will leave to others.)

The Objective Stance The first irony to observe is the very claim to objectivity so often stated or implied. The susceptibility of the two axioms of the new perspective to analysis as arising from, or at least as being in keeping with, contemporary concerns makes the stance of objectivity look immediately suspect, given the insistent denials we have witnessed that any such modernizing is going on. For indeed, we moderns are not typically concerned so much about sin and guilt and forgiveness as we are about notions of community, so that our theological climate is reflected here; and we need hardly mention how our renewed interest in Jewish—Christian dialogue, standing where we stand in time, exerts its own influence over new perspective debate.15 It is certainly not as though these interpreters are blind to, or lack interest in, the contemporary significance of their new look at Paul; precisely the reverse is the ease.16 Yet they are, rhetorically, caught in their own web. For in figuring the interpreter’s own perspective as itself in some sense the problem, they have restricted their own work to the terms of a “modernist” critical

E.P Sanders, Paul (Past Masters; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 18. J.D.G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity (London: SCM Press: Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991), p. 14. 14 Note the use made by Kuhn of “conversion” language, Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1970). pp. 144-59; cf. P. Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science (trans. A.T. Levine; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 257-58. 15 What I allude to here in brief I find spelled out more fully in a recent study which, though doing its own distinctive thing, is at points nicely, complementary to my own, but came into my hands only after I had completed the first part of the present study and planned the final part (on Daniel Boyarin, with whom also, I found, this study fruitfully engages): J.M.G. Barclay, “‘Neither Jew Nor Greek’: Multiculturalism and the New Perspective on Paul,” in M.G. Brett (ed.), Ethnicity and the Bible (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), pp. 197-214 (see pp. 203-205). I thank John for alerting me to his essay on a visit to Sheffield and for sending me a copy. 16 All three follow up their work on Paul with work having an ecumenical aspect (though historically focused on early Judaism and Jewish/Christian relation): cf. Stendahl’s two essays on “Judaism and Christianity,” repr. in his Meanings: The Bible as Document and as Guide (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 205-32; the three volumes on Jewish and Christian Self-Definition edited by Sanders et al. (London: SCM Press, 1980–82); and Dunn (ed.), Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, A.D. 70–135 (WUNT, 66; Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1992). 12 13

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rhetoric that is both easily undermined and begs to be.17 (To take this irony one step further, this “modern” rhetoric, turned with admittedly great effect against the Reformation’s reading of Paul, was first used by the Reformers themselves, in the rhetoric, of sola scriptura, to install their new Paul—which means the Reformers are caught in their own web as well, the same as that which ensnares their latter-day counter-reformers.) The way we have tended to do history of interpretation here is revealing—the way we like to tell the story.18 The preferred tone is triumphalist, the theme upward progress, converging on us (as it happens). We somehow do not wish to say that traditional readings of Paul simply no longer serve for our time, that we need other readings. The tradition is wrong, and we know why—we mean that absolutely, that is, we are able to occupy a position from which we can measure prior readings against “the real thing.”19 Ironically—but not surprisingly—we are much readier to borrow the Kuhnian language of a “paradigm shift” to describe the significance of our own revolutionary work than to reflect on the implications of such language in terms of the circularity of our critique of the former paradigm from our vantage point within the new. Thus, alongside a self-serving emphasis on the difference a change of “perspective” can make, and the need thus to “convert” and join those who have made the interpretive shift, we have a realist rhetoric of non-perspectival, that is “critical,” interpretation of former interpretation, where apparently the shift does not exert an influence on our reading of other readings. To add an ironic footnote to the irony of the claim to objectivity, compliments are, of course, no more “scientific” than insults. Yet a certain urge to say nice things about early Judaism often seems to be present. An example may be taken from James H. Charlesworth in a recent monograph: in the midst of a plea for greater scientific objectivity, where Charlesworth states axiomatically that “the historian is called on to describe not to prescribe,” he reflects on proper terminology for treating the Judaism of Paul’s time, weeding out offensive or misleading terms.20 Among these, “Late Judaism” is to be replaced by “Early Judaism,” and about this, I expect, there is already unanimity—but note Charlesworth’s explanation: [“Early Judaism”] has the connotation of being alive with refreshing new insights: we find here highly-developed and sophisticated metaphysical speculation, and introspective perceptions into the psychological complexities of being human . . . Early Jews were brilliantly alive with penetrating speculations into almost every facet of our world and universe.21

Descriptive, not prescriptive?

For such a restriction, note Sanders’s apparent discomfort with a possibly more “activist” construal of his efforts in Paul and Palestinian Judaism, where, pointedly denying a concern with anti-Semitism in biblical scholarship, he suggests his own preferred terms of how his work should be construed: “As I see it, the view which is here under attack is held because it is thought to correspond to the evidence, and I attack it because I think is does not” (p. xiii). On “modern” hermeneutics, see A.K.M. Adam, Making Sense of New Testament Theology: “Modern” Problems and Prospects (Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics, 11; Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1995). 18 On matters touched on here, see my “Biblical Criticism and the Rhetoric of Inquiry,” BibInt. 5 (1997), pp. 133–59 (esp. pp. 141, 147-48, 151-52). 19 Granted, Stendahl said not that the Reformers were wrong but that they were, say, “80 per cent correct,” but it may be questioned whether this kind allowance (which at any rate is more or less taken back as soon as it is given) is really borne out by his interpretive stance toward this traditional reading of Paul. 20 J.H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Preudepigrapha and the New Testament (SNTSMS, 54; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). p. 58. 21 Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament, p. 59. 17

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Now my point in drawing attention to this is not that I do not like to see Judaism complimented; nor am I urging interpreters to be more “scientific.” Rather, I am taking this very “urge to compliment” as indicating that there is more at play here than mere “science.” And our impulsive denials of this are simply part of the story. Furthermore, as an ironic footnote to this ironic footnote, such compliments often appear cynical and even condescending. Surely the pseudepigraphal literature that Charlesworth has particularly in mind, though certainly still of interest and value in a number of ways, presents at innumerable points for Charlesworth the same mixture of the quaint and the bizarre as it does for everyone else. Does Charlesworth really consult these Early Jewish texts for contemporary guidance (“refreshing new insights,” “highly-developed, sophisticated, and penetrating speculations”) on the matters treated there? The “urge to compliment,” then, can come off, in the end, as rather insulting (hence my pausing to make a point of the matter).22

A Residual Biblicism Having begun to take an ironic look at the new perspective, we can proceed through several more turns of the screw, and in so doing the cultural studies potential of the new perspective is rendered by degrees more ambiguous, more diluted, more attenuated. The irony now to be observed is not unrelated to the ironic claim to objectivity. By “residual biblicism” I mean the apparent desire to have Paul affirm our own deepest values, to find ready to hand in this biblical witness that which we may now affirm for ourselves. (Logically, this point particularly concerns Christian interpretation of Paul—indeed, the “new perspective” is a “contemporary” Protestant interpretive movement, a reformation of its own Reformation heritage.) Thus Paul is at times sounding surprisingly liberal, Western and pluralist—and that after all the warnings of his distance from us (leaving us to ask once more whether Luther’s Paul comes to grief more for his failure to fit the twentieth century than the first, whether, ironically, the new perspective’s hermeneutical moralizing could as well be turned on itself).23 Now, I do not really wish simply to repeat Stendahl’s “original versus translation” scheme, and it is not in my interest to chide interpreters when their readings can be placed in some kind of intimate relationship with contemporary contexts of aims and values, contemporary “interpretive communities.” Indeed, this irony is what it is in light of the pointed and specific denials that anything such is going on. (Apart from this polemical context, my own intuition that this sort of thing is only ever what goes on would prohibit me from making much of this ironic biblicism.)

Charlesworth is, admittedly, a rather obvious example of what I would nevertheless suggest are wider tendencies. At an earlier stage with the present study (in oral presentation in Sheffield, June 1994), I spoke of “political correctness” as typifying the new perspective at such points as this and as further confirming as contemporaneousness, its reflection of current concerns; I would now refrain from using the term, as it has clearly emerged as a buzz-word for the political right. Barclay, “Neither Jew Nor Greek,” pp. 205-206, uses the term “multiculturalism” in a similar connection. Whatever the term, I (like Barclay) would commend the move toward multicultural sensitivity and dialogue; yet here I want to make a negative point (but not the negative one made by the political right, which is of the “there goes the neighborhood” variety): what is going on in this vein in reading Paul and Judaism is, as I suggest above, at times somewhat shallow and even, in a roundabout way, offensive (thus working at cross purposes with the wider cultural impulse). 23 An example of such an unexpectedly pluralist Paul might be found in the “two covenants” reading associated with Stendahl, according to which Pauline Christianity and Judaism each go their own mutually affirming way. 22

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There are subtle shades here. Some positions within the new perspective, where Paul comes off as is exactly as we might want him to (for example, as never critiquing Judaism and the law as such, but only opposing a nationalistic and sectarian exclusivism), seem on their very face biblicistic. That is, they read right off the biblical page self-affirmative views, and it seems difficult not to have one’s suspicions raised—by the self-same suspicious reflex that the new perspective itself exercises—that perhaps there is the need to do this (in the sense of a need for direct biblical authorization). But even where other readings of Paul allow some degree of tension between Paul and contemporary Christian convictions, such readings do not simply on that account escape connection with the present, for wherever they are found they are enabled simply by other strategies or possibilities of relating biblical interpretation to contemporary praxis—other “interpretive communities.” What is more, an important rival to this “universalistic Paul,” the “dogmatic Paul,” according to which view Paul offers no real reason for his shift from life within the law to faith in Jesus Christ, so that Paul emerges as (apparently) making an arbitrary leap, is susceptible of analysis as finding resonance in contemporary sensibilities. For here Paul, though admittedly exclusivistic in his avowal of Jesus, is so in such a way as to leave Judaism untouched in its own right. If for Paul the difference between Christianity and Judaism (leaving aside the anachronism of speaking thus of two discrete religions at that time) is at bottom arbitrary, so much the better for us, because that is the way we as moderns would prefer to have it, too. True, Paul’s instinctive pastoral attempts to offer secondary rationales for his change of heart hide his arbitrariness from him; but not from us.24 History and exegesis (those reified and rarefied entities), if emancipated from theology, do not then find themselves with their destinies in their own hands, as it were. They never find themselves, in fact, in anyone’s hands but ours, with all that this entails. Exegetical and historical debate, then, may often be seen as concealing more fundamental issues left unspoken, unaddressed, and unresolved. (Here one such issue might be the very place of the Bible in contemporary theology, ethics, and politics.25) With the (reputed) demise of theology, the introspective conscience of Pauline studies will still have matters over which to wring its worried hands.

A Certain Covert Protestantism As we have noted, criticism of Protestantism’s record of handling early Judaism is central to the new perspective, a critique of Christian caricatures of Judaism that was long overdue.26 Ironically, though, it often seems uncannily as though the same old Protestant debates are being played out, only now a favorable verdict is being passed down on Judaism. Judaism suddenly finds itself shifted from one side of the equation to the other, but the same set of values works the scales, the same Protestant reflexes animate the interpretive debate. This is one of the most biting ironies of the whole story before us.

T h ose familiar with the interpretive debate will be readily able to assign the points of view hinted at in this paragraph to individual scholars; I do not name names, not to be underhanded, but out of a sense for the oversimplification present in my characterization. 25 Jennifer Glancy and I noticed here a partial overlapping of our contributions to the Colloquium. 26 Sanders in particular, of course, is associated with this critique; he builds self-consciously on the classic essay by G.F. Moore, “Christian Writers on Judaism,” HTR 14 (1921), pp. 197-254, as well as on the work of such Jewish scholars as C.G. Montefiore, S Schechter, H.J. Schoeps and S Sandmel (the critique was not so much long overdue, then, as far too long in taking hold). 24

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A couple other voices on this score may help me make my (otherwise perhaps controversial) point. First, from Philip Alexander, in a review of Sanders’s Jesus and Judaism: Sanders continues [his] attack . . . on the Christian caricature of Pharisaic and Rabbinic Judaism as “legalism.” He has no difficulty in exposing the odium theologicum that lies behind some supposedly critical New Testament scholarship, and in showing that notions of divine love, grace and forgiveness are not foreign to the Pharisees and the Rabbis. This is music to the reviewer’s ears. But perhaps Sanders has not identified the point at issue here with total accuracy. His answer to the charge of “legalism” seems, in effect, to be that Rabbinic Judaism, despite appearances, is really a religion of “grace.” But does this not involve a tacit acceptance of a major element in his opponent’s position—the assumption that “grace” is superior to “law”? The correct response to the charge muse surely be: And what is wrong with “legalism,” once we have got rid of abusive language about “hypocrisy” and “mere externalism”? It is neither religiously nor philosophically self-evident that a “legalistic” view of the world is inferior to one based on “grace.” If we fail to take a firm stand on this point we run the risk of seriously misdescribing Pharisaic and Rabbinic Judaism, and of trying to make it over into a pale reflection of Protestant Christianity.27

(Dunn might seem in danger of the latter in such comments as: “Paul is wholly at one with his fellow Jews in asserting that justification is by faith.”28) Similarly if less gently, and serving to illustrate Alexander’s point, Jacob Neusner, in an article review of Sanders’s recent work on the Pharisees and early Judaism, closes with some highly personal comments on “Sanders’ Protestant theological apologetic for a Judaism in the Liberal Protestant model.”29 He cites a lengthy excerpt in which Sanders, commenting on Sabbath observance and its negative treatment in Jesus and Paul, says that “the assumption that they attacked ‘ritual’ implies that rest on the sabbath should be considered ‘ritual.’ It was instead commemorative (of God’s rest) and ethical (not only men, but also women, servants, animals, and the land itself were allowed to rest).”30 To Neusner, this is “theologically condescending,” because Sanders affirms that, if the Pharisees practiced “ritual,” then they, and the Judaism that claims descent from them, would be subject to condemnation by Jesus and Paul . . . As a believing Jew, I practice Judaism, and I do not appreciate—or require—a defense that dismisses as unimportant or inauthentic what in my faith is very important indeed: the observance of rituals of various kinds. They are mine because they are the Torah’s. I do not propose to apologize for them. I do not wish to explain them away. I do not reduce them to their ethical significance. “Commemorative” and “ethical” indeed! . . . Nor do I value a defence of my religion that implicitly throughout and explicitly at many points accepts at face value what another religion values and rejects what my religion deems authentic P. Alexander, review of Jesus and Judaism, by E.P. Sanders, in JJS 37 (1986), pp. 103-106 (105). Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” in Jesus, Paul and the Law, p. 190. In highlighting this comment, I do not intend to give aid to the caricatures of Judaism that Dunn rightly joins Sanders in exposing. But “justification by faith” has become a watchword for Protestantism, not Judaism in its own self-description, and one expects there to be some reason for this, pointing to some kind of difference. To smooth over such difference by stretching one’s own perspective to cover all invites precisely the counter-charge suggested here of imperialism and condescension, of misplaced “generosity.” 29 J. Neusner, “Mr. Sanders’ Pharisees and Mine: A Response to E.P Sanders,” Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah, SJT 44 (1991), pp 73-95 (92). 30 Sanders. Jewish Law, p. 245, cited in Neusner, “Mr. Sanders’ Pharisees,” p. 93. 27 28

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service to the living God. In the end Sanders wants to defend Judaism by his re-presentation of Pharisaism in a form that, in his view, Christianity can have affirmed then and should appreciate today—and therefore now cease to denigrate. That approved Judaism turns out to be a Judaism in the model of Christianity (in Sanders’s pattern). [His] “Judaism” represented as kosher to Liberal Protestantism is only a caricature and an offence.31

Both these respondents are careful to acknowledge Sanders’s good intentions, but nevertheless both point to undesired consequences, and suggest unconscious motivations, of Sanders’s interpretation. And a further irony that seems to be implied in Neusner’s critique, when he speaks of “Christianity in Sanders’s pattern,” is that that liberal Protestantism which casts its shadow unwittingly over early Judaism does the same for those strands of Christianity that alike fall foul of its strictures. In this way, a seemingly ecumenical gesture might have a sharply exclusionary rebound.

On Perspective A final cluster of ironies revolves around the whole matter of “perspective.” Paul’s and ours. I will attempt to get at a couple of points through a pair of citations from a recent treatment of many of the issues surrounding the new perspective, Stephen Westerholm’s Israel’s Law and the Church’s Faith: The methodological error has often been committed in the past of concluding that, since Paul contrasts grace and works and argues for salvation by grace, his opponents (and, ultimately, Judaism) must have worked with the same distinction but argued for salvation by works. Clearly this distorts Judaism, which never thought that divine grace was incompatible with divine requirements. But we become guilty of a similar methodological error if we conclude that, since Paul’s opponents did not distinguish between grace and requirements. Paul himself could not have done so either . . . The methodological point is crucial. Paul must not be allowed to be our main witness for Judaism, nor must Judaism, or the position of Paul’s opponents, determine the limits within which Paul is to be interpreted . . . Paul moves the whole discussion onto a different level . . . Forced to explain (as his opponents were not) both the law’s inadequacy and the distinction between the path of faith and that of the law, Paul characterized the law and the gospel in terms crucial to his case, but foreign to the understanding of his opponents.32 Neusner, “Mr. Sanders’ Pharisees,” pp. 94-95. The irony presently under review struck me from my earliest encounter with Sanders’s work on Paul and Judaism. The point has not gone entirely unnoticed in critical responses to Sanders, as Alexander and Neusner testify (though it has not received sufficient attention or response, I believe). Concerning Sanders’s earlier Paul and Palestinian Judaism, A.J. Saldarini, in a review in JBL 98 (1979), pp. 299-303 (300), hints at “Christian theological interests” lying behind Sanders’s treatment of rabbinic Judaism; similarly, Jacob Neusner, in “The Use of the Later Rabbinic Evidence for the Study of Paul,” in William Scott Green (ed.), Approaches to Ancient Judaism, II (BJS, 9; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1980), pp. 43-63, claims that Sanders puts to the Jewish material “questions of Pauline-Lutheran theology” (p. 51; cf. pp. 47, 49, 50, 53-56, 60). Sanders replies in the same volume (“Puzzling Out Rabbinic Judaism,” pp. 65-79 [65-69]), denying that he approaches the material with such extrinsic values; Sanders does not seem, though, to take up the real substance and force of Neusner’s objection on this matter (contrast Neusner, pp. 53-56, with Sanders, pp. 73-75), an objection which Neusner puts more pointedly in the text cited here. 32 Westerholm, Israel’s Law, p. 150. 31

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And elsewhere in the same work: [T]he insights of the “new perspective” must not be lost to view. Paul’s convictions need to be identified; they must also be recognized as Christian theology. When Paul’s conclusion that the path of the law is dependent on human works is used to posit a rabbinic doctrine of salvation by works, and when his claim that God’s grace in Christ excludes human boasting is used to portray rabbinic Jews as self-righteous boasters, the results (in Johnsonian terms) are “pernicious as well as false.” When, moreover, the doctrine of merit perceived by Luther in the Catholicism of his day is read into the Judaism of the first Christian centuries, the results are worthless for historical study. Students who want to know how a rabbinic Jew perceived humanity’s place in God’s world will read Paul with caution and Luther not at all. On the other hand, students who want to understand Paul but feel they have nothing to learn from a Martin Luther should consider a career in metallurgy. Exegesis is learned from the masters.33

One small irony here is that an interpreter reading Paul in recognizable continuity with Luther is more successful at shaking loose the debate over Paul from the ongoing Reformation debates than some of his rival “new perspectivists” are. Another more significant irony concerns the shift in perspective of criticism generally. As Westerholm notes, Paul is doing Christian theology. That is. Paul has himself experienced a paradigm shift. The question then becomes: Through whose eyes do we see the debate Paul is engaged in? Once upon a time interpreters may have simply (more or less unconsciously) assumed Paul’s critique of non-Christian Judaism as their own—that is, the reader was, quite unproblematically, doing Christian theology right along with Paul. This was “the norm.” Now, perhaps, we feel drawn to give priority to Judaism’s story (or stories) of itself. This inexorable process of secularization of biblical reading is, in fact, precisely an instance of what I am arguing—the beholdeness of interpretation to perspective, a beholdeness not just inevitable (where we might lament) but (at least potentially) productive, as the new perspective indeed wishes to claim for itself, and which we may readily grant (though, admittedly, where one is thinking perspectivally notions like “productive” and “progress” become somewhat problematic in the abstract). But there is more (questions of biblicism re-emerge here). For our shifting apprehension of Paul’s shift is often such as to render both invisible to us. Frequently, as I have argued, the new perspective variously obscures or erases Pauline difference from Judaism (creating good Protestants all around, while insisting that Paul’s critical perspective on Judaism must be seen to match Judaism on its own terms), failing all the while to make clear its own stance toward Paul’s stance (we are presumably just doing what we have always done—stating the facts about Paul, seeing Judaism as it is). Often we affect to keep to a neutral description of two parties in (some sort of) opposition, without ever quite having them opposed or ourselves entering into that opposition, while still wishing at points to question the legitimacy of Paul’s (apparently) revisionist appropriation of his tradition.34

Westerholm, Israel’s Law, p. 173. A further irony is at times apparent. For the modern, critical period, to be “critical” is precisely to offer a view from “outside,” a view not beholden to the perspective of that which is the object of critical analysis. But in this case, although Paul might on some readings be described as taking such a critical view of his own Jewish tradition, only the “insider” (that is, non-Christian) view of Judaism is allowed critical weight. By

33 34

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What I have described above as two larger interpretive issues carried by the contemporary debate on Paul, namely, Paul’s continuity and discontinuity with his own tradition and the structure of Paul’s thought relative to this, have taken on in recent years a characteristically modern form in the “new perspective” (though one ought really to note that these questions in some form characterize interpretation of Paul since Paul). But we should probably not congratulate ourselves too much about this. For when I say “characteristically modern” I mean just that—covered with the imprint of our own time and its concerns (or, to cite James once more, “the trail of the human serpent is . . . over everything”35). So much of our recent discussion of Paul comes down to this: was Paul reasonable (and we mean that absolutely) in his change of perspective, and could he reasonably have expected other Jews to follow? The conclusion that some are eager to draw and others anxious to avoid is that Paul is arbitrary, that is, unreasonable. The spectre of reason as somehow “relative” to alternative, “incommensurable” perspectives, where it rises for us at all, only leaves us cold—ironic, given how much of identity, Jewish and Christian alike, is bound up in this interpretive debate over Paul. Ultimately, the question presses itself: could we help telling our own story through Paul even if we tried? And in the present, “postmodern” critical climate, it becomes strange to us, perhaps, that we ever did try. As an index to this paradigm shift, and to what could come of the cultural studies potential of the new perspective given the will to exploit it to the full, I turn briefly in the end to the recent work of Daniel Boyarin.

A Cultural Reading of Paul Daniel Boyarin’s A Radical Jew does not quite stand alone as an example of a cultural reading of Paul (though neither is the field particularly crowded).36 I have chosen to highlight this as opposed to any other example especially because of its self-conscious development of the new perspective: Paul’s discourse on the Law and Judaism is seen to be “forever caught in a paradox of identity and difference.”37 It is impossible to do justice to Boyarin’s challenging and suggestive reading of Paul here. I will simply offer Boyarin as an extended example of a “cultural reading,” highlighting his hermeneutical self-positioning, his distinctive approach to Paul, and the links he draws between Pauline and contemporary cultural politics.38 contrast, Paul’s own apparent efforts at self-definition arc exposed as secondary rationalizations, ideological mystifications laid over what we know to be “the real Paul.” James, Pragmatism, p. 37. 36 D. Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Other varied examples of “cultural readings” of Paul would include E.A. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1991) and R. Jewett, Paul the Apostle to America: Cultural Trends and Pauline Scholarship (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994) (Jewett also interacts with the new perspective). In the present essay, I exaggerate, of course, in suggesting that it is all “the same old thing” in Pauline studies (nor have we exhausted all the interest in “the same old thing”!). Thus at the Colloquium Philip Esler rightly named a number of contemporary scholars applying “social-scientific” research to Paul as further examples of “cultural readings”; but while I certainly acknowledge that these are fresh attempts to explore new directions, I am not sure the label “cultural studies” quite applies (which is no insult, of course, but only a question of the definition of a term that is admittedly up for grabs)—though the work of Dale Martin could well be included here: cf. D.B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), and note Boyarin’s enthusiastic review (JBL/CRBR Online Reviews [http://scholar​.oc​.emory​.edu​/scripts​/jbl​-crbr​/reviews​.html], 7/96). 37 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 204. 38 I have chosen to be largely descriptive here (raising critical questions only briefly in the end relative to “cultural studies”), in order to introduce Boyarin’s work on Paul and to commend it to others; see also Barclay, “Neither 35

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First, Boyarin’s interpretive self-understanding, which stands out in its contrast to the “modernist” impulses of the new perspective suggested above: Here . . . you have a talmudist and postmodern Jewish cultural critic reading Paul. I think that my particular perspective as a practicing Jewish, non-Christian, critical but sympathetic reader of Paul conduces me to ways of understanding his work that are necessarily different from the ways of readers of other cultural stances. This text fits into the tradition, then, of what has come to be called cultural readings of the Bible, readings that are openly informed by the cultural knowledge and subject-positions of their producers.39

Reading Paul himself as “a Jewish cultural critic” who poses “a challenge to Jews now,” Boyarin asks “in what ways [Paul’s] critique is important and valid for Jews today, and indeed in what ways the questions that Paul raises about culture are important and valid for everyone.”40 “Paul represents in his person and thematizes in his discourse, paradoxes not only of Jewish identity, but . . . of all identity as such.”41 “Are the specificities of human identity, the differences, of value, or are they only an obstacle in the striving for justice and liberation? What I want to know is what Paul is saying to me, a male Jew, and how I must respond to it.”42 “Rather than seeing Paul as a text and my task that of a philologist, I see as engaged across the centuries in a common enterprise of cultural criticism.”43 “I am concerned . . . to register the response of an actively practicing (post)modern rabbinic Jew to both Paul and Pauline interpretation, particularly insofar as these (especially the latter) have often been inimical to my religious/ethnic group and practice.”44 The choice of a “starting point” or “key” to Paul “is primarily a theological, ethical, political decision, not a ‘scientific’ one”; Boyarin thus prefers readings that “render the Pauline corpus more or less coherent” and that prove “useful in appropriating the Pauline texts today.”45 The interpretive goal is not the correct reading, but a valid reading.46 “Perhaps not surprisingly, this book is part of the movement to thoroughly discredit the Reformation interpretation of Paul and particularly the description of Judaism on which it is based. I go further than some of the scholars in arguing that not only is this reading unsupportable in scholarly terms, but that it is an ethical scandal as well . . .”47 Jew Nor Greek,” pp. 206-14. In the introduction to the present paper I alluded to Boyarin (a talmudist) as “an ‘interloper’ into Pauline studies” (cf. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. ix-xi, 1, 12), meaning by this that, predictably, the mold of Pauline studies, where cultural studies is concerned, had to be broken from the outside. Actually, though, Boyarin’s engagement with Paul and with recent Pauline scholarship is so competent and insightful that he could only be regarded as an “outsider” in a (in this case negligible) disciplinary sense. Such boundary crossing as Boyarin engages in is always risky, vulnerable to a disciplinary closing of ranks; one hopes his effort will receive the attention it clearly deserves. 39 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 1. 40 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. 2-3. 41 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 3. 42 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 3. 43 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. 3-4. 44 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 4. 45 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 6; on this dual preference and Boyarin’s hermeneutics generally, see pp. 39-40, 54, 130-35, 183, 190, 199, 213-14, 218, 261 nn. 4, 5, 262 n. 6, 270 n. 50, 293-94 nn. 21, 23, 316 n. 20, 322-23 n. 53, 325 n. 13. 46 See Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 261 n. 5. 47 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 11; see n. 17 above. As Boyarin remarks elsewhere: “Postmodern hermeneutics has often been claimed as an escape from moral responsibility. I would claim the exact opposite. Interpretation can no longer serve as a cover for moral and political irresponsibility, since we know that hermeneutical choices are always being made by interpreters. There may be interpretations that the text excludes; it almost never demands only one reading” (pp. 213-14).

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Boyarin’s portrait of Paul makes no claim to know “what really happened” or “what was actually going on in the mind of Paul,” but is rather, he asserts, “a highly politicized intervention in biblical interpretation and, I hope, more than that as well,” a political reading of Paul accompanied by “a highly political account of different interpretations of Paul from the perspective of a Jew committed to the significance and continuation of Jewish culture and particularity.”48 Through an incisive account of recent new perspective debate, in which Boyarin emphasizes the need for a reading of Paul that does not “slander Judaism,” he associates his own approach most closely with the tradition of F.C. Baur (“Paul the universalizing critic of Jewish particularity”) as refined through the recent work of James Dunn (“Paul the universalizing critic of Jewish ethnocentrism”), figured by Boyarin as “Paul the cultural critic.”49 For Boyarin, the key Pauline document is his Epistle to the Galatians; the key texts, 3.26-29 and 4.21-31.50 Boyarin’s two chapters on Galatians particularly reveal his nearness to yet independence from Dunn: I wish to establish the plausibility of two claims: (1) that the social gospel was central to Paul’s ministry, i.e., that the eradication of human difference and hierarchy was its central theme, and (2) that the dyad of flesh and spirit was the vehicle by which this transformation was to take place.51

The second of these two claims introduces what is distinctive in Boyarin’s reading of Paul. “[T]he hermeneutical key to Paul” is “his allegorical hermeneutic and a cultural politics which grow out of the hermeneutical/intellectual and religious/moral world that he inhabits, the world of Hellenized Judaism of the first century.”52 Paul was motivated by a Hellenistic desire for the One, which among other things produced an ideal of a universal human essence, beyond difference and hierarchy. This universal humanity, however, was predicated (and still is) on the dualism of the flesh and the spirit, such that while the body is particular, marked through practice as Jew or Greek, and through anatomy as male or female, the spirit is universal . . . Paul’s anthropological dualism was matched by a hermeneutical dualism as well. Just as the human being is divided into a fleshy and a spiritual component, so also is language itself. It is composed of outer, material signs and inner, spiritual significations.53

Boyarin reads Paul, with Philo and others, as partaking of a diffuse and eclectic Hellenistic Jewish middle-Platonism, the source of his intimately interrelated anthropological and hermeneutical dualisms of letter or flesh and spirit. Paul’s Christian theology represents a supersession of historical Israel as carnal, a carnality aided by and expressed in a literal reading of scripture, of circumcision, of “Israel.” [T]he premise of this book is that for Paul the term flesh enters into a rich metaphorical and metonymic semantic field bounded on the one hand by the metaphorical usages already current in biblical parlance and on the other hand by the dualism of spirit and flesh current in the milieu of Hellenistic—that is, first-century—Judaism. It was the working out Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. 39-40. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. 40-56; 11-12. 50 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. 22-25, 266 n. 20; 32-36, 269 n. 42. 51 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 107; see pp. 106-57. 52 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 6. 53 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 7. 48 49

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and through of these multiple semantic possibilities that generated Paul’s major semantic innovations. Flesh is the penis and physical kinship; it is the site of sexuality, wherein lies the origin of sin; it is also the site of genealogy, wherein lies the ethnocentrism of Judaism as Paul encountered it. All of these could be opposed. Paul came to see, by a spiritual or ideal set of counterparts which would enable the escape from the two elements of human life that Paul felt most disturbing: desire and ethnicity . . . Paul came to oppose the Law because of the way that it literally—that is, carnally—insisted on the priority and importance of the flesh, of procreation and kinship, symbolized by the mark in the flesh, par excellence, the penis.54

“What concerned Paul . . . was the literal observance of the Law insofar as it frustrated what Paul took to be the moral and religious necessity of humankind, namely to erase all distinction between ethnos and ethnos, sex and sex and become one in Christ’s spiritual body,” and Paul’s “genius” lies in his having found in the “dualist ideology” of his culture a solution to this theological problem.55 For Paul, “‘true Jewishness’ ends up having nothing to do with family connection (descent from Abraham according to the flesh), history (having the Law), or maintaining the cultural/religious practices of the historical Jewish community (circumcision), but paradoxically consists of participating in a universalism, an allegory that dissolves those essences and meanings entirely.”56 Boyarin links Paul to the present via a tightly-knit chain of interpretive reasoning. On such cultural matters as gender and ethnicity, Boyarin “assum[es] that in some fundamental ways Paul has set the agenda . . . for both Jews and Christians until this day.”57 Paul’s allegoresis, hermeneutical and anthropological, is an expression of “a profound yearning for univocity,” for “the One,” for an idealized universal humanity (typically figured in the continuous “phallogocentric” Western tradition as male and European).58 “It is no accident, then, that the discourses of misogyny and anti-Judaism are profoundly implicated in projects of allegorical reading of the Bible,” given that the “metalinguistic practice” of “allegorical interpretation” is “not a local intervention in the meaning of texts but a global discourse on the meaning of language and the human body and especially on human difference.”59 The “hermeneutic system” of “midrash” which characterized the Rabbis “seems precisely to refuse that dualism, eschewing the inner–outer, visible–invisible, body–soul dichotomies of allegorical reading . . . Midrash and platonic allegory are alternate techniques of the body.”60 Boyarin’s “central thesis” is “that the allegorization of the sign ‘Israel’ in Paul is part and parcel of the very conception of difference within which Paul was to found his discourse on gender as well.”61 Paul yearns for the “erasure” of gender and ethnicity, and “allegoresis, the ultimate hermeneutical mode of logocentric discourse, unites both gender and ethnic identity as the secondary and devalued terms of the same binary opposition” (flesh/ spirit).62 The Pauline linkage between the Law and sin (Rom. 7 and elsewhere) is a reflex of the celibate Paul’s Hellenistic revulsion from sexuality; here the Law is problematic in its command to procreate, a command whose enticement to lust (and thus break the Law) ends in fallenness Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp 68-69; cf. pp. 78-81, 86-95. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 85. 56 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. 94-95, commenting on Rom. 2.28-29. 57 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 4. 58 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 16. 59 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 17. 60 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 14. 61 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 22. 62 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 24. 54 55

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and death. This Law is “fleshy” both in terms of its literal sense and in its having to do with “the flesh.” “In the new life of the spirit, however, even that most fleshly commandment to procreate will be understood in its spiritual sense, namely, as a commandment to spiritual procreation, to that which bears fruit for God and not for death,” and so, “literally by being not under Law, that is by not being obligated to procreate, the Christian is freed from the dominion of sinful passion, that is free to remove sexuality from her person, and thus able to free herself from being under sin.”63 But embodied Jewish commitment to circumcision and genealogy is thus spiritualized out of existence; similarly, embodied female difference is sacrificed to Paul’s yearning for a higher spiritual androgyny, above fleshy, corporeal gender and sexuality—in subsequent Christian tradition, offering a form of equality to celibate women (an “equality” figured as maleness), but at the cost of sexuality and maternity.64 Ironically, the very spiritualizing dualism that promises release from the divisions and inequities of race and gender is itself responsible for the devaluation of “the Jew” and “Woman.”65 In his final chapter, “Answering the Mail,” Boyarin states “that Paul’s letters are letters addressed to us—to me, as a (post)modern Jew,” and so Boyarin concludes “with a highly personal and engaged, perhaps not always completely satisfactory, attempt to answer Paul’s letters to me. How can I ethically construct a particular identity which is extremely precious to me without falling into ethnocentrism or racism of one kind or another?”66 Paul’s universalism seems to conduce to coercive politico-cultural systems that engage in more or less violent projects of the absorption of cultural specificities into the dominant one. Yet Jews cannot ignore the force of Paul’s critique just because of its negative effects, for uncritical devotion to ethnic particularity has equally negative effects.67

“My thesis is that rabbinic Judaism and Pauline Christianity as two different hermeneutic systems for reading the Bible generate two diametrically opposed, but mirror-like, forms of racism—and also two dialectical possibilities of anti-racism . . . The genius of Christianity is its concern for all of the peoples of the world; the genius of rabbinic Judaism is its ability to leave other people alone.”68 Drawing on recent discussion of “essentialism versus constructionism” in identity theory, Boyarin combines the two: “Claims for essence are legitimation strategies for identity politics

Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. 167, 169. See Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. 176-79, 180-200. 65 Boyarin traces Paul’s allegorization of “the Jew” through that Protestant theological tradition according to which “the Jew” is the symbol of inferior religion or debased human nature (in this case against the Pauline grain), and his critique of this tradition (A Radical Jew, pp. 209-219), focused on Bultmann. Käsemann and more recently, Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, is withering; it also provides an interesting hermeneutical moment: “Even granting the undecidability of texts, the multivariate nature of hermeneutics, and my own personal investments that lead me to read one way and not another, I find it hard to imagine that anyone who is not already inclined toward Hamerton-Kelly’s hatred of Judaism will find his paraphrase in Paul’s language . . .” (p. 218; cf. in another connection: “Zionism is a particular reading of Jewish culture and especially of the Bible. I do not, and could not, given my hermeneutic theories, argue that it is a wrong reading or that there is a right reading that can be countered to it. I do argue, however, that it is not the only reading” [p 246]; one might question whether the categories “wrong” and “right” are as off-limits, even on “postmodern” assumptions, as Boyarin suggests). The recent poststructuralist use of “Jew” or “Woman” as a disembodied symbol for all “difference” or “otherness” is held to be a similar, though well-meaning, allegorical move (pp. 219-27). 66 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. 228-29. 67 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 228. 68 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. 232-33. 63 64

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and, as such, are attacked at great peril to causes of difference and liberation of differences.”69 Genealogy serves this purpose for Jewish identity. But is this “racist”? Boyarin makes a crucial distinction between the political position of a dominated minority and a dominating majority: “the very things appealed to in order to legitimate the subaltern identity are appealed to as well by dominating groups in order to exploit the dominated. The valence of the claim shifts from negative to positive with the political status of the group making the claim.”70 Power makes all the difference, then Boyarin takes up the challenge of Paul’s universalizing critique of the divisive effects of “racial identity” and argues, in the end, that Paul’s critique hit the wrong target: it is not identity based on genealogy, but on autochthony, that is to be opposed.71 Finally, in a critique of aspects of Zionism and the Israeli State against the backdrop of other manifestations of hegemonic nationalisms in the contemporary world, Boyarin makes a plea for “diasporizing identity” and for “deterritorializing Judaism”: The dialectic between Paul and the Rabbis can be recuperated for cultural critique. When Christianity is the hegemonic power in Europe and the United States, then the resistance of Jews to being universalized can be a critical force and model for the resistance of all peoples to being Europeanized out of particular bodily existence. When, however, an ethnocentric Judaism becomes a temporal, hegemonic political force, it becomes absolutely, vitally necessary to accept Paul’s critical challenge—although not his universalizing, disembodying solution—and develop an equally passionate concern for all human beings . . . Somewhere in this dialectic a synthesis must be found, one that will allow for stubborn hanging on to ethnic, cultural specificity but in a context of deeply felt and enacted human solidarity. For that synthesis, Diaspora provides the model, and only in conditions of Diaspora can such a resolution even be attempted.72

The heights to which Boyarin takes Paul, compared to the more down to earth norm (positively dusty, actually), makes for an exhilarating (and sometimes dizzying) ride. In addition to Paul’s relevance to contemporary identity politics of race and gender, he is seen ultimately to contribute to current political dialogue on the “new world order.” The expanded sense of what a reading of Paul might open out into is a much needed challenge to Pauline studies. I initially suggested that the most obvious opening to “cultural studies” granted by familiar Pauline scholarship is the significance of cultural location in reading Paul—a matter relevant both for Paul and for his readers (in that the constructions of the former by the latter either— depending on whom you ask—conceal the “real” Paul or else reveal “Paul” in whatever shape he assumes). Boyarin extends “cultural reading” far beyond this.73 In fact, he offers a cultural reading in both of the two senses sometimes distinguished, the “culturalist” and the “(post)structuralist.”74 The “culturalist” reading yields a Paul consciously engaged in a principled political critique Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 238. Boyarin, A Radical few, pp. 241-42: Boyarin finds this distinction in both Foucault and Sanders (pp. 241, 25051)—must be true then! 71 See Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 253. 72 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. 256-57. 73 T h ough he typically uses the term itself to refer to this kind of awareness of reading location; cf. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, pp. 1, 32, 40, 204. 74 For the distinction between “culturalist” and “(post)structuralist” approaches, drawn from Stuart Hall, see A. Easthope, “Cultural Studies 1: United Kingdom,” in M. Groden and M. Kreisworth (eds.), The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 178: “The former, based on the work of Raymond Williams and the liberal humanist inheritance, conceives the human subject (whether individual or collective) as freely able to make up meanings for itself and rework social 69 70

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of his Jewish contemporaries (here Boyarin makes explicit what is often implicit in the “new perspective”). The “poststructuralist” reading goes behind the back of this other Paul, probing his allegorical discursive and signifying practices, of which Paul proves to be a victim (so that Paul is explicitly construed as a “cultural critic” only to be exposed as a deeply flawed one).75 That is, the latter reading undermines, subverts, deconstructs the former (by the same token, the former sets up the latter). This irony must be my parting one, but just here large questions might be raised, questions that both appropriately address Boyarin at the level of the broad sweep of his reading and that address more broadly the enterprise of cultural criticism itself.76 If Boyarin’s thesis is to meet resistance anywhere, it will surely be just here, in his move to a “poststructuralist” reading. What justifies such a move, in general and in this particular case? Can resistance be entirely put down to a nostalgic clinging to the notion of a free and unified human self (which we, as good “postmoderns,” are supposed to be beyond)? Do we not rightly retain some sense that the ethically significant level is that of consciously held principles and intentional purposive action, the level at which we hold each other accountable? How determinative are our tacit conceptions of language and the silent workings of signification? Cannot discursive practices and political convictions combine in varied, complex and reciprocal ways (rather than the former making the latter an inevitability)? Can we simply figure Pauline Christianity as allegorical and rabbinic Judaism as midrashic—and regard the outcome as predictable? But then do we not rightly sense, after all, some relation of reading practices to politics? And to what does the sort of ironic unmasking or depth-reading Boyarin employs owe its beguiling power, if and where it possesses such? Can we rhetoricize the choice of one or the other of the two modes of cultural reading (the “culturalist” reading more suited, perhaps, to reformation, the “poststructuralist” to revolution)? That is, can we relativize the move to our stance toward the object in question (in this case, Paul)? Can we rhetoricize the relation of discourse and politics—for Paul and for us?77 And might a “poststructuralist” critical reading wield its rhetorical power in such a way as to constitute a new scientism?

institutions, while the latter, deriving from structuralism and poststructuralism, envisages the subject as an identity or position determined within social and ideological structures of which he or she is an effect.” 75 T h is further move distinguishes Boyarin’s cultural reading from that of say, Jewett, Paul, The Apostle to America. 76 I have only questions here, not answers (though one might well perceive a drift to the following); these questions are not meant to detract from Boyarin, but are offered in a spirit of constructive dialogue. 77 Boyarin resists attributing Paul’s “allegorical” discourse to “mere rhetoric,” wishing rather to explain Paul (see pp. 35. 68, 109, 269 n. 42)—quite un-postmodern on both counts. See any “Sins of the Flesh and Suspicious Minds: Dunn’s New Theology of Paul,” forthcoming in JSNT (note particularly on “the flesh,” where Boyarin is building on Dunn).

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The Selfish Text The Bible and Memetics Hugh S. Pyper

According to the collective authors of The Postmodern Bible, it is a “truism” that the Bible has exerted more influence on Western culture than any other book (The Bible and Culture Collective 1995: 1). In art, literature, politics and religion, biblical thought forms, narratives and quotations are all-pervasive. As Western culture becomes globalized, so too does the Bible. It is said that between a quarter and a third of all Japanese households possess a Bible, in a country where only one or two percent of the population have any Christian adherence. This is because it is regarded as essential background for a proper understanding of Western culture. One effect of the spread of Western culture through trade and conquest as well as missionary activity has been the spread of a collection of ancient Hebrew and Greek texts to every corner of the globe. Where Western culture goes, the Bible goes too. Simply in terms of the number of copies currently in existence, the Bible represents one of the most successful texts ever produced. Whereas other great texts of the ancient world have either been lost or else exist only in a relatively small number of copies, the Bible is ubiquitous. It exists in over 2000 different languages and in many of those languages it exists in multiple translations. Something identifiable with the Bible in its present form has existed for nearly two millennia and some of its components for much longer. If “survival of the fittest” has any validity as a slogan, then the Bible seems a fair candidate for the accolade of the fittest of texts. The purpose of this essay is to explore more fully how the biblical texts have achieved this remarkable success and what this reveals about the culture in which they are embedded. It will be obvious that the model by which I intend to do this is a Darwinian one. Indeed. I propose to turn for this to one of the fiercest contemporary critics of the biblical worldview, Richard Dawkins. His book The Selfish Gene (1976 and 1989), itself a runaway bestseller, has popularized the admittedly controversial idea that human beings, indeed all living organisms, can be construed as the “survival vehicles” for their genetic material. This claim is a variant on Samuel Butler’s well-known description of a hen as “an egg’s way of making another egg.” An organism is a gene’s way of making another gene. More pertinent to our purposes is Dawkins’s further claim that there is a strict analogy between the processes of biological evolution and the development of human culture. This idea has been taken up by Daniel Dennett, who adapts Butler’s epigram to read, “A scholar is just a library’s way of making more libraries” (1991: 202). It is the following further adaptation of this slogan that forms the proposition that this paper will discuss: Western culture is the Bible’s way of making more Bibles.

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In an attempt to see if and how far this rather bold assertion can be defended, I shall analyse in more depth the nature of the analogy that can be drawn between biological and cultural evolution and in particular the usefulness of Dawkins’s concept of the “meme” in this context. In the process, however, it will become apparent, I hope, that the literature of popular Darwinism is itself a cultural product, affected by the very phenomena, including the prevalence of the Bible, that it tries to analyse. My contention overall will be that any attempt at a reductive reading of the Bible in terms of some metanarrative of biological determinism or a postmodern analysis of cultural relativism may find itself hoisted with its own petard.

Genes, Memes and Texts In The Selfish Gene (1976), Dawkins contends that just as biological evolution can be studied at various levels—the gene, the genome, the individual, the gene pool or the species—so cultural evolution can be looked at in multiple levels, from the spread of the simplest catch-phrase to the rise and dominance of the great civilizations of China or the Islamic world. In terms of evolutionary biology, the main point he argues in the book is that the clearest way to think about evolution is to work from the point of view of the smallest replicating entities, in the case of genetics, the gene. By analogy, studies of cultural evolution in Darwinian terms will proceed best by examining the smallest replicating units in culture. It is these that he designates as “memes.” He illustrates the concept as follows: Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes-fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation (l976: 206).

Later, however, Dawkins becomes concerned to distinguish between a meme as a unit of information lodged in a brain and the phenotypic effects of that meme, such manifestations as the tune or the idea (1982: 109). Definitions are difficult, to say the least, in these areas. What exactly constitutes a meme or a culture defies classification, and the recent literature on meme is bedevilled by shifting definitions and unsupportable generalizations and comparisons. Extravagant claims for the explanatory power of this concept have been made, including claims that the key to human selfunderstanding is in the new “science” of memetics. As the originator of the concept, Dawkins has been far more modest in his assessment of its value. Dennett, who as a philosopher has written with more rigour on the subject than most, elaborates the concept of the meme in Chapter 12 of his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea where he defines memes as “self-replicating complex ideas which form distinct memorable units” (1995: 344). Even so, the concept remains notoriously fluid and therefore liable to abuse. How could it be applied to the Bible? The Bible, if anything, seems more like a repository of memes than a meme itself or even a “meme complex.” In the ensuing argument, I shall at times be using the term “meme” for its convenience and its heuristic power in applying Darwinian insights to cultural developments, but always with a weather eye on its slippery nature.

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The Bible as Replicator At this point, however. I want to turn to a more fruitful line of enquiry provided by Dawkins’s later, more rigorous discussion of another concept, that of the replicator. This he defines as follows: “A replicator is anything in the universe of which copies are made” (Dawkins 1982: 83). At a banal level, that is a claim that can undeniably be made for the Bible and so it may be of interest to explore the ramifications of this analogy. Note, first of all, that Dawkins carefully does not say that the replicator must be self-replicating. There is a fundamental point here that has often been missed. DNA is sometimes described as a “self-replicating” molecule. In one sense this is true. Given the right environment, a molecule of DNA is capable of acting as a template so that an exact copy of itself is produced. The important point is that it needs the right environment. DNA on its own cannot reproduce itself; it needs a complex of enzymes which will guide and manage the process. In fact, it is only at the level of the cell that we find a replicating structure that can produce copies of all its parts from raw materials in a simple environment. In that sense, the Bible is no different from DNA. Shut a Bible, or even two, in a cupboard and you will certainly not find more Bibles when you come back. Leave a jar of DNA on a shelf, however, and it will not increase either. Only in the context of a cell, of a “survival machine,” will we find DNA reproducing. Likewise, Bibles can only reproduce through the agency of a human reader, who then takes steps to ensure that more copies are produced. The crucial point that lifts all this from the level of a truism is the way in which Dawkins then refines the concept of the replicator. He distinguishes between an active replicator, the nature of which has some influence over the probability of its being copied, and a passive replicator, the nature of which is immaterial. DNA, the replicating molecule that encodes genetic information in cells, is an example of the first, in that it exerts phenotypic effects on the environment through the protein synthesis it enables. These effects in turn influence whether it will be copied. Active replicators modify their environment in such a way as to enhance their own reproductive capacity. To illustrate this, Dawkins makes a particular study of the interactions between parasites and hosts. For example, at a simple level, a gall wasp larva will carry genes that encode for the synthesis of chemicals that mimic the growth hormones of an oak tree, inducing the tree to grow an unusual structure that serves to protect and feed the wasp larva. Here the wasp genes are acting on the phenotype of the oak tree, not the wasp, in a way that enhances the wasp’s reproduction but which may have a deleterious effect on the tree. The relevance of this parasite-host model for the consideration of the Bible will become clearer as the discussion develops. Unfortunately for my purposes, Dawkins’s example of a passive regulator is a sheet of paper which is Xeroxed. On the face of it, this undercuts any analogy between the genetic material and the Bible. He goes on, however, to concede that some pieces of paper are much more likely to be copied than others because of what is written on them. They then become active replicators as they convey information that acts on the reader and her environment in such a way as to induce her to copy the text. The argument I shall pursue is that in this sense the Bible is indeed an active replicator, one which alters its environment so as to increase its chances of being copied. The intriguing questions then become how the Bible does this and why it has been so conspicuously successful. Dawkins goes on to discuss other aspects of active replicators. It is a fundamental point in his argument that no process of replication is infallible. Strikingly, a favoured metaphor to illustrate this in popular genetic texts is the variability of the biblical text in different translations or through processes of copying. Robert Pollack in his Signs of Life, for instance, sets out six English versions of Jas 4.5 to illustrate the phenomenon of alleles, the existence of variant forms of the

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same gene within a population or indeed an individual genome (1994: 38). Dawkins himself uses the “mistranslation” of the Hebrew for “young woman” as “virgin” in the Septuagint version of Isa. 7.14 as an example of the potentially enormous phenotypic effects of a small change in DNA. He also provides a footnote explaining the Hebrew and Greek texts complete with citations in Hebrew, remarking that “I suppose the scholars of the Septuagint could at least be said to have started something big” by this (1989: 16). This infiltration of biblical examples into the texts of popular genetics is an intriguing phenomenon to which I shall return. The crucial consequence of this variation is that, when it occurs, some replicators may turn out to be less efficient than others at replication and so will tend to be replaced by the more successful replicators. For active replicators, whose nature affects their success in achieving replication, such variation may have a remarkable effect on their reproductive ability. Those that replicate most efficiently will, if all else is equal, come to predominate in the population. Yet variability in itself is not enough; it must be coupled with stability. If “successful” variants are to survive and out-compete the others, they must be conserved over time. Dawkins sets out the conditions for a successful replicator in the following slogan: longevity, fecundity and fidelity. The replicator must last long enough to reproduce, it must be capable of producing a sufficient number of copies, and these copies must be accurate. To ensure accuracy, the genetic material has a whole complex of “editor enzymes” which repair and correct copying errors in DNA. So too the biblical text has become sacrosanct with a premium put on its accurate reproduction. The great complexes of the Masoretic apparatus and the libraries of biblical criticism that have sought to preserve the text in its “original” form are the evidences of this. The stability of a particular text or a particular DNA sequence, what Dawkins calls its “longevity,” is an important factor. The replicator must maintain its identity over time. Equally important, however, is its capacity to throw up variants which, when conditions change, may confer an advantage on the organisms that bear them. It is this balance between the ability to reproduce faithfully a particular variant but also to be able to produce variation if the circumstances favour it that confers reproductive success on any replicating system.

The Cell and the Community The Bible, then, operates as a replicator in a way analogous to DNA. Like DNA, it stores information which can be read and translated and which contributes to its own reproduction. This, however, requires the action of another level of agency. In the case of DNA, this agent is the cell, where the information contained in DNA is translated into proteins that both structure and control the host of chemical processes that are necessary to sustain the life of the cell, and therefore the reproduction of DNA. In the case of the Bible, the agency is a human community that will recopy and disseminate the text. The crucial question then becomes how the active effect of the cellular DNA on the constitution of the cell or organism which is its “survival vehicle” is paralleled in the case of the Bible. That a case can be made is evident from the fact that the analogy has been pursued in the opposite direction, notably by Robert Pollack. In his book Signs of Life he explicitly embraces the analogy of DNA as text. . . . I have organised this book around the notion of DNA as a work of literature, a great historical text. But the metaphor of the chemical text is more than a vision: DNA is a long

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skinny assembly of atoms similar in function, if not form, to the letters of a book, strung out in one long line. The cells of our bodies do extract a multiplicity of meanings from the DNA text inside them, and we have indeed begun to read a cell’s DNA in ways even more subtle than a cell can do (1994: 5).

Molecular biology is shot through with metaphors of reading: translation, transcription, reading enzymes and the like. Pollack extends this metaphor by suggesting that the genome is like an encyclopedia, where the volumes are represented by the chromosomes, the articles by the sets of genes encoding for a particular character, the sentences by the genes themselves. Words are domains and letters are base pairs (1994: 21). Nor is he alone in drawing such comparisons. Dawkins himself speaks of the tempting analogy of seeing DNA as a “family Bible” (1995: 39), a record of our ancestry slightly different for each one of us, although he quickly goes on to point out flaws in this metaphor. Dennett makes the point that the strict analogy between genes and memes can be maintained on the ground that they are both “semantic entities,” by which he means that they constitute information that can be variously encoded. A gene is not simply a piece of DNA, although to be effective it has to be expressed as such. It could equally be said to be encoded in a sequence of letters on a page, just as a meme may be contained in the pages of a book. But as texts, both DNA and the Bible have to be read. In the case of DNA, this is a matter of the synthesis of RNA and, through it, of particular amino acid sequences in cellular proteins. In the case of a text such as the Bible, the analogous process, in Dennett’s view, is that its memes influence a human mind and so influence a common meme pool so as to ensure the physical survival of the text. Dennett expresses this as follows: “memes still depend at least indirectly on one or more of their vehicles spending at least a brief pupal stage in a remarkable sort of meme nest: a human mind” (1995: 349). Mere reproduction of a text as a physical artefact is not enough to ensure its continued survival as Dennett makes explicit. Copies of books will only endure so long, and the relative youth of even the earliest complete manuscripts of the Bible bears this out. He quotes an analogy from Manfred Eigen, who points out that a Mozart symphony cannot be said to survive as a living cultural entity unless it is played and replayed and checked for continuing value against other compositions. The Bible must be read and must make itself read if it is to be reproduced. Its success in achieving this is what makes it an example of a highly adaptive active replicator. In this view the biblical reader, then, acts as the site of transfer of the information contained in the text to the meme pool in which he or she operates. The book itself encodes memes which once active in the mind lead the human agents of that meme pool to produce more examples of the text. But like all memes, in Dennett’s view, they encounter competition. People have a lot of other things to do with their time and energy besides copying Bibles, indeed a lot of other texts to read. What has led to the particular success of the Bible in this competition for mental space?

The Viral Bible Controversially, this can best be looked at under the rubric of its “infectivity.” In a paper entitled “Viruses of the Mind,” Dawkins gives an account of the propagating power of what he calls a mind virus (Dawkins 1993). By this term he means a piece of information that ensures its own duplication without regard to the survival of the system it exploits. Viruses are propagated differently from the genes of their hosts. For instance, influenza viruses spread by coughs

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and sneezes rather than by being incorporated into a viable embryo for the next generation. This means that, unlike host cells, whose genes will only be propagated by the reproduction of the organism of which they are part, viral genes and viruses have no vested interest in the reproductive success of their host. So, how would a successful “mind-virus” operate? The problem for a virus is that it must be incorporated into the replicative machinery of its host. What is the parallel mechanism among viruses of the mind? Such a meme will have to instil in the host a mechanism for conserving the meme, and a mechanism for propagating it. It would ideally act like the gall wasp to divert the host’s energies to its own reproduction. It would also, however, be well advised to have a mechanism for conserving its variability so that any changes in the environment, including the intrusion of other foreign memes, and in particular any developments in the host’s own immune system, can be either countermanded or else outflanked. My tentative suggestion is that the Bible instils a meme in its readers which aligns its own survival with that of the reader and his or her community. “Your survival depends on mine” is the message that the Bible gives. If the primary evolutionary drive is for survival, then a virus or a meme that “persuades” its host that it is necessary to the host’s own survival, and therefore conveys a reproductive advantage, will have an instant welcome into the replicatory machine. The virus becomes a symbiont, an organism that cooperates to mutual benefit with its host, rather than a parasite. Of course, it is only in hindsight that the nature of the association can be known with certainty. It is quite possible that an organism will live quietly as a symbiont and then suddenly turn on its host at a later stage. Images of John Hurt and the parasitic alien bursting out through his body wall are only too apt in this connection, but the process may be a much quieter one. It may be that a false offer of reward to the host is never cashed out. From the invader’s point of view, this matters little as long as it achieves its goal of its own reproduction.

Strategies of Survival What the Bible has to offer the communities that it needs in order to reproduce is the unique variety of powerful strategies of survival it enshrines. Dawkins and other writers on memetics frequently cite the example of the “God-meme” as a meme which has a powerful record of propagation across time and space. From a theological point of view, of course, the reduction of the complexity of human accounts of God to a single meme is a gross oversimplification. What seems to be implied is rather a meme that predicates human survival on something other than purely biological grounds, that offers a space not only for bodily survival but for memetic survival. This has resonances with the account that Zygmunt Bauman offers of the whole enterprise of human culture (Bauman 1992). Culture, he claims, is a human construct designed to fend off the threat of death. It is a survival mechanism that finds a way of promising a form of survival in the face of the inevitability of individual death. For Bauman, the Jewish tradition is the clearest case of the subsuming of individual death in communal survival. The individual may die but his or her genes and memes will carry on. The duty of the individual, then, in the sense of his or her best survival strategy, becomes one of ensuring the survival of the group, not of prolonging his or her own life. Christianity has adopted the alternative strategy of a promise of immortality, in that the believer’s death is caught up in the context of the resurrection of Jesus. Both genetically and memetically, the afterlife of the believer is strictly irrelevant except in so far as belief in personal immortality acts to sustain the continuity of the meme pool.

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Both of these strategies are offered to the reader of the biblical text, together with stern warnings of the likely outcome of failing to abide by the word of the text. This is also aligned to a particular set of strategies that reinforce the integrity of the biblical text. In order to maintain continuity and identity, any organism or any gene pool has to be able to filter out undesirable interlopers. Again, a cunning usurper will both penetrate these defences but also quickly turn them to its own advantage, keeping out competitive genes and installing itself as the object of the host’s attention. On an organismic scale, the efforts of a baby cuckoo to throw the host species’ own eggs and chicks out of the nest combined with its success in subsequently subverting the host’s nurturing instincts to its own development are a classic case. The cuckoo succeeds in deflecting to its own benefit the mechanisms of rearing the young which have evolved for the vital task of reproducing the host species. The Bible contains powerful instructions as to its own unique worth and the limits to be placed on the infiltration of foreign information or texts into the communities that propagate it. Transgression of these limits will lead, so it warns, to communal disaster, which must be avoided by rooting out any alternative ideology. The whole process of canonization reveals a complex interaction between text and community that serves, for example, to oust the fledgling apocrypha and turn the community’s attention to the ever-growing task of copying and commentating on the biblical text with an increased sense of its importance and of the need for its conservation. The propagation of the text and the founding of new communities are also linked to the survival of the reader and his or her community, or meme pool. The Hebrew Bible is full of admonitions about the duty to hand down its teaching, and, by implication, the text, to the next generation. In addition the text contains a strong message of evangelization which encourages the recruitment of new transmitters, of the tradition. The survival of the reader’s community, so the Bible intimates, depends on the production of new copies of the texts and new communities. This complex of memes and of strategies forms a powerful ensemble to ensure the accurate transmission of the text.

Biblical Variation If the Bible thus encodes strategies to ensure its longevity and accuracy, what then of biblical variability? Superficially, of course, Bibles show variation. The physical appearance of the Bibles on our shelves is very different from that of the scrolls found at Qumran, an evolution that has something to do with ease of reading, portability and changes in the mechanics of reproduction. In another obvious sense, the Bible has evolved out of its component parts, which themselves have undergone a long process of development. It now exists in a number of forms: the Tanakh, and the various canons of the Christian churches. Despite this variation it might be argued that within each community it has on the whole developed a fixed form. However, that form itself preserves a great variety of strategies of survival. There is an analogy here perhaps in the way in which variant genes can be maintained in a population even if they have no particular advantage, or are perhaps deleterious. In many organisms, chromosomes and the genes they contain are carried in pairs. This means that an individual may carry two different variants of any gene, such variants being termed alleles. In most cases, one of the alleles is dominant, so that in an individual which carries two copies

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of the gene, only the dominant characteristics are expressed. The consequence of this is that the individual may carry without any disadvantage another allele which could, if expressed, have a deleterious effect, but might also, in changed circumstances, turn out to confer an advantage. The sexual process leads to the constant reassortment of alleles, which means that the population will be able both to express the alleles of the gene but also to carry them under the cloak of the dominant phenotype. It is tempting to speculate whether some of the redundancies and doublings in the biblical text may have a similar function in that they can preserve maverick readings. These can be ignored by the mainstream interpreters, especially if an interpretative parallel to the dominance mechanism is in play, whereby an anomalous or redundant verse or passage can be “corrected” by appeal to other verses in Scripture, or the perceived overall theological thrust of the material. the day may come, however, when the suppressed alternative reading may prove of interest or use to a particular “interpretative community,” which then propagates the Bible on the basis of that alternative reading. Furthermore, even in its canonical form the Bible can still generate variety. The information contained between the covers of any given edition of the Bible varies and develops, especially in terms of marginalia and commentary, which may, at times, have outweighed the biblical text in terms of importance. It is only necessary to count the number of editions of the Bible currently available to realize how, in adapting to the needs of different communities, cultures and age groups, the contents of the physical entity called the Bible can vary widely. These variations serve to widen its appeal, or, in other words, to enable it to gain entry to and propagate itself in a whole variety of new environments. In this connection, one of the most obvious sources of variation and adaptive strategies that the Bible has is its translatability. Translation is a good trick for increasing the number of Bibles—I certainly possess at least 17 versions of the Scriptures and I suspect that most regular biblical readers, let alone scholars, possess more than one version, something which would be unlikely for many other books in their libraries. From the blindly functional point of view, there is paradoxical advantage for a text in being written in a dead language once it has achieved a cultural dominance in another language group. It can potentially always be retranslated because the precision of the match between the words and the meanings cannot be guaranteed in the way that the text itself insists is important. It is more open to revision than a text inscribed in the native language of a culture, except in rare instances where a text preserves an older form of the evolving tongue. It is possible, for instance, to find modern language paraphrases of Shakespeare, but there is a great resistance to producing new English versions of his works, whereas once the interesting conservatism over the Authorized Version was broken, the floodgates of new biblical translations opened. Additionally, there is implicit permission for the text to be translated into the vernacular language of any community that uses the book, again increasing both its diversity and adaptability but also the sheer numbers of copies in existence. This is by no means a one-way process. The success of the Bible in reforming the communities into which it moves through translation is also striking. As Carroll and Prickett observe in their introduction to the World Classics edition of the Authorized Version, What we can observe is that it was not just the Bible that was transformed in the course of successive reinterpretations. The Vulgate, a single, authoritative, monolingual instrument for the entire Western Church, was the instrument of the new imperial power of the Roman Church. Luther’s Reformation translation of the Bible was to change the German language for ever: his commentary on Romans to set the agenda of theological debate for centuries.

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Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, on which the Authorised Version was to be so closely modelled, did the same if not more for English (Carroll and Prickett 1997: xiv–xv).

Communities based on the Bible may have a strong interest in conserving it unchanged. From the point of view of the Bible, however, its ability to adapt to new communities is an essential part of its success. The fact that much human ingenuity has been expended on ensuring that the Bible does not change and that such mutations have at times been physically rooted out merely goes to show the strong pressure on the text to mutate and its potential for evolution. As we noted before, the interests of the text and those of its nurturing community may not coincide. This leads to the conclusion that when another champion of scientific realism, the astronomer Carl Sagan, lays into the Bible in his attack on what he conceives of as superstition in his recent book, The Demon-haunted World, he in fact reveals one source of its reproductive success. Contrasting the love of one’s enemy enjoined in the Gospels with the celebration of holy war of Joshua, he writes, “The Bible is full of so many stories of contradictory moral purpose that even generation can find scriptural justification for nearly any action it proposes, from incest, slavery and mass murder to the most refined love, courage and self-sacrifice” (1996: 275). Indeed, and this has surely contributed to its survival. A book to which both the apartheid regime in South Africa and its most fervent opponents can turn to justify their position may not offer simple moral precepts, but does ensure that both sides will own their own copies. For the survival of the book, its amazing capacity to sustain opposing camps is a very successful strategy. Part of its success is its very diversity, but also the fact that diversity can be differently enacted. As is well known, every cell in the human body contains the same genome, but this is differently expressed in different tissues to give cells that vary radically in form and function. The difference lies in the particular portions of the genome which are read. So, too, the Bible contains more information than any one community can readily assimilate, especially as it may seem mutually contradictory or impossible to apply in a given situation. What then happens so often is the formation of a canon within the canon, where the community opts to read and follow a particular smaller set of instructions, read with a particular interpretative slant. This may change over time, giving a flexibility and yet continuity to the community. Biblical communities themselves show a capacity for survival that consists in a knack for maintaining continuity through change.

Biblical Advantage It was allegedly the physician to Frederick the Great who, when asked by that monarch to give a proof of the existence of God, replied, “The continued existence of the Jews”—an existence bound up with the identity, adaptability and continuity that the Bible confers. In a more theoretical vein Sir Peter Medawar attributes the biological success of human beings as a whole to a new form of inheritance: exogenetic or exosomatic heredity. “In this form of heredity, information is transmitted from one generation to the next through non-genetic channels—by word of mouth, for example, and by other forms of indoctrination; in general by the entire apparatus of culture” (1977: 14; quoted in Dennett 1995: 342). Henry Plotkin, in his Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge, cites the Bible and the Koran as just such devices of exosomatic storage. He speculates on the selective advantage of such texts to the cultures that retain them by drawing on Bartlett’s work on the degradation of oral narratives, which implies that over time any group will retell a tale in such a way as to bring it into line with accepted norms. Plotkin argues that the

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“exosomatic storage of memes” in the Bible may have preserved “richness subtlety and beauty” in cultures which possess the book (1994: 220). That continuity is bound up with the continued existence of the Bible. The community of readers sees it as its duty to ensure the survival of the book. More than this, it sees the book as the guarantor of its own continuity and survival. The book itself contains a whole plethora of strategies for survival, and, in particular, is the record of an amazing feat of cultural continuity, as the diaspora communities of Jews manage to retain a sense of themselves as Israel, as members of one “meme pool” of cultural exchange, protected by firm filters from external memetic contamination. The fact that historians might take leave to differ over the actual continuity of the community and its immunity to outside infection is surely a proof of the power of the meme complex in question. Despite the available evidence of all that might have led to its dissolution and disappearance, the community is maintained, and the text is preserved. Even more amazing is the development of communities of those supposedly excluded by the text, the Gentiles, who find ways of identifying themselves as Israel and arrogating to themselves both the promises and the duties imposed by the text, chief among which is the duty to ensure the perpetuation and dispersal of the text. Here the “gene pool” of Judaism, with its claim of descent from Abraham’s seed, is replaced by a “meme pool,” a claim of descent from Abraham’s faith, a line of argument already presaged in the Old Testament itself. This is an astonishing success and one of crucial importance to the propagation of the text. The consequence of its incorporation into the canon of the Christian Bible is an exponential leap in the number of copies produced. However, it may also be true that the text turns against the communities that have sustained it if that is to its advantage. The horrid record of Christian anti-Semitism shows the consequences of the filter mechanisms for memetic purity being turned against the original host community, as the Bible takes on a new existence as Christian Scripture. The mechanisms that served to exclude “Canaanite” memes from the community now act to exclude Judaism. A prime exemplar of such “selfishness” of the text might be seen in the Reformation, where the text operates to cause a major breach and disruption in the community that sustained it in order to take advantage of the new technology of printing. It achieves this through the propagation of a meme that removed the authority of interpretation from the institution to the individual and to the possibilities of reproduction within vernacular language communities. The peril of too close an association with the host community may be that the text will fall with the community that guards it. The success of the Bible has been predicated on its ability to “jump ship” when necessary. The paragraph above is an obviously self-parodic example of the prevalence of the intentionalist fallacy in the discussion of Darwinian replicants. It is patently a fallacy to argue that the Bible provoked the Reformation in order to increase its own population, but the facts remain. Whatever damage the Reformation did to the church and to the victims of the religious wars that accompanied it, it was certainly good for the Bible.

The Survival of the Bible What then of the Bible in late twentieth-century society, where the traditional communities of interest in the Bible may be thought to be in danger of collapse? Selection is a cruel business, as many species and their DNA find every day. Surviving intact for a hundred million years is no defence when your habitat is suddenly filled with industrial pollutants. The best that can be said

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for any replicator is that it has survived so far. Tomorrow is another day and will perhaps bring an insurmountable challenge. Even if the worst comes to the worst in terms of a diminishing community of biblical readers, the important thing for the text in a memetic view is not that it be read but that it be copied. By achieving an iconic status within a culture, the text can relieve itself of the pressure of seducing readers. The baptismal Bible or wedding Bible may be a gift that is never read, and no one is likely to open the pages of the court room Bible on which oaths are sworn, but they must be complete, as the community is well endowed with reverence for the canonical text that is either all or nothing: an incomplete Bible is not a Bible. This may work more powerfully for the New Testament than the Old, as the New circulates independently, but it nonetheless still allows for the reproduction of redundant, unread material within the New Testament. For the sake of iconic completeness, it may even extend to the replication of the even less appealing Old Testament. This too has a biological analogy. One of the more unexpected findings of molecular biology is that a large proportion of the DNA in any genome is seemingly also redundant, consisting of simple repeating sequences that do not encode any gene. Opinion is still divided as to the function of this material. It may have structural or geometrical implications. This redundant DNA is, however, copied and transmitted to the next generation as faithfully as any other. Analogously the Bible carries a great deal of seemingly redundant information: the detailed instructions for the construction of the tabernacle, for instance. As long as there is some commitment to a notion of completeness, however, this seemingly irrelevant material will be replicated. This means that the Bible can survive to a remarkable extent even on the vestiges of a culture which valued it. However, the situation for the Bible is by no means as gloomy as that. As I was finishing this paper, by coincidence two documents arrived together in my pigeonhole. One was a copy of a review of several modern popular debunking biographies of Jesus, which finished by quoting Lord Gowrie’s admission that A.Ν. Wilson’s version “sends us scurrying back to the gospels” (Stanford 1997: 3). The second was a leaflet from the National Bible Society, urging donations for the despatch of Bibles to the displaced and starving population of Zaire. Whatever one thinks of the anti-biblical polemics of an A.N. Wilson and the response of the Bible Society to the disasters of war, there is a common feature to these documents: both seem to serve to increase the sale and distribution of the Bible. The Bible Society can still launch an appeal to increase the number of Bibles in the belief that the Bible will contribute uniquely to the survival of the people of Zaire. A.N. Wilson, who seeks to debunk it and would no doubt pour scorn on the Bible Society’s work, finds himself both propagating biblical memes in his own texts and sending his readers back to consult the original text. The biblical text is not affected by the fact that the person who reads it is only doing so to refute it as long as there is a sufficient cultural community or meme pool to maintain the argument and therefore sustain the need for the text. Yet the Bible has always shown an astonishing facility in generating communities that will see it as worth transmitting. What memetic pull is it that brings together a group of scholars of diverse backgrounds and beliefs to Sheffield to discuss the Bible and culture, for instance? Has the Bible “succeeded” in making a bid beyond its native environment of the religious community, one which may be severely threatened in a new memetic ecology? Is it now able to persuade communities of readers to consider it as a cultural artefact, using the same memetic appeal as Homer and Plato? If so, what a tribute to the extraordinary staying power of the particular combination of memes that the text and the communities it builds around itself enshrine. Having formed communities about itself for 2000 years, often by coopting its enemies, is the Bible proving able to do this again by infiltrating not religious but cultural discussion?

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A telling example of this ability of the biblical text to infiltrate the most unlikely communities is the very genre of popular generic writing of which Dawkins is the most celebrated practitioner. For someone who evinces such a suspicion of the influence of the Bible, he makes a surprising number of references to it. His main rival, both as a best-selling writer of popular genetics and as an advocate of what to Dawkins seems a “heretical” view of Darwinism, is Stephen Jay Gould, whose books are shot through with biblical allusions. Another populist geneticist’s recent book, Stephen Jones’s In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny, a companion to a television series, is an interesting case in point. In it he covers such topics as the Lost Tribes of Israel and the concept of Armageddon, in the process alluding to a large number of biblical texts and outlining many biblical stories. It would be ironic, would it not, if we were to conclude that Dawkins himself has become a “survival machine” for the Bible, a “meme nest” for its dispersed memes, which may induce readers who would otherwise leave their Bibles unread to go back to the text. Dawkins, however, is merely one articulate representative of a much wider conversation in a global gene pool that could loosely be designated as “Western culture.” Insofar as we have seen that the survival of the Bible seems to be predicated on the persistence of its peculiarly effective set of memes, which induce reading communities to propagate it, it is Dawkins’s inescapable cultural environment that is in evidence here. But are we then simply the victims of the Bible? Dawkins ends The Selfish Gene with a rallying cry: “We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (1976: 215). Is he actually a witness that we may think we can rebel against biblical memes, but that such replicators have an uncanny power to survive all our efforts? The telling passage in his River out of Eden (the title itself needs no comment) on the “ravishing” poetry of the Authorized Version of the Song of Songs, and the “lifetime’s repetition” which has given it its own haunting appeal despite the possible inaccuracy in translation (1995: 40), argues that aspects at least of the Bible have succeeded in inserting themselves into the “meme nest” of Dawkins’s mind in such a way that they are transmitted, if not replicated. Dennett comments on Dawkins’s challenge to the power of the memes, “This ‘we’ that transcends not only its genetic creators but also its memetic creators is . . . a myth” (1995: 366). His own writings show also the power of persistence of the biblical tradition. He ends his 1995 book with an ambivalent plea for the preservation of meme complexes such as religions for their cultural enrichment. “I love the King James Bible,” he declares. “My own spirit recoils from a God Who is He or She in the same way in which my heart shrinks when I see a lion pacing neurotically back and forth in a small zoo cage. I know, I know, the lion is beautiful but dangerous; if you let the lion roam free it would kill me; safety demands that it be put in a cage” (1995: 515). This is a rather extraordinary paragraph which is somewhat baffling in its uncharacteristic ambiguity and its implications. What is it that distresses Dennett so much? Is it the use of gendered language of God, rather than the idea of God? Is the King James Bible the cage, in which case what is the love he bears it, or is its place in the cage with the lion because of its dangers? My own view, and no doubt I here manifest symptoms of my own freight of memetic viruses, is that the Bible has so firmly entrenched a place in our culture that it is ineradicable, It is not a parasite but a constituent part of the great complex of meme complexes that can be designated “Western culture,” part of the exosomatic genome of that culture’s members. More than that, I see it, in Plotkin’s terms, as an indispensable source of what might be called “memetic diversity.” In agricultural genetics, one of the most worrying trends has been the loss of diversity from the appellations of food plants and animals. There are obvious superficial gains, not least, to seed

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companies and fertilizer manufacturers in growing vast tracts of pure stands of the “best” varieties, the judgment of “best” depending on the particular values of the grower or the market. Ease of marketing may well win out against nutrition. However, there is a potential disaster looming if the super variety is suddenly attacked by a pathogen or if there is a major climatic shift. A variety may be fit for the purpose and the conditions of the moment, but what if conditions change? Here it becomes vitally important to maintain a “gene pool” of wild relatives of the crop plants, which may themselves have all sorts of drawbacks from the point of view of the technology of farming, but which have shown themselves able to fend for themselves in this competitive world over time. Such wild populations contain a huge diversity of genetic material maintained over time and a vast potential for diversity and for change. Can we view the Bible as a sort of cultural “memetic reserve”? Parts of it may seem irrelevant, redundant, even detrimental to our survival, but it has kept going. As Medawar and Plotkin indicate, it may serve to maintain a memetic richness and complexity, an inexhaustible source of variety which may contain the unexpected counter to forces that threaten to impoverish our cultural lives. But Dennett’s rather inarticulate declaration of love for the Bible suggests other possibilities. This paper has, of course, taken a slightly wry look at a provocative rereading of the dynamics of cultural development. Nothing in the theory of memetics can help us to establish the truth or falsity of a meme, it can only deal with its frequency and prevalence. Questions of reference are not raised. Indeed, the practitioners of memetics have erected some pretty formidable filters to debar any such questions. Methodologically, this may be necessary to prevent muddled thinking, but methodology is not truth despite its strong tendency to become so. The easiest way to filter out a proposition is to declare it to be either meaningless or false. A very different account could have been given on the premise that the Bible reflects the encounter of God with the complex web of human culture and individuality, a premise which methodologically Darwinism cannot entertain. The attempt, however, to follow through such a methodology is a discipline that I hope has brought to light intriguing connections which any account of the relations of the Bible and culture might need to take on board. More radically, however, is survival, as Darwinism must have it, really the primary value, or is it in turn a methodology that has become a truth? The lion may be dangerous, and human culture, as Bauman argued, may well have been a device to keep it caged and to ensure survival, just as the wild lion has been confined practically to game reserves. The beauty of the cage, then, is in some sense engendered by the lion. Letting the lion out would have disturbing implications for culture as well as for scientific method. But is there no other model of co-existence between human and beast, between human beings, the Bible, and the God which it cages and displays? Here I want simply to recall that Isak Dinesen has a wonderful account in her book, Shadows on the Grass, of the mutual respect between the hunter and the lion which grows from the fact that each knows that the other is hunter as well as prey: “a lion hunt each single time is an affair of perfect harmony, of deep, burning, mutual desire and reverence between two truthful and undaunted creatures on the same wavelength” (1985: 305). Somewhere in this may be a dynamic that can lift us beyond the mechanisms of the meme and into true encounter.

Bibliography Bauman, Z.1992 Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Cambridge: Polity Press). Carroll, R.P., and S. Prickett (eds.) The Bible Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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Dawkins, R. 1976 The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Dawkins, R. 1982 The Extended Phenotype (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Dawkins, R. 1989 The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, new edn). Dawkins, R. 1993 “Viruses of the Mind,” in B. Dahlbom (ed.), Dewell and his Critics Demystifying Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell): 13–27. Dawkins, R. 1995 River out of Eden: A Darwinian of Life (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson). Dennett, D. C. 1991 Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane). Dennett, D. C. 1995 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (London: Allen Lane). Dinesen, I. 1985 Out of Africa/Shadows on the Grass (Ηarmondsworth: Penguin Books). Jones, S. 1996 In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny (London: HarperCollins). Medawar, P. 1977 “Unnatural Science,” The New York Review of Books 3 (February): 13–18. Plotkin, H. 1994 Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge: Concerning Adaptation, Instinet and the Evolution of Intelligence (London: Penguin Books). Pollack, R. 1994 Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA (London: Penguin Books). Sagan, C. 1996 The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (London: Headline Book Publishing). Stanford, P. 1997 “Jesus Christ’s Smarter Brother,” The Guardian 2; 25 February: 2–3. The Bible and Culture Collective 1995 The Postmodern Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Part IV

Television and Film As I noted in Part I, current work currently understood to be “Bible and cultural studies,” particularly in North America (the United States most certainly), is a fusion (at times uncritically) of traditional cultural studies and pop culture/mass media criticism. One of the largest areas of interest is in the Bible’s appearance in film and television. This interest was easily the first wave of work on Bible in media and mass culture and reflects both the extraordinary popular appeal of film in-and-among US and UK readers and critics, and a long intertwining of Bible and cinema. The Bible has a long and significant role in cinema studies. Among the first narrative cinema was early-twentieth-century films of German passion plays. Characters and stories from the Bible have been transported to cinematic epics and the subject of an array of movies. Among the landmarks of cinema history are films such as Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, King of Kings, and The Robe. The Bible has been the subject of film controversy in the reception of movies such as The Passion of the Christ, The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus Christ Superstar, Dogma, and more. The Bible has appeared in relatively modern movies such as Prince of Egypt, Exodus: Gods and Kings, and Noah. The Bible has attracted the notice of landmark, critically acclaimed directors such as Cecil DeMille, Paulo Passolini, Martin Scorcese, Ridley Scott, and Darren Aronofsky. Add to these films that feature the Bible, biblical verses, characters, and themes intrude on an array of otherwise non-biblical films. The Bible has regularly appeared on television, as well—in documentaries (some scholarly, some “mysterious,”), children’s cartoons, in televised serials, and in an array of single episodes of other serials. Finally, there is the role of film in instruction about the Bible, both in secular classrooms and in faith-based education programs. When Bible critics have turned to Bible and film, while they have encountered much to discuss and analyze, there has been irregular use of film theory and often little by way of acquaintance with cinema history or critical methodologies informing film analysis. Many treat cinema as simply a complex “text” without attention to its own, rich legacy of scholarship. Of course, this is by no means uniform. Several scholars, decades ago (as some of the chapters included in this section indicate), were deeply aware of film studies. Further, as biblical studies scholarship has grown (and its growth over the last two decades has been perhaps even beyond exponential), it has also matured. Several recent works intentionally, and quite ably, draw from film studies in remarkably complex ways. Readers are encouraged to revisit the chapters by J. Cheryl Exum and Jennifer Koosed and Todd Linafelt included in Part II. These works are early landmarks in the serious study of Bible and film. The chapters in this section begin with another ground-breaking work, “Sitcom Mythology” by George Aichele, an early work looking at Bible and television. Surprisingly given its ubiquity, television has lagged behind film in interest to biblical scholars.

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As work on Bible and film has grown in readers, it has gained increasing methodological maturity, as well, drawing from among the best work of film theory. One of the early leaders in this methodological growth has been Richard Walsh. I include one of his earlier works “Gospels of Death” as “trailer” to his later edited volumes (readers are encouraged to consult his works listed in the bibliography). I also include a chapter by Erin Runions, “Why Girls Cry: Gender Melancolia and Sexual Violence in Ezekiel 16 And Boys Don’t Cry.” Runions has long been at the vanguard of Bible and cultural studies, and, in this chapter, she fuses several long-running interests in her stunning (re)reading of Ezekiel. Finally, the section concludes with Jeffrey L. Staley’s “Reading ‘This Woman’ back in John 7:1-8:59: Liar, Liar and the ‘Pericopae adulterae’ in Intertextual Lingo.” Staley (a long-time collaborator of Richard Walsh) is at his most emblematic in this chapter, fusing his interests in popular culture—particularly film—and the Gospel of John. Also on display in this work are both the themes of intertextuality and autobiography (both mentioned and discussed in the opening chapter of Part II). Staley has long been invested in both, being one of the first biblical scholars to use autobiographical biblical criticism, and one of very few to use the method for a sustained monograph (in Reading with a Passion).

Annotated bibliography: Further Reading Bach, Alice, ed. Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz. Semeia 74. Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1997. This collection was among the first serious, sustained collections of scholarship on Bible and film (predating the SBL section of the annual meeting, Bible and film, by more than a decade). More than a museum piece, the chapters in this collection are quite strong and have held up well as the conversation has grown. Bond, Helen K. and Edward Adams, eds. The Bible on Television. LNTS. Scriptural Traces. New York: Bloomsbury / T & T Clark, 2020. This volume addresses, in a systematic way, the appearance of the Bible in (largely US) television. Work on Bible and the moving image has been chiefly focused on cinema; this collection is a welcome addition. Burnette-Bletsch, Rhonda, ed. The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and Its Reception in Film. 2 vols. HBibRec. Leiden: De Gruyter, 2016. This ambitious two-volume collection is aimed at the introduction of serious film theory to biblical scholarship via entries addressing genres, critical issues, cinema history, and more, all with direct application to biblical text. Copier, Laura. Preposterous Revelations: Visions of Apocalypse and Martyrdom in Hollywood Cinema 1980-2000. BMW. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2012. Laura Copier is primarily trained in film studies. She brings this skill to her work on Bible in film (particularly apocalyptic texts) and, in doing so, demonstrates the ways keen attention to film production, history, and theory enrich its analysis. Copier, Laura and Caroline Vander Stichele, eds. Close Encounters Between Bible and Film: An Interdisciplinary Engagement. SemeiaSt, 87. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2016. This collection in the Semeia Studies series openly acknowledges its debts to earlier volumes (particularly to Bach, listed earlier) and seeks to move the conversation forward via a collection that foregrounds not only Bible and film but scholarship that uses the leading edge of film theory, as well. Edwards, Katie. Admen and Eve: The Bible in Contemporary Advertising. BMW. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2012. This volume addresses the use of the Bible in modern advertising media. Work on Bible and the moving image (either film or television) has tended to neglect the “commercial.” In many ways, however, advertising is even more mass culture in its appeal (as marketers seek out the most buyers). Fredriksen, Paula, ed. On the Passion of the Christ: Exploring the Issues Raised by the Controversial Movie. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. This collection addresses the 2004 film,

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directed and produced by Mel Gibson, on the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. The chapters interrogate Gibson’s claims that the movie represented “authentic” reading of the Bible, as well as the cultural and popular debates and conversation the movie’s reception awakened. Graybill, Rhiannon and Peter J. Sabo, eds. “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”: The Bible and Margaret Atwood. BibIntersec, 18. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2020. This collection focuses on the work of Margaret Atwood and its engagement with and around Bible. Strictly, of course, Atwood is a novelist and writer, yet she is widely known, as well, for her work which has been variously adapted for cinema and television. Several of these chapters, in particular, treat The Handmaid’s Tale. Marshal, Joseph A. and Robert Paul Seesengood, eds. “Pasolini’s Paul: Representation, Re-Use, Religion.” Biblical Interpretation 17.4–5 (2019). Themed issue. The chapters in this collection were occasioned by the translation into English of Pasolini’s script for a planned-but-unshot movie on the life of Paul (a companion to his landmark The Gospel According to Matthew). The chapters not only address an important film auteur and his interest in Bible but also untangle the ways the proposed movie, and the Bible, are enmeshed with cultural issues surrounding politics, sexuality, and the limits of theory. Plate, S. Brent. Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Though focused more broadly on religion (largely Judeo-Christianity) than on Bible, this excellent collection by Plate is an ideal beginning point for biblical critics interested in Bible and film, acquainting such readers with the basics of film theory, history, and critical issues. Readers should also note S. Brent Plate and J. Mitchell, eds. The Religion and Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2007), which is a collection of key readings. Reinhartz, Adele, ed. Bible and Cinema: Fifty Key Films. Routledge Key Guides. New York: Routledge, 2012. This volume takes fifty major films (largely Hollywood, post-war), sorted in alphabetical order by film title, and examines their value for biblical criticism. Each entry is written by a biblical scholar. Reinhartz is also the editor of an excellent general introduction to the topic: Bible and Cinema: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2013). Rindge, Matthew S. Profane Parable: Film and the American Dream. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016. This excellent book sets the standard for work on Bible in cinema that both critically engages film studies in adept ways and also that focuses on much greater nuance regarding connection (in other words: that includes films which do not overtly cite Bible). The chapters on Fight Club and About Schmidt are particularly strong. Runions, Erin. How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film. New York: Palgrave, 2003. This book is another (brilliant) example of a work on Bible and film that is critically astute and nuanced in film selection (Runions tends, here, to read and analyze scenes sorted thematically than to review full-length films). Shepherd, David J. The Bible on Silent Film: Spectacle, Story and Scripture in Early Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. David Shepherd is, without question, the leading critical authority on the Bible in/and silent film. Indeed, his interests and skills with early film history and analysis make him widely read among film theorists. Silent films are often overlooked by many contemporary critics (and in syllabi for courses on religion and cinema). They shouldn’t be, as this excellent work establishes. Tollerton, David, ed. A New Hollywood Moses: On the Spectacle and Reception of Exodus: Gods And Kings. Biblical Reception, 4. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Walsh, Richard, ed. Bloomsbury Bible and Film Handbook. New York: Bloomsbury / T & T Clark, 2018. This volume is one of the first collections on Bible and film, with contributions largely by scholars primarily trained in Bible, to have crossed over into film studies proper. The chapters here are critically sharp and carefully edited. Walsh has long led the trend toward more critical astute work in Bible and film. Readers can note this even in his earlier work on the topic, particularly the subtle Finding St. Paul in Film (New York: T & T Clark, 2005).

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Sitcom Mythology George Aichele

Levels of Reality [T]he cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object as much as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a lost referent.1

Walter Benjamin describes the motion picture as a “mechanical reproduction” that deprives the representation of the authority or “aura” with which it was invested by the “work of art.”2 This aura derives from the unique existence of any original artwork, such as a painting, which gives authenticity to that work and binds it to a tradition. Although this aura functions in a primarily aesthetic manner in the modern world, it originates in the ritual importance of the work of art, and this ritual significance remains in some vestigial way associated with the work’s aura.3 In contrast, the mass-produced and mass-experienced, mechanically reproduced work of art replaces both the ritual and aesthetic functions with a political function, and “[w]hat is lost is the original, which only a history itself nostalgic and retrospective can reconstitute as ‘authentic.’”4 The movie Pleasantville explores ideological aspects of the mechanically reproduced artwork that is the televised situation comedy, and it does so by means of the mechanically reproduced artwork that is the popular feature film. In other words, Pleasantville does not reproduce a work of art, but instead it simulates yet another reproduction, a televised situation comedy or sitcom. The doubling of media and of reproduction plays an important part in both the expression form and the expression content of this movie.5 A fictional story depicts the relationship between fictional stories and reality. It makes explicit the duplicity involved in any narrative. Through this referential loop, the movie continually calls attention not only to the fictional status of the TV show, “Pleasantville,” but to its own fictionality as well. It challenges not only the traditions and ideologies within which the early TV sitcoms functioned, but also those that inform any mechanically reproduced work of art, including itself. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 47. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 221. Benjamin regards all photographs as lacking in aura. Roland Barthes argues that some still photos do possess a kind of authenticity (he calls it the punctum), but he agrees that this is lost in the moving picture (Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Hill & Wang, 1981], 3, 55, 78, 89). 3 Illuminations, 223–24. 4 Baudrillard, Simulacra, 99, discussing Benjamin. 5 T h is distinction derives from Hjelmslev. See Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 22–24, for a summary of Hjelmslev’s views. 1

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Pleasantville is set in the late 1990s world of middle-class, suburban America. The movie’s narrative world realistically mimics a contemporary suburban, middle-class neighborhood in the United States. Early in the movie, in a rapid sequence of brief scenes, high school teachers describe for their classes the grim state of affairs in the world at present and in the near future. These descriptions apply as well to the actual world, the primary world in which the film’s audience lives. The movie’s principal characters are also realistic ones, and they live in realistic situations. David and Jennifer Wagner are fraternal twins growing up in a broken home. David is a teenaged “nerd” who spends all of his spare time watching 1950s-era television shows on an “oldies” TV cable channel not unlike the real-life channel, Nickelodeon. Jennifer is a “valley girl,” interested only in boys and fashions, and in each of those objects only as means to greater popularity with her clique of girlfriends. Both of them are ignored by their forty-something mother, who is desperately trying to regain her own lost youth and to deal with the fact that her life is not turning out at all the way that she had planned. The extraordinary exception to this realism occurs when both David and Jennifer are miraculously transported into the narrative world of a fictitious television series from 1958. This TV series is also titled “Pleasantville,” and it is also set in middle-class suburban America, in a town also called Pleasantville. The use of the same name for the movie, the TV show, and the town highlights the importance of the various “levels of reality”6 in this story. To reduce confusion, I refer to the movie as Pleasantville (in italics), to the television show as “Pleasantville” (in quotes), and to the town as Pleasantville.​ Pleasantville exists within the actual, primary world of the movie’s audience. I call this the first level of reality. Pleasantville is one movie among numerous others in our world. This movie depicts a second level of reality, the fictional but realistic secondary world inhabited by David and Jennifer. “Pleasantville” exists within this secondary world as one TV series among many others. Other TV shows, actual series from the 1950s, are mentioned by name in the movie, although they are not shown on the screen. Finally, Pleasantville exists within a third level of reality, the fantasy world represented in “Pleasantville.”7 However, Pleasantville is not merely one town among others; it is unique, initially at least, because there are no other communities in the world of “Pleasantville.” The expansion of this world to include other communities is one of the changes that occurs as the story of Pleasantville unfolds. actual viewing audience: 1st level of reality: color

movie Pleasantville

David & Jennnifer: 2nd level of reality: color

Bud & Mary Sue: 3rd level of “Pleasantville” reality: black and white TV show

Figure 15.1  Levels of Reality.

Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 101–21. See J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966), for further discussion of both “primary world” and “secondary world.” See also Benjamin, Illuminations, 217–51. One could call a third level world such as that of Pleasantville a “tertiary world,” but its ontological status remains that of a secondary world. Realism is not reality, nor is fantasy non-reality: “there is no antipathy between realism and myth. It is well known how often our ‘realistic’ literature is mythical (if only as a crude myth of realism) and how our ‘literature of the unreal’ has at least the merit of being only slightly so. The wise thing would of course be to define the writer’s realism as an essentially ideological problem” (Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers [New York: Hill & Wang. 19721, 136–37).

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What is reproduced in this movie is itself a fictional reproduction, and this has important consequences for both its form and its content. It is important that these levels of reality be kept distinct, even when they spill out into one another. The distinction between “Pleasantville” and Pleasantville is crucial to the distinction between expression form and expression content at work in Pleasantville. The fictional reality represented in the TV show is at two removes from the primary world of the movie’s viewers. Pleasantville is a town in a fantastical secondary world (“Pleasantville”) that in turn appears within a realistic secondary world (Pleasantville); in this sense, it is the least “real” of all the levels. However, although Pleasantville is the least realistic of the three reality levels, it is the most important one in the overall story of Pleasantville. All the important events in the movie take place in the fantastical town of Pleasantville. In the third-level reality of Pleasantville, David and Jennifer come of age and come to terms with their Pleasantville lives, because it is there that mythologically significant transformations and transgressions occur. It is common in fantastical narratives for a magical gate or passageway to connect the realistic world to the fantasy one. In this way, the two worlds are connected but also kept distinct. Familiar examples of this sort of fantasy structure include Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz. The story of Pleasantville also begins in this way. The Wagners’ television set and the TV show appearing on it function as a gateway between the world of the movie and the world of “Pleasantville.” Nevertheless, in this case the boundary between reality and fantasy is eventually inverted and blurred, and finally it collapses altogether. Following David and Jennifer’s transfer into the TV show, the realistic world begins to appear in the world of Pleasantville, much to the discomfort of the town’s inhabitants. Thus this story is not merely about multiple levels of reality, but also about the possibility of interference and exchange between the various levels.8 The transfer of the characters David and Jennifer from the second level of reality to the third level initiates this exchange, but its ramifications extend far beyond them. The difference between these levels of reality is signified graphically in the movie’s discourse by the contrast between the fully colored world of Pleasantville and the black-and-white world of “Pleasantville.” The invasion of realism is represented in the discourse of the movie through the gradual penetration of color images into the black-and-white TV-show world. In this respect, Pleasantville may be compared to the movie version of The Wizard of Oz. In that movie, color represented the fabulous, magical realm of Oz, and the dull everyday realities of Kansas appeared in black and white. The shift back and forth between monochrome and color was quite abrupt and startling, as was the shift between the worlds of Kansas and Oz. Only Dorothy (and the viewer) was aware of this media shift at the beginning and end of the movie, so it served both as an index of a shift in reality and connoted that the dream fantasy of Oz was preferable to the waking reality of Kansas.9 In Pleasantville, the effect is quite different. The initial shift from the second-level reality to the third level one is abrupt, but from then on, as realism gradually invades Pleasantville, patches of color increasingly spread into the monochromic screen images. The inhabitants of Pleasantville are aware of this increase in the colorfulness of their world, and they react to it in various ways. Unlike The Wizard of Oz, the use of both color and monochromic images is not only essential to For additional examples see George Aichele, “Two Forms of Meta-Fantasy,” Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts 1, no. 3 (1988): 55–67. Even earlier, DeMille used “two-tone” color in the scene of Jesus’ resurrection in The King of Kings. Several other movies have combined color and black and white, in various ways. The British “counterculture” movie If... did so simply because the producers ran out of money about halfway through the filming and had to finish the movie using black-and-white film. Because scenes were filmed out of narrative sequence, the finished movie switches back and forth fairly often. Even so, the media shifts in If... are curiously suggestive.

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the discourse of Pleasantville, but it plays an important part in the story as well. Expression form itself becomes expression content, and transformations of content change the form. Eventually, Pleasantville is entirely colored, so that when David returns to his home at the movie’s end, the reality shift involves no media shift at all. The fantasy world has become a real one.

Limits of the Pleasant [T]he whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached.10

In contrast to the realism of Pleasantville, “Pleasantville” does not accurately represent the primary world of America in the 1950s. Indeed, the world of this television show is quite unrealistic. In addition, there is no pretense in Pleasantville of a return to the 1950s, and the simulation of an old sitcom provides a perspective on the present-day world, not that of the past. Although “Pleasantville” realistically imitates a 1950s sitcom, the movie audience (at the time of its release in 1998) and the movie’s characters, David and Jennifer, react to both the TV show and the town depicted in it in terms of values and beliefs of people living in the 1990s, that is, with irony and amusement. However, what the 1990s audience finds funny is not necessarily what the 1950s audience found funny. Characters and situations seem unrealistic to present-day viewers in ways that they did not to the original viewers of the actual shows in the 1950s. Certain behaviors and ways of speaking seem old-fashioned. Clothing and hairstyles from the 1950s tend to appear strange or ugly now, while the automobiles and popular music have acquired respectability and “classic” status. Nevertheless, it is precisely in its unrealistic qualities that “Pleasantville” most realistically imitates the world of TV sitcoms. The TV show within the movie is strongly reminiscent of black-and-white TV favorites from the Eisenhower era, such as Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, or Ozzie and Harriet. Several of these actual TV series are mentioned by name in the first few minutes of the movie, and reruns of them can still be seen on cable networks such as Nickelodeon. These actual sitcoms present a highly distorted version of reality, quite like that of “Pleasantville.” Thus, although the fantasy world of “Pleasantville” appears in the midst of the realistic world of Pleasantville, that happens simply because it is a television show and, in reality, TV shows are often unrealistic. The actual 1950s TV series, such as the ones mentioned above, represent not the way the primary world actually was, but rather the world as white middle-class Americans wanted it to be. These shows typically feature a white, middle-class, nuclear family living in a homogeneous suburban neighborhood. The father and mother both live in a happy, peaceful, and monogamous relationship. All members of the family depict conventional gender and generational roles. These shows reflect a white, patriarchal, Protestant, middle-class myth of America, and in that sense they serve as ideological mirrors of desire. The sitcoms are not realistic depictions of actual life, but rather utopian dreams of what that life should be. In other words, these shows represent a fantastical secondary world, a narrative assembled from bits and pieces of the actual, primary

Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir et al. (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 33.

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world but rearranged according to the desires of the viewing audience, or at least according to the TV producers’ understanding of those desires.11 The ideology reflected in these shows was not merely a dream, but it was also a stimulus to action and a goal to be actively sought. Many real-life people (including my own parents) moved to the burgeoning American suburbs in the 1940s and 1950s with the dream of living in a Pleasantville of their own, a place in which the unpleasantness of racial or economic exploitation could be kept always out of sight from the very ones who profit most from that exploitation. Pleasantville represents exactly the sort of town that these people wanted to live in: a place where drug abuse, broken families, homosexuality, class or race conflict, and crime are unknown, and where docile teenaged children always respect and obey their parents. Pleasantville is the place where there is no unpleasantness at all. “Pleasantville” represents a stable and homogeneous utopia. This little world truly is a pleasant one in many ways. The weather is always sunny and calm, catastrophes never occur, and the sole function of the fire department is to rescue the occasional stranded cat. There is neither poverty nor unemployment—marginalized people apparently do not exist—and every family has its own clean and spacious house and yard. As David notes, “nobody’s homeless in Pleasantville.”12 Harmony reigns in “Pleasantville,” perhaps because there is no evidence of political, religious, lifestyle, racial, or cultural differences. The mayor holds impromptu court in the barbershop or the bowling alley, but these irregular meetings are innocuous because there are never any serious matters to discuss. Everyone in Pleasantville knows and likes everyone else, and each weekly episode of the show ends happily. “Pleasantville” is suitable for the whole family to watch, and it represents wholesome, middle-class American “family values.” However, pleasantness has its price, and it is a high one. Pleasantville exists in a world of its own. It is indeed a paradise, surrounded not by physical walls (Genesis 2:8; 3:23–24) but by narrative limits: an Eden from which humanity was never exiled, a kind of reverse ghetto. The inhabitants are trapped in mythic reiterability.13 Pleasantville is truly utopia (Greek ou topos, “nowhere”), because its inhabitants are only dimly aware of a world beyond the town’s outskirts. Indeed, whether a larger world exists at all in “Pleasantville” is uncertain. The streets do not connect to other streets, towns, or cities. The inhabitants have heard of the Mississippi River, but because the roads loop back on themselves, they have no way to go to see it. Likewise, the people all know what color is, and the words for different colors, even though they have never seen any colored thing. When color starts to appear in their monochrome world, they call it “real” color. The world of Pleasantville is limited in other ways as well. Adult women do not work outside their homes, unlike their husbands. Instead they stay at home and fix meals. The women play bridge, and the men bowl. The occasional unattached adult (such as the soda-shop owner, Mr. Johnson) is charmingly eccentric, and never a threat or challenge to the marital norm. Younger women become cheerleaders and bake cookies for their boyfriends, who play basketball and never miss a shot. The high school team always wins, although where the other teams come from is not clear. Despite (or perhaps because of) the apparent universality of heterosexuality, the word, “sex,” and any sexual activity beyond the occasional kiss on the cheek are unknown. Interesting exceptions to this tendency include I Love Lucy, in which the Cuban musician, Desi Arnaz, played Lucille Ball’s husband, and The Honeymooners, in which the marital relationship was stormy and the characters belonged to the working class. In My Three Sons, there was no female mother figure. Both I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners also had urban, apartment settings, unlike the suburban, single-family houses that were common in 1950s sitcoms. However, these sitcoms also reinforced bourgeois values. More recent sitcoms no longer follow such simplistic patterns, but they remain highly utopian and unrealistic, for the most part. 12 Quotations from the film are my own transcription. 13 See Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 112–22. 11

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Married couples sleep in separate beds. The teenagers go to Lovers’ Lane, but only to hold hands and talk. In the soda shop or their cars, they listen to the bland music of Perry Como and Johnny Mathis. In Pleasantville, David and Jennifer Wagner are forcibly transported from the realistic social chaos of the late 1990s into the tidy utopian world of Pleasantville. This transgression of the limits of reality is effected by a marvelous TV remote controller, which is supplied to them by a mysterious TV repairman who admires David’s knowledge of the TV series. When David and Jennifer are translated from their full-color world into the monochromatic “Pleasantville” reality, they become native “Pleasantville” characters, Bud and Mary Sue, the adolescent children of mildmannered civic leader George Parker and his wife Betty. No one notices the changed appearance of Bud or Mary Sue—unlike more recent sitcoms, where cast changes are often written into the script in various ways, in 1950s sitcoms, changes in the cast frequently went unnoted in the show. However, the clash of cultures that results when David and Jennifer’s realistically depicted 1990s ideas, attitudes, and actions inevitably collide with the insipid world of 1950s sitcoms leads to disruptions of the TV show’s scripted order. David is a big fan of “Pleasantville,” and initially he wants to stick closely to the scripts, which he already knows by heart. In his world, “Pleasantville” is forty years old, and long since in syndicated reruns. Nevertheless, precisely because David knows in advance how each episode will turn out, his behavior as the “Pleasantville” character, Bud Parker, is changed. The Pleasantville natives, like most fictional characters, are unaware of the script that controls their lives and presumably think they act out of free will. In contrast, David’s knowledge of the script allows him to deviate from it, but this difference affects the story in ways that he cannot predict. Despite his love of “Pleasantville,” David’s knowledge as an expert viewer of the series causes him to react to situations in ways different than any native “Pleasantville” character would. In spite of himself, David brings changes into the world of “Pleasantville.” Early in the story, he must decide whether or not to encourage Jennifer (as Mary Sue Parker) to go out with Skip, the handsome high school basketball hero, as the script requires, although David knows that Jennifer will probably not merely hold hands with Skip, contrary to the script. Since Skip is a native of the “Pleasantville” world, he is completely ignorant of sexual matters, and he is not at all ready for a sexually active woman such as Jennifer. Unlike David, Jennifer is not a “Pleasantville” fan, and she hates her imprisonment in the “pasty” 1950s TV world. She will do almost anything to get out of it and back to the colorful 1990s, including seducing Skip. Jennifer: We don’t belong here. David: If we don’t play along we can alter their whole existence. Jennifer: Maybe it needs to be messed with.

Jennifer wants to return to the second-level reality of Pleasantville, and she does not mind rearranging the “Pleasantville” world if that will result in her return. Sex is introduced, first among the teenagers on Lovers’ Lane and then in the bedrooms of the adults, as married couples begin to buy double beds (which never appeared in 1950s sitcoms). Nevertheless, “it’s not just the sex,” as David says. His own relationship (as Bud) with Mr. Johnson, in whose soda shop he works, inexorably draws David in directions that the native Bud would never have gone. Both David’s and Jennifer’s affection for Betty Parker, their “Pleasantville” mother, also have this result; their relationships to Betty simultaneously press both of them to further violations of the “Pleasantville” scripts. Thanks to transgressions such as these, the teenagers of the town discover rock ’n roll and jazz music, as well as the novels of Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, and

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J. D. Salinger, among others. Many of the town’s inhabitants are eager to learn about a world where the roads do not simply loop back on themselves but “just keep on going.” An escalating sequence of narrative imbalances ripples out through the peaceful town of Pleasantville, and a wide range of repressed desires are unleashed as the lives of the Pleasantville inhabitants deviate further and further from the “Pleasantville” scripts. These script deviations are accompanied by the appearance of color in the monochrome world of “Pleasantville.” In other words, the narrative alterations introduced by David and Jennifer are accompanied by the appearance of the realism of Pleasantville in the midst of the fantasy that is Pleasantville. With each new deviation, the amount of color on the movie screen grows, and although the hue and placement of the emergent color—a deep red rose blossom, a lime green automobile—may seem arbitrary, it is hardly random. The play in this movie between color and monochrome film media is not just a clever techno-trick, nor is it only a metaphor. The film’s use of both color and monochromic images highlights the cinematic medium itself in a way that is essential to the story. It is both symbolic and iconic, to use the terminology of C. S. Peirce. An image of the world in color is inherently more realistic than the same image in black and white, and the vivid colors that gradually spill out onto the movie screen and especially onto the characters’ skins increase the actual realism of the image on the screen. The colors also symbolize deep changes in the characters. They are associated with stronger emotions and commitments, and richer perceptions. As David says, “they just . . . see something inside themselves.” Some of the townspeople eagerly embrace the new world of color and deviation from the script. They also discover that they are deeply unhappy in their bland, monochrome lives. Thanks to Jennifer’s instructions, Betty discovers the pleasures of her own body and becomes “colored,” in a remarkable negative transfiguration. She also uncovers her own deep dislike for her underprivileged status as a woman and housewife in Pleasantville. With David’s help, Mr. Johnson discovers that he doesn’t have to do everything in the soda shop always in the same tightly scripted order, and he realizes that he really wants to be a painter. Both Betty Parker and Mr. Johnson discover within themselves desires that their lives should somehow be other than they currently are. In both cases, these desires take them beyond the safe world of 1950s middleclass American conventions into dangerous places and alternative lifestyles. Other inhabitants of the town respond to the disruptions in the script and especially to the appearance of color in their world with fear and anger. Like George Parker, Betty’s husband, these townspeople are comfortable with their tightly scripted reality and are deeply resistant to the escalating sequence of changes. As a result, the changes have an acutely divisive effect on the Pleasantville community. George Parker: “It’ll go away” (referring to his wife’s newly colored skin). Betty Parker: “I don’t want it to go away.”

However, Betty is fearful of appearing with her colorful skin in public, and David comes to the rescue by applying monochrome “makeup” to her face. Betty’s decision to “pass” as “white” is understandable. Some of those who remain “white” violently attack the newly “colored” people and anything associated with them. Eventually the “white” people hold a town meeting (to which only “true citizens” of Pleasantville are welcome) in which the mood is initially ugly, but where the people eventually decide (in liberal, middle-class fashion) that violent action will not solve the problem. Like many white middle-class Americans of the 1950s and 1960s, the Pleasantville inhabitants are uncomfortable with the changes in their world, but many of them are equally dismayed by the violence that arises in reaction to these changes. By this point in the movie, the realism that has

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emerged in Pleasantville has replaced a great deal of the non-realism that was typical of 1950s TV sitcoms. Those sitcoms never seriously addressed issues such as racial, sexual, or lifestyle difference, even though by the late 1950s Americans were increasingly aware of these and related matters. By 1958, nuclear weapons were being actively and frequently tested by both sides of the Cold War, and many Americans were digging bomb shelters in their basements. Sputnik had orbited the Earth, and the United States was losing the “space race.” Fidel Castro and his followers were about to make big changes in Cuba. More to the point, the Civil Rights movement was well underway, and the United States was beginning to get involved in the very controversial war in Vietnam. Rock ‘n roll, with its roots deep in the music of black Americans but sometimes performed and always eagerly purchased by a whole generation of suburban white teenagers, was coming into its own as a cultural force. It was also during the late 1950s that color television sets and programs became widely available.14

A Flaw in Eden [C]oloring the world is always a means of denying it (and perhaps one should at this point begin an inquiry into the use of color in the cinema) . . . [C]olor is an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses).15

Pleasantville repeatedly establishes parallels between the town library, Lover’s Lane, and the soda shop, with its innovative music. As sites of adolescent social encounter and sexual experimentation, Lovers’ Lane and the soda shop clearly belong together; it is also not surprising that Lovers’ Lane and the soda shop serve as major beachheads of the color invasion. It is less obvious why the local library should also be so marked, but the townspeople rightly perceive both the soda shop and the library to be dangerous sites of novelty and rebellion. Both of them become popular gathering spots for the newly colored people, and both of them are eventually destroyed by enraged mobs of “white” people. In a crucial episode, David takes Margaret Henderson, another native “Pleasantville” character, out to Lovers’ Lane. Both Margaret and David are still in black and white. Margaret has already deviated from the TV script on her own, because she is supposed to be the girlfriend of another character, who is appropriately named Whitey. Because of David’s unscripted heroic actions (teaching the firemen how to fight an equally unscripted fire), Margaret is attracted to him instead of to Whitey. After they arrive at Lovers’ Lane, David and Margaret sit by the lake with several other young couples who are reading books and talking quietly together. Impulsively, Margaret runs to pick a bright red apple from a tree in the park, which she offers to David with a smile, saying, “Go ahead, try it.” Prior to this point, the movie’s plot has been generally simple and linear, but now the montage cuts rapidly back and forth between this episode and several others, which are presumably occurring simultaneously. These concurrent episodes are as follows: T h e videotape for Pleasantville begins with a series of still images and instructions to adjust the “color level” of the television set. In the mid-1950s, my father worked on the patent rights for some of the new color TV technology. As a result, we had a color TV in our house long before most other people in our Pleasantvillelike community. Color programming was rare in those days, and we often invited neighbors or friends over to watch the amazing new phenomenon with us (not unlike gatherings of people to listen to radio programs a generation earlier). The technology was still undependable, and this invariably resulted in agonizing moments when we struggled to adjust the color level of the TV set, often without success. 15 Barthes, Mythologies, 94; Camera, 81. 14

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1. Jennifer sits alone in her room, reading a book. Skip appears outside her window and asks her to join him for another sexual rendezvous. She declines, saying that she’d rather study. 2. George Parker comes home from work to find his house dark, his wife missing, and no dinner on the table. George runs to the bowling alley, where he encounters the mayor and other male friends, who are righteously aghast at his story. 3. Betty Parker visits Mr. Johnson at the soda shop. He ends up painting her portrait, and eventually (on the soda shop window) her nude, fully colored body reclining on the bar of the soda fountain. In each of these interwoven scenes, a significant alteration in the order of things has occurred. The valley girl becomes the serious student. The husband finds his home abandoned and in disarray. The housewife and the soda jerk become bohemians. This juxtaposition suggests that these three scenes belong together with the Edenic encounter of David and Margaret, and furthermore, that the cinematic allusion to the story of Adam and Eve is by no means incidental. Each of the four scenes indicates major changes in the lives of characters arising from the intrusion of David and Jennifer into the “Pleasantville” world and the consequent color revolution. Immediately after this complex of scenes begins, the uniformly pleasant weather ceases and it starts to rain in Pleasantville. This storm further ties all four of the interrelated scenes together. George gets soaked as he runs to the bowling alley. In their respective locations, Jennifer, Betty, and Mr. Johnson all look out of windows and notice with pleasure the change in the weather. In contrast, David calms the fears of the teenagers caught out in the storm at Lovers’ Lane. It has never “really” rained before in paradise, and the native inhabitants look upon this new phenomenon with ignorance. The rain is the product of a mild thunderstorm, and no Noachian flood results. This storm is no punishment for sin. David and Margaret have merely been kissing, in contrast to the torrid lovemaking between Skip and Jennifer earlier in the story, and the apple that David takes from Margaret is just an apple. In contrast to the biblical Eden story, the eating of this fruit is a good thing, and it is the woman, not the man, who is transformed when she offers it to him, because Margaret soon becomes “colored.” Both Jennifer and Mr. Johnson also become “colored” during the storm. David’s own color transformation must wait until he defends his “colored” mother from a gang of thugs led by Whitey. David remains a “white” man, but his desire for Margaret has finally overcome his desire to follow the “Pleasantville” script. The scene between David and Margaret at Lovers’ Lane is not the first time that the biblical story of Eden is referenced in Pleasantville. When David brings an art book from the library to the soda shop to encourage Mr. Johnson’s desire to paint, the book falls open to a colorful painting of Adam and Eve, hands covering their nakedness, fleeing in shame and misery. After the rain, numerous references point to the Eden and Flood stories. Most obviously, the comically wrathful TV repairman tells David that his acceptance of the apple from Margaret has decisively changed everything. Referring to “the deluge” and “bolts of lightning,” the repairman shows David (and the movie’s viewer) a replay of Margaret offering him the apple. Repairman: “You don’t deserve to live in this paradise. . . . I’m going to put this place back the way it was, and we’re going to make everybody happy again.” David: “I can’t let you do that.”

David and the repairman both admire “Pleasantville,” but they want quite different things for the people there. David defies the power of the repairman and eventually defeats him.

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Pleasantville presents a story of encounter with forbidden knowledge—that is, knowledge that opens the eyes16 (Genesis 3:7) and from which there is no turning back. Like the repairman, David and Jennifer are supernatural beings in relation to the world of Pleasantville. Unlike him, they are actively present in that world, not merely watching it from outside. The roles of David and Jennifer in the transformation of Pleasantville are similar to that of the hero of Gnostic redeemer myths, and a dualistic metaphysics is implied by the movie’s multiple levels of reality. The twin redeemers descend from second-level Pleasantville to enlighten the ignorant people of third-level “Pleasantville” and deliver them from their enchantment by oppressive powers.17 However, the knowledge that David and Jennifer bring to the people of Pleasantville is not offered either as temptation or as revelation. At no point do David or Jennifer inform the “Pleasantville” natives that they (the natives) are merely fictional characters, or that they (David and Jennifer) know how the “Pleasantville” scripts run. Nevertheless, Jennifer and David’s knowledge redeems the inhabitants of Pleasantville, and it is the truth, although the saving knowledge that these redeemers bring does not provide escape from an evil or fallen world. There can be no (fantastic) escape from this world because it is already utopia, the place to which one escapes. Instead, the entire world is transformed from within. The fantasy world of Pleasantville is “redeemed” as it becomes more realistic. After the storm, a brilliantly colored rainbow arches over the black-and-white town and suggests a promise of good things to come. However, despite the movie’s explicit (albeit amusing) depiction of divine wrath, and in contrast to the biblical text (Genesis 9:12–15), in Pleasantville, the rainbow after the storm signifies a broken covenant, a departure from paradise. The people of Pleasantville have broken their implicit covenant with the TV repair deity—that is, they have strayed far from the script—and they choose in favor of the new ways and the more colorful world introduced by David and Jennifer. Furthermore, unlike the usual reading of the biblical story of Eden, it is good that they do so. The changes that Jennifer and David bring, directly through their own actions and indirectly through their effects on others, are all presented by the movie as good things. These effects include individual freedom and spontaneity, diversity, creativity, and hedonism. They may be summarized as willingness to deviate from the script. The successful color revolution in Pleasantville does not result in shame and misery, but rather in a world noticeably closer in its complexity and diversity to the everyday, primary world in which we actually live—a world that for all its faults is far more desirable than the monochrome and monotone world of “Pleasantville.” Paradise is the place where one must follow the script without deviation, and it is eventually replaced in this movie by a messier but more human (and humane) world where “nothing is supposed to be.” Even the transgressions of Betty and Mr. Johnson, quite outrageous in terms of 1950s middle-class morality, are vindicated in the movie’s conclusion. Nevertheless, although the happy ending of the movie justifies the broken covenant, it is not an unambiguous vindication. The pleasant illusion of freedom has been replaced by harsher circumstances. From now on, the people of Pleasantville must write their own scripts and suffer the fear and uncertainty that accompany such responsibility. David and Jennifer have also been changed by Pleasantville. Here lies the greatest contrast to the redeemer myth. The redeemers have themselves been redeemed. Although she initially despised the world of Pleasantville, Jennifer decides to remain in the third-level reality, where the roads now connect to other communities and other possibilities, and where she will have to “Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 236–37). 17 Compare John 1:1–14, and Gospel of Thomas (“the twin”) 28, 50, 61, 77. 16

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face the same challenges and obligations that a young woman would have to face in the secondlevel world of Pleasantville, or in our world. Jennifer’s decision to stay in Pleasantville requires that she abandon her former valley-girl lifestyle. Conversely, David leaves his “Pleasantville” mother, Betty, and his Pleasantville girlfriend, Margaret, to help his Pleasantville mother through her midlife crisis. David’s departure from his beloved world of “Pleasantville” and return to the grimmer world of Pleasantville also suggest a deep change in him. He no longer wants to flee from reality, and now he is eager to attempt the sort of changes in the “real” world that he has made in the fantastic one. David’s and Jennifer’s choices are presented as the considered decisions of adults who, because of their experiences in Pleasantville, have come a long way from their initial, narcissistic adolescence.

The Lost Referent What is life, after all, but a caravan of lifelike forgeries?18

Roland Barthes says of the still photograph, “The choice is mine: to subject its spectacle to the civilized code of perfect illusions, or to confront in it the wakening of intractable reality.”19 A similar choice is presented by this moving picture. Like the TV shows that it mocks, Pleasantville reinforces elements of middle-class ideology: individual freedom, optimism in the face of an uncertain future, and traditional humanistic values, such as tolerance, compassion, and fair play. In addition, despite the movie’s technical play with the cinematic medium and its postmodern play with levels of reality, its treatment of the Eden story is hardly novel. The position of the Eden story at the beginning of the biblical canon connotes that without the transgression that it narrates, the rest of the biblical story would be unnecessary. The eating of forbidden fruit sets the stage for greater events to come. Such would be the “civilized” reading of this movie. However, as Barthes says, another reading is possible. The reference to the Eden story in the movie is closely tied to the collapse of levels of narrative reality into one another: the fantastic becomes real, color invades the black-and-white world, and expression form becomes expression content. The cinematic rewriting of the biblical stories of Eden and the Flood in Pleasantville not only juxtaposes them, but it also recycles them in a way that challenges the Christian reading of those stories. Christian theologians describe the eating of forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve as the original sin. This sin condemns humanity (the descendents of Adam and Eve) to an inherited condition of universal unworthiness, from which only the undeserved sacrifice of Christ can deliver them. The theologians ignore the possibility, suggested in the biblical text itself, that the primal fault appears much earlier in the Eden story. God puts two supernatural trees in the garden, and these trees separate knowledge from life (Genesis 2:8–9). As a result, the garden is divided at its center and cannot be single: the garden itself is diabolic. The potential for disharmony in (and liberation from) paradise appears in this duality, which, once begun, continues to spread. The eating of forbidden fruit only occurs after humanity itself has been divided, also by God (Genesis 2:21–22). In other words, God creates the situation in which the humans will be tempted and must then be driven from the garden. God is as responsible for the humans’ transgression as is the serpent, and arguably even more so. Robert Coover, Pricksongs and Descants (New York: Penguin, 1969), 111. Camera, 119.

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Furthermore, the duality is not merely in the garden, but in God himself. God and the serpent are not enemies, but allies. The serpent is one half of a fundamental split within God, corresponding to the divided trees.20 According to Umberto Eco, this fault also appears in the language of Eden—that is, God’s perfect language.21 God’s authoritative and creative Word brings with it its own inevitable misunderstanding and transgression. It makes lies and fictions possible. This language is inherently ambiguous and fictional, and it encourages an uncontrolled play of metaphors that undermines the binary oppositions that are crucial to the significance of any message. The original sin is linguistic. In their own emerging ability to play with language, Adam and Eve become like God (Genesis 3:22). Like Adam, David in “Pleasantville” is an ordinary human being, and like the serpent (Genesis 3:4–6), David in Pleasantville brings forbidden knowledge—supernatural knowledge—to Pleasantville. Margaret as Eve tempts David as Adam, but only after (and because) David as the serpent has already tempted her. Insofar as David is the one to whom Margaret offers the apple, he is placed in a peculiar position. He is simultaneously the supernatural tempter and the human being. David here corresponds to Tzvetan Todorov’s understanding of the fantastic as narrative undecidability between the marvelous and the uncanny.22 This accounts for the encounter between David and the TV repairman described above, in which David refuses to allow the restoration of paradise. God splits in two and this tears Eden apart, but it also opens a space for a nonutopian, uncertain, human world. The old sitcoms go their way, and a new, more colorful day arrives. By the movie’s end, a sadder-but-wiser deity drives off in his repair van. Pleasantville interprets the biblical story of Eden as a contest between finite, thoroughly human gods. The supernatural TV repairman defends the ideological status quo of the sitcom and insists that the script must be obeyed at all costs. The sitcom script is the inflexible law, the divine will. The repairman wishes to keep the people of Pleasantville in a state of pleasant ignorance, the oppressive ignorance that makes paradise possible. His will is thwarted by David and Jennifer, who are able to defy him successfully and to transform the fantastic “Pleasantville” world, to make it more realistic, because they are incarnate in that world and he is not. Although the repairman possesses the marvelous power to transfer David and Jennifer from Pleasantville to “Pleasantville” and back again, once he gives that power to them, he cannot stop them from making fundamental, irreversible changes in Pleasantville. Eco claims that the Edenic language is dominated by the “poetic function,”23 and therefore its messages are “aesthetic” and self-referential. Much as in Eco’s account of Adam and Eve, Pleasantville also plays with “language”—that is, with the cinematic medium itself. The characters in Pleasantville apparently watch many of the same TV shows that we do, although there are some differences, such as “Pleasantville” itself. The residents of Pleasantville also own TV sets; See John Dominic Crossan, “Felix Culpa and Foenix Culprit,” Semeia 18 (1980): 109; and George Aichele, The Limits of Story (Chico, Calif.: Scholars, 1985), chap. 2. See also Gospel of Thomas 23, 61, 72. Some scholars suggest that in an earlier form of the Eden-myth, Adam and Eve were gods, and so were the trees (Ludwig Köhler, Old Testament Theology, trans. A. S. Todd. [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1957]; and Gerhard von Rad, Genesis, trans. John H. Marks [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961]). Many variants on the Eden story in recent popular literature rewrite the respective roles of man and woman, or of humans and God. For some recent examples, see John Crowley, “The Nightingale Sings at Night,” Novelty, Four Stories (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 1–34; and Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens (New York: Ace Books, 1990), vii–ix. See also Kafka, Parables, 29–33. 21 Role, 90–104. 22 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973), 41–57. 23 23.See Roman Jakobson, Language and Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1987), 69–70. 20

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perhaps they also watch situation comedies on them. Such shows would entail another (fourth) level of reality, although David uses TV sets to communicate from the third-level reality of Pleasantville to the TV repairman, who remains within the second-level world of the movie. However, the poetic function is most apparent in the movie’s many frames in which colored and monochromic images appear side by side on the screen, including the temptation scene between Margaret and David. Each of these complex images makes the audience aware that we are watching a movie, a simulation. The explicit interplay between various levels of reality in this movie generates a paradox. The confusion of names and the manipulation of the medium create a referential feedback loop through which the movie interrogates its own reality and therefore also the reality inhabited by its viewers. David and Jennifer change the world of Pleasantville, but they are also changed by it. If such exchanges can occur between the second and third levels of reality, can they not also occur between other levels, including our own? These exchanges between levels suggest that even the world inhabited by the movie’s audience may not be the very first level. Could it be that we and everything in our world are also merely simulacra and mechanically reproduced illusions, shadows on the cave wall of yet another level of reality, observed by yet other beings in some medium that we cannot imagine, because we are it? Might the so-called “primary world” of everyday life as we know it be itself just another “level of reality,” another fictional, ideological construct?24 Or is our supposedly non-fictional world impermeable to fictional beings? The gnosis offered by David and Jennifer to the Pleasantville inhabitants is also offered to the film’s audience—and the simulation and fictionality that are inherent in any story, and that are raised to a higher degree by the mechanically reproduced electronic media of film and television, are likewise imputed to the audience’s primary world. “The process will . . . put . . . models of simulation in place and . . . give them the feeling of the real, of the banal, of lived experience, to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because it has disappeared from our life.”25 Pleasantville radically secularizes the biblical Eden story, even as it critiques the sitcom mythology. Although a paradise, Pleasantville was never especially innocent. Instead, it was bland and pasty. What it needed was to become more colorful, in other words, more realistic. The use of color both symbolizes and iconically enacts the intrusion of realism into a nonrealistic world, and the alignment of color with realism also connotes the goodness and desirability of the changes that occur. In addition, and unlike other interpretations of the Eden story, in this movie redemption is not a one-way gift. Instead, it is an exchange. The redemptive exchange takes place not only between Margaret and David, but also between levels of reality. For both David and Jennifer, the fantasy world transforms the realistic world, and vice versa. Underneath the allure of the fantastic lies a desire for reality, and it is only by passing through fantasy that they encounter reality—different realities, as it happens. The ideological relation between the realistic and the fantastic is exposed and inverted, and the fantastic becomes real. The moment in the movie where that inversion is most apparent, where it appears in the discourse of the movie itself, is the moment when monochrome Margaret gives monochrome David a bright red apple.

24.See Baudrillard, Simulacra. This possibly infinite regress appears even more explicitly in other recent movies such as The Matrix, The 13th Floor, and eXistenZ. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 124.

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Gospels of Death Richard Walsh

It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified! (Gal 3:1b) I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Gal 2:19b–20) May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. (Gal 6:14)

Mesmerizing Death-Gods “Death is beautiful. What a bunch of crap.” So concludes Rachel Mannis near the end of Flatliners. Like Paul, the cast of Flatliners flirts with death. Near-death experiences of light and peace fascinate Rachel. Her father committed suicide when she was a small child, and she desperately wants some peaceful resolution of that trauma. Nelson, whom the other characters call “Dr. Death,” desires the renown and worship that scientific exploration of “the other side” will bring. As the movie opens, he sets the tone by intoning, “Today is a good day to die.” The rest of the cast, all fellow medical students, are simply caught up in Nelson’s obsession. He assembles them as a team to induce his death and resuscitate him. At first, they are triumphant. Nelson’s death-resurrection—they refer to both Jesus Christ and Lazarus after Nelson’s return—and his new zest for life intrigue them, and they soon vie for the opportunity to flatline themselves. Except for Randy Steckle, they all do so. As competitive medical students, they bid for the opportunity to go first by daring to stay dead longer than the others. Accordingly, the resulting resuscitations become more and more dramatic. Nelson, however, has not told them everything, and horror soon engulfs them. The resuscitated bring their sins—people they harmed in the past in some way—back with them as haunting, seemingly physical, visions. Death is not sweet, and despite near-death reports, nothing beautiful is out there. Finally, David Lobraccio discovers that restitution, or “atonement” as Nelson calls it, can stop the horror. He and Joe Hurley apologize to those they have wronged. Rachel’s reconciliation with her dead father is more difficult, but she finally meets him successfully in her dreams. Nelson’s atonement is the most difficult. As a child, he was involved in a taunting incident that led to Billy Mahoney’s death. To escape this nemesis, who inflicts physical suffering upon him, Nelson decides to flatline alone. After all, he “deserves” to die. On the other side, he trades places with his victim and “dies.” Meanwhile, the team arrives and tries to revive him. As they do so, David, the

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token atheist, rails at God and denies that Nelson, or anyone, deserves to die. Finally, David asks God to forgive them for trifling in his territory (death), but that admission is not enough, and Nelson does not revive. After all seems lost, however, Nelson makes his peace with Billy on the other side and returns. Waking, he mumbles to David that today was not a good day to die after all. Early on, Nelson contends that religion and philosophy have failed vis-à-vis death and that science must take their place. David’s foxhole conversion, however, belies this presumption. Like Gen 3, Frankenstein, and hundreds of movies, Flatliners chastises scientific arrogance. Thus, the movie’s tagline opines, “Some lines shouldn’t be crossed,” and the atheist angrily apologizes to God for having “stepped on your fucking territory.” Two contrasting scenes visually underline the movie’s conservative point. Near the opening of the movie, Nelson walks through a rotunda, the paintings in which are obscured by restoration work. At the end of the movie, Nelson walks through the same rotunda, and we see a wrathful, Michelangelo-like deity towering over cowering humans. A forgotten deity—or maybe it is just death—reasserts its power over mere mortals. In addition to this traditional religious message, the movie also espouses a liberal ethic of love and toleration. At first blush, this message is trite. The sum profundity of tackling such an epic issue as life after death is for William Baldwin to say sorry for secretly making videotapes of the women he beds, for Kevin Bacon to apologize to a Black girl he was mean to growing up, and for Julia Roberts to come to terms with her father who committed suicide. The film operates on the infuriatingly banal presentiment that all the problems of the past can be solved by warm fuzzy feelgood clichés. It’s sad to think when it comes to taking on the great challenge of what lies after death all that Flatliners can end up doing is to resolve everything on a figurative group hug.1

Perhaps atonement does come too easily, but the point of Flatliners is not necessarily trite. Like The Sixth Sense, Flatliners affirms this life, not the next. From that perspective, it is hardly trite to reduce death to ethical lessons about this present life.2 Like Flatliners, Paul also opposes human arrogance. Like Nelson, Paul is also fascinated by death. But Paul does not affirm this world.3 Instead, Paul crucifies the world (Gal 6:14). For Paul, the cross undoes the world’s wisdom and power, because the crucified, rejected Christ is God’s wisdom and power (1 Cor 1:18–25). Paul’s crucified becomes the world’s crux, its ironic, apocalyptic reversal, the trans-valuation of all values.4 In this apocalypse, death becomes the sacred source of meaning and power, if it does not become god. Not surprisingly, then, the sacred symbol of Western Christianity, adorning its churches, is the cross (or crucifix). In fact, the death fascinating apocalyptic visionaries is more macabre and deadly than that in Flatliners. Apocalyptic visionaries find themselves drawn to dispatch the wicked to bring about Richard Schreib, “Flatliners” http://www​.moria​.co​.nz​/sf​/flatliners​.htm (accessed June 7, 2004). Incidentally, The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest extant pieces of literature, makes the same point vis-à-vis death. 3 Materialist philosophers either reject Paul on this point, as Nietzsche did (The Antichrist, 42–43, 47), or construct a Paul that does not reject the world and does not obsessively concentrate on death, as Badiou does (Saint Paul, 65–74). For the politicians, the useful Paul opposes sociopolitical structures, not cosmological or biological ones. See Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 58–60. It is not so easy to compartmentalize ancient apocalyptic. There, the entire cosmos comes undone before, or if, it is remade. The whole of creation, not just the social world, needs redemption (compare Rom 8:18–39). See chapter 1. 4 Martin Hengel, Crucifixion: In the Ancient World and the Folly of the Cross, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), has an extremely helpful review of ancient attitudes about the shameful slave death of crucifixion. In fact, he contends that a gospel proclaiming “the utterly vile death of the cross” is closer to madness (mania) than to folly (mōria) in antiquity (ibid., xi–xii, 83). 1 2

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God’s new age (Adam Meiks) or see suicide as an escape from the evil times in which they live (Fenton Meiks, Donnie Darko). Mere near-death does not mesmerize them, for they wish to die to live in another world. They do not want to merely glimpse the other side. They have already done that in their visions. They want to live on the other side. Death itself, then, is their good, their gospel, and their god. While we may think of such apocalyptic visionaries as weaklings unfit for life, Paul hardly fits such a description. He is as authoritarian and authoritative as any medical student. Supremely confident of himself and his goals and demanding of others, a surprising “crack in his real” disrupts his life. Paul’s vision of the “cursed,” crucified Christ undoes the whole world (Gal 3:13–14). This world and all human effort become as naught. Humanity’s best is folly, weakness (1 Cor 1:18–25), and refuse (Phil 3:7–9). All humans are sinners (Rom 1:18–3:20). The world is dead (Gal 6:14). Christ’s death alone leads out of this evil age (Rom 3:21–26). As Paul and his followers die to their nothingness in Christ, they become superheroes. The cult superhero himself lives in them, replacing their puny selves, their bodies of death (Rom 7:24–25). Paul’s good news, then, is no call to restitution, nor is it an affirmation of this life. It is a call to, at least, metaphorical suicide. Like Douglas Quaid, Paul and his followers die to their old weak, or evil, selves (Hauser) in order to be reborn as new superhero selves. For Paul, this rebirth requires the transcendent invasion of the resurrected Christ (Gal 2:19–20) or the spirit. Accordingly, Paul’s formulaic summaries of his preaching often include the resurrection and sometimes even focus on it (for example, 1 Cor 15).5 Nevertheless, the crucifixion always remains the fundamental datum (see 1 Cor 15:3). Thus, Paul becomes quite indignant with his followers when they so stress the triumph of the spirit or of the resurrection that they forget the suffering and weakness of the cross (see 1–2 Corinthians). Neither the resurrection nor the spirit delivers Paul and his followers from this present evil age. Their lives are not now triumphal. Instead, they participate fully in Christ’s sufferings in the present evil age. As a result, present triumph is highly suspect. Now, suffering portends their future glory (Rom 8:17–18). Their resurrection depends now upon apocalyptic visions (1 Cor 15:5–8; Gal 1:11–12), upon the spirit, and upon hope. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you. . . . For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God . . . and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed [apokaluphthēnai] to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing [apokalupsin] of the children of God. . . . We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Rom 8:11, 14, 17–19, 22–25)

In short, death is the empirical reality now. We have discussed the resurrection or, at least, Paul’s apocalyptic and visionary quality in chapters 1–2. If we take Paul at his word, apocalypse also precedes (the understanding of) the cross for him.

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Paul’s transcendent invasion, that is, does not now completely replace the world. Like the memories of Flatliners, the resurrection and the spirit only haunt Paul and his followers. Life “in Christ” is beset with tensions. The new age of which Christ and the spirit are forerunners tarries. Caught between this age and the next, Paul desires to be done with present suffering, to end the tension between this world and “in Christ.” No wonder, then, that Paul desires death for himself (Phil 1:21–24) and for his followers (2 Cor 5:1–10). Death is better than life. At least it is better than the partial, riven life that Paul and his followers have, like Fenton and Donnie. No wonder, then, that Paul determines to know, to preach, and to become nothing other than Christ crucified (1 Cor 2:2; 2 Cor 4:10–12). It is the message of suffering that makes the gospel relevant and understandable to those who live in horrible times. Paul’s followers live in such times. They are without resources, apart from transcendent intervention. There is not one cross in their world, but many. Their hero comes to them, then, where they live, as “empty” as they are (Phil 2:5–11). He dies as they do.

The Public Display of the Crucified Like Paul, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ publicly displays Christ crucified. Like Paul, Gibson cares little for Jesus’ teaching or ministry,6 and Christ’s suffering unto death fascinates him. Where Paul merely announces the crucifixion, however, Gibson films a passion narrative, filtered through Catholic mysticism (the visions of two nuns, Mary of Agreda and Anne Catherine Emmerich) and Catholic ritual (the stations of the cross and the Eucharist). The result focuses on Christ’s physical suffering far more than Paul does. Gibson’s movie starts with Gethsemane’s sweated blood, dramatizes the beatings of the police and the Jewish trial, and adds a striking visual of Jesus hung, like a side of beef (or a lamb), from a bridge. The scourging is the most vicious, emotional moment in the movie. In fact, thereafter, the subsequent crucifixion is somewhat anticlimactic. Throughout, terrible physical anguish dominates the screen. Roger Ebert estimates that one hundred of the film’s one hundred twenty-six minutes depict Christ’s suffering, and he claims that The Passion of the Christ is the most violent film he has ever seen.7 Everything is sweat and blood, flayed body, and grim anguish. By contrast, the ancient world seldom describes crucifixion in detail. In fact, most authors pass over everything but the brute fact of crucifixion in silence.8 Paul himself certainly never luxuriates in the details of Christ’s suffering as Gibson does.9 When Paul details physical sufferings, it is his 6

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Gibson borrows from all the canonical gospels, but he relies most heavily on John. Beyond the passion narrative, Gibson offers a few flashbacks to the ministry and a brief stigmatic resurrection scene. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Roger​ Ebert, “The ​ ​ Passion of the Christ” (February 24, 2004), http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews /2004/02/022401.html (accessed May 17, 2004). Other reviewers agree. David Edelstein calls the movie “The Jesus Chain Saw Massacre” (quoted in Deborah Hornblow, “The Cash-In of the Christ,” The Fayetteville Observer, April 2, 2004, E1); and John Petrakis labels it “the Kill Bill of Jesus movies” (“The Passion of the Christ,” The Christian Century 121.6 [March 23, 2004]: 40). Peter Travers says that Caviezel, the actor playing Christ, “doesn’t so much give a performance as offer meat” of ​ the Christ, ​ himself up​ as raw ​ ​ (“The ​ Passion ​ ​ ”​ Rolling Stone [February 23, 2004], http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie?id=594955I&pageid=rs ​ ​ .ReviewsMovieArchive&pageregion=mainRegion [accessed May 17, 2004]). Not surprisingly, many reviewers cautioned parents about taking their children to the movie. Hengel, Crucifixion, 25, observes that the gospel passion narratives have more details than other ancient references to such deaths. The crucifixion entered Christian art late. There is a mocking second-century graffito that shows an ass-headed man on a cross with the inscription “Alexander worships God.” See Crossan and Reed, In Search of Paul, 367– 68. Otherwise, the oldest portrayal of Christ on the cross comes from the fourth century (after Constantine’s

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own suffering that is in view (for example, 1 Cor 4:9–13; 2 Cor 4:7–12; 6:4–10; 11:23–33; 12:7– 10). Christian mysticism began to focus on the physical sufferings of Christ in something like Gibson’s manner only in the thirteenth century, the era of the stigmata of St. Francis and the rise to popularity of the stations of the cross. Previous medieval mysticism was more Neoplatonic, an eschewing of the body in favor of the spirit. While Paul is hardly Neoplatonic, Paul’s cross is not so much physical suffering as it is a descent into shame, a loss of status, a humiliation:10 who, though he [Christ Jesus] was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. (Phil 2:6–8; see also 2 Cor 8:9)

This emptying indicates Christ’s solidarity with humans who suffer in an evil age. In short, in Paul, Christ’s suffering “for us” is a suffering “with us.”11 Gibson’s heroic Christ suffers far more uniquely. The horrible scourging is crucial. After a whipping that would have killed a “normal man,” Gibson’s Christ catches Mary’s eye and rises slowly from the ground to endure more suffering. This figure is not a fellow apocalyptic sufferer. This suffering is not the apocalyptic prelude to glory. This Christ is already triumphant in his suffering, in this slow rise. After this, the brief, stigmatic resurrection visual at the movie’s end is anticlimactic and unnecessary. This Christ becomes heroic as he endures suffering. He is the Hollywood passionaction hero.12 As a result, Gibson’s cross has little about it of Mark’s God-forsakenness (Mark 15:34) or of Paul’s weakness and folly (1 Cor 1:18–2:5). Instead, it resembles the Johannine passion hero’s triumph.13 Gibson’s Christ is “a tough dude who can take a licking and keep on ticking.”14 Such suffering is beyond us. If we are more than mere voyeurs, it is because the suffering extends grace to us. Accordingly, the most important flashback in the movie is to the institution of the Eucharist. This flashback from the cross merges the crucifixion and the Eucharist into one ritual moment (compare John 6) re-realizing this mythic-founding time.15 Gibson’s movie visually breaks the body and sheds the blood for us. If only the bell would tinkle during this reel sacrament, for the movie aspires to transubstantiate the crucifixion. As it does so, Gibson’s heroic Christ becomes even less human. He becomes the religious objects of the sacrament. He becomes the body eaten and the blood drunk (John 6:53–58).

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vision), and such depictions were not popular until the sixth century. Artists began portraying dead Christs on the cross only in the twelfth century. See Roland H. Bainton, Behold the Christ: A Portrayal in Words and Pictures (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 144–57. Hengel, Crucifixion, 51–63, says ancients saw it primarily as the “slave’s punishment.” Robert Jewett, Saint Paul Returns to the Movies, 123–35, nicely articulates the “shameful” qualities of the cross. See Hengel, Crucifixion, 88. Paul frequently joins his sufferings with those of Christ both as part of the end of this apocalyptic age and as ethical example. For example, see the parallel structure of humiliation/glorification in Christ’s life in Phil 2:5–11 and in Paul’s life in Phil 3:4–16. There is, of course, a long-standing debate in Pauline interpretation about Christ’s death. Does Paul think it saves as a sacrifice on our behalf (Rom 3:21–26), or does it save as we participate in it (Rom 6:1–4)? See David G. Horrell, An Introduction to the Study of Paul (London: T & T Clark, 2000), 57–59. For Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 98–115, the distinction is a false choice. Death appears as sacrifice under the “horizon of the law” and as participation from the perspective of love. Gibson made his acting career writing suffering upon his body from the hero of Mad Max and Lethal Weapon to that of Braveheart. As a reviewer for the New York Times wittily remarked, Gibson prepared for the role of the heroically suffering Christ his entire career. Unfortunately, the role came too late, and he was too old. As a result, Jim Caviezel stands in for Mel Gibson who is standing in as Wallace, a latter-day Christ. Like John’s passion, the suffering in The Passion of the Christ “lifts” its hero “up,” exalts him, and glorifies him. Petrakis, “The Passion of the Christ” 40. Gibson is not documenting a real crucifixion. He visualizes the Western imagination of the crucifixion, so he nails his Christ through the palms, not the wrists. When the female stigmatic in Stigmata wonders why Christian art is “wrong” on this point, her mentor priest instructs her on the power of art on Christian imagination.

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Paul can speak similarly of the supernatural power of the supper (1 Cor 11:23–32). Nonetheless, for Paul, baptism better symbolizes the believer’s participation in Christ’s death and sufferings in this evil age. Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Rom 6:3–5)

Baptism, that is, marks the interim quality of the new life “in Christ.” Baptism and present suffering look forward to apocalypse. Of course, in Paul’s hands, even the supper “proclaim[s] the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26, emphasis added). It, too, involves Paul’s followers in Christ’s ongoing sufferings. Their lives become like Christ’s life and death. They, too, are “for others.” When they eat, even the strong are to be mindful of the weak, and all are to aspire to love (see 1 Cor 8–14). Gibson’s Christ does not suffer with us in this way. His suffering is heroically before and beyond us. His suffering is always “for us.” Accordingly, Gibson interprets the passion with two “headlines.” First, the movie sets Isa 53 as a title over the entire passion. This headline reads Christ’s suffering as for us and because of our sins. In short, we watch Christ suffer what we reprehensible creatures deserve. The ritual aspects of the movie—the Eucharist and the stations of the cross—also contribute to this interpretation. Second, the opening scene in Gethsemane frames the passion as a conflict between a heroic Christ and an androgynous Satan. Christ resists Satan’s temptations; he decides to bear what Satan says “no man” can bear; and he crushes a hissing snake under his heel (see Gen 3:15). These motifs, of course, present Christ’s suffering as a triumph over Satan. Thereafter, there is no real conflict. Instead, the rest of the movie stretches its viewers on an emotional rack in order to provide them a visceral sense of the suffering on their behalf. If the suffering is sacrifice and conflict, it is also a public proclamation, a public display of the crucified. While not developing a sophisticated theory of the atonement, Gibson flirts with the three major theological views: substitution, ransom, and moral influence. In the former case, Christ appeases a wrathful God by dying in place of sinful humans. The ransom theory imagines humans in thrall to Satan, and Christ’s death as breaking Satan’s hold. The moral influence theory asserts that Christ’s death on the cross shows errant humans that God still loves them. The ransom motif fits the pattern of the Hollywood passion hero most neatly, but Gibson visualizes such notions only in Gethsemane. It remains in the background, however, in Christ’s heroic endurance. Most of the movie’s rhetoric endeavors to display the depths of Christ’s suffering to a human audience; nevertheless, that suffering is clearly “for us.” As a result, the spectacle’s deepest logic is the substitution theory. The opening title from Isa 53 is quite clear on this point. The use of Catholic ritual and mystic devotion focusing on Christ’s suffering also contributes to this interpretation. We see what we deserve and what Christ bore for us as the mythic foundation of our faith, not in apocalyptic suffering with us. Paul, standing as he does near the beginning of speculation about the meaning of the cross, never offers a sophisticated theory either.16 He, too, flirts with various metaphors to explain what happened at the cross. Martin Hengel, The Atonement: The Origins of the Doctrine in the New Testament, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), 54, 65, claims that Paul does not explain the atonement because it is not a controversial datum in early Christianity. As already mentioned, the main debate in Pauline interpretation is between sacrificial and participatory ideas. See n. 11. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, 18–40, argues, relying on Rom 5:12–21, that Paul sees the cross primarily in terms of an obedience that fulfills the covenant,

16

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But now, apart from law, the righteousness [dikaiosunē] of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness [dikaiosunē] of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified [dikaioumenoi] by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness [dikaiosunēs], because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous [dikaiov] and that he justifies [dikaiounta] the one who has faith in Jesus. (Rom 3:21–26)

These metaphors are less clearly related to any of the theories of the atonement than Gibson’s spectacle. Paul gestures at the meaning of the cross with images drawn from the law court (justification), economics (redemption), and religious sacrifice (sacrifice of atonement). Dikaio words, which English translations generally render with forms of “just” or “righteous,” dominate this passage. The Greek words designate a person, action, or thing that adheres to some standard, as in the justified margins of computer word-processing. In the context of the law court, the words designate the innocent, with respect to a particular charge, or a person acting appropriately with respect to his/her function. A judge, for example, is righteous when he absolves the innocent and punishes the guilty.17 Given this passage’s prominent location in Romans (after Paul’s indictment of sinners and before his description of the life in Christ), the importance of Romans in Paul’s extant texts, and the dominant interpretation of Romans, scholars have long thought justification by faith the center of Paul’s thought. Present scholars are less certain.18 After all, “justification” language is important only in Galatians and Romans. Further, many are suspicious of the anti-Semitism lurking in the traditional statement of justification by faith by Protestant scholars. More important, influenced heavily by Stendahl, they also suspect that the traditional “justification by faith” reading of Paul interprets Paul far too individualistically. As we have seen, Rom 3:21–26 ceases to be the crux of Romans in Stendahl’s reading. The crux shifts to Rom 9–11, and Romans becomes a theodicy in which Paul defends God against the charge that he has rejected Israel. Gibson needs no such theodicy. He is far more certain about justice than Paul because he is the heir of a long-standing, legalistic reflection that begins with Tertullian and proceeds through the development of medieval penance and Anselm’s feudalistic reflections on the atonement. This Western Christianity is relentlessly about the forgiveness of an individual’s sins, a religious matter whose “justice” has come in the West to rely upon some macabre transaction taking place at the cross or in its ritual reenactment.19 This legal, sinful fascination is written so deeply into a matter that disobedient Adam and Israel did not realize. Seeley, The Noble Death, 13–17, 83–112, also argues for obedience—but the obedience of the martyrs—as the background for Paul’s understanding of the cross. Broadly speaking, both of their views are participatory. 17 Given the apocalyptic character of Paul’s letters, many recent scholars interpret the righteousness of God in apocalyptic terms (see pephancrotai in Rom 3:21) rather than in forensic categories, or in terms of his faithfulness to his covenant (see Rom 9–11). These ideas have been popular since Ernst Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W. J. Montague (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 168–82. Despite the legal imagery in Rom 3:21– 26, the covenant and the apocalyptic categories are a more likely background for Paul’s apocalyptic cross. I am concerned here, however, with Paul’s dominant interpretation in the legalistic West and with Gibson’s film. 18 Recent scholars have suggested other centers of Pauline thought. Given the occasional nature of Paul’s letters, others doubt that we can talk meaningfully about the center of Paul’s thought at all. See Victor Paul Furnish, “Pauline Studies,” in Epp and MacRae, eds., The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters, 333–36. 19 Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 15, refers to such sin and redemption ideas as “the perverse core of Christianity.”

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the Western imagination that it seems a fact, not merely an interpretation.20 Gibson’s exorbitant spectacle relies upon this “fact” and succeeded financially. Evangelical Protestants and Catholics lined up together to watch Gibson’s public display of Christ’s suffering. Clearly, Gibson nicely captures the West’s cruciform, sinful imagination, with its crucifixes, stigmata, bleeding hearts, stations of the cross, and Eucharist. With such at its imaginative center, it is no wonder that Western Christianity has also sponsored Crusades, Inquisitions, Colonizing Missions, Empires, Hell, and, at the movies, religious horror like The Passion of the Christ and Flatliners. The crucified imagination, so vividly captured by Gibson, makes us insensitive to suffering. In fact, the crucified imagination makes sinners of us all. Similarly, Paul knows human sinfulness only after the apocalypse of Christ. The order of Romans is misleading, for its discussion of sin precedes Paul’s discussion of the cross and life “in Christ.” Romans, however, is a theodicy for the inclusion of the Gentiles, a mission that Paul was committed to long before writing Romans. In fact, he wrote Romans to extend that mission (Rom 1:13–15; 15:23–29). The declaration of human sinfulness that opens Romans, then, actually follows Paul’s apocalypse and gentile mission.21 In Romans, the assertion of the ubiquity of sin is merely the opening volley in Paul’s attempt to extend his gentile mission. That is, he concludes that humans are sinful only after his apocalypse. Later readers, like Augustine, Luther, and Gibson, forgot Romans’ place in Paul’s apocalyptic imagination and made the declaration of human sinfulness the foundational datum to which the cross responded. Thereby, Westerners became sinners deserving death. No wonder Nelson (in Flatliners) guiltily decides he deserves to die. Only the atheist David demurs. Maybe we should reply with David and Will Munny in Unforgiven that “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Will Munny is the protagonist of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. He is a “known thief and murderer,” not a hero. When he married, however, Munny quit drinking and gave up his life of crime. As the movie opens, his wife has died, and Munny is left with a farm and two children. A hopelessly bad farmer, he returns to his outlaw life when the Schofield Kid arrives to recruit Munny to help him kill two cowboys. One of the cowboys has badly cut a whore, and Little Bill, the sheriff in Big Whiskey, has considered a fine a sufficient restoration of “justice.” The angry whores, led by Strawberry Alice, have put up a bounty on the cowboys in retaliation. They have done so secretly because Little Bill rules Big Whiskey with an iron fist, ruthlessly destroying all who oppose his order. In Barthes’s terminology (Mythologies, 109–59), this “fact” is a Western myth, neither a fact nor a politicized interpretation. We can politicize it by observing that the crucifixion needs to be “just” only for the “legal” form that Western imperial Christianity took. Tertullian, the first great Latin Christian writer, was a lawyer. The first Christian churches in the West were basilicas, renovations of or replicas of Roman law courts. Accordingly, scholars often characterize Latin or Roman Christianity as moral or legalistic when comparing it to other early Christianities. Perhaps this tone built upon the Stoicism that was so popular in the Roman Empire. In this connection, the popularity of Pelagius in Rome is worth remembering. Eastern Christianity follows different paths. Moreover, the New Testament documents themselves hardly speak uniformly on this point. Paul never uses the notion of “forgiveness,” although he does speak about “reconciliation” (e.g., Rom 5:1–11; 2 Cor 5:18–21). Paul’s notion of the cross lies somewhere between apocalypse (the death of the obedient martyrs belongs here as well) and the mystery cults. Mark’s cross opens the apocalypse. Luke’s is the Jewish murder of the innocent one. Matthew’s has to do with sin, forgiveness, obedience, and law (read “Torah”). John’s cross is the passion hero’s triumph, his glorification, an overcoming of death, not unlike the understanding of salvation in Orthodox Christianities. John’s understanding of the cross is most similar to Hollywood versions of the passion hero. 21 T h is “solution precedes plight” interpretation has been common in Pauline studies since E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 474–511. See chapter 4 for more discussion. Those disputing Sanders’s notion do so by moving even further than he does from individualistic and legalistic interpretations. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, 258–67, rejects this formulation in favor of understanding exile as the deep background (or plight) behind Paul’s thought. Roetzel, Paul, 65–67, thinks that Hellenistic religious alienation is the deep background. 20

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Will enlists his old partner, Ned Logan, and starts after the cowboys. When they arrive in Big Whiskey, Little Bill beats Munny badly. After this ritual humiliation, the whores nurse Will back to health, and he begins his journey back to his old criminal self. Unlike his partners, he can kill without thought and without remorse. After they kill the first cowboy, Ned, no longer “cut out” for this life, starts home to his wife. After Will and the Schofield Kid kill the second cowboy and wait for the bounty, they both reflect on the horror of killing. The Schofield Kid tearfully tries to justify his killing by the cowboy’s own wicked actions against the whores: “Well, I guess, they had it coming.” Will replies, “We all have it coming, Kid.” The “it,” of course, is death, not justice. When one of the whores arrives with the bounty, she tells Will that Little Bill caught Ned on his way home and killed him, after torturing him. Ominously, Will begins to drink. Returning to the saloon where Little Bill beat him, Will shoots the owner for displaying Ned out front and then shoots five other men, including Little Bill. As Will drinks at the bar afterwards, the wounded Little Bill reaches for his pistol, which Will knocks away. Dying, Little Bill says, “I don’t deserve this. To die like this. I was building a house.” Will replies, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Angrily, Little Bill retorts, “I’ll see you in hell, William Munny.” Will laconically agrees and fires. In Unforgiven, Eastwood shares a bleak view of human nature with Paul and Gibson. Unlike Gibson, however, Eastwood provides no heroes. Unlike Paul, Eastwood does not show new creations. Instead, he dramatizes a failed conversion and Munny’s return to his old, despicable life. Nonetheless, Eastwood refuses to damn humans as universally as Paul and Gibson do. Ned and the Schofield Kid are not killers like Little Bill and Will. In fact, almost everyone has to drink excessively in order to live with killing. More important, Unforgiven resists a melodramatic view of life. People do not “get what they deserve” in death. People simply die. To put it in Unforgiven’s most memorable line, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” In fact, there is little justice in this movie. At least no one thinks themselves treated justly. The whores think that Little Bill lets the cowboys off too easily. They respond to this travesty with their own travesty of justice. They hire vengeance. The only salvific element in the movie is Will’s refusal to ennoble his role. He is no divine instrument, not even a hero. He is only a mercenary. He has to drink to carry out his role. As he does not lionize himself, he does not need to demonize his enemies. Thus, he refuses to say that his victims deserve their deaths or that his actions restore justice. If Will has any nobility, it is in his attempt to soldier on, in his attempt to please his wife, to care for his children, and to remain loyal to his friends. These are mundane matters, and matters remain on this level.22 Will and everyone else in the movie are unforgiven, for there is no one, no larger power anyway, to forgive them and no hero to save them.23 The movie never explains its title; therefore, the title sits rather loosely on the film. So far, I have suggested an interpretation that sets it in counterpoint to Paul and to The Passion of the Christ. On this view, the movie refuses forgiveness as it refuses to imagine a deity who stands behind just deaths (and public crucifixions). Another interpretation, however, might assay Eastwood’s role in Unforgiven contrasts dramatically with his similar roles in High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider. While all three movies set an “outlaw” over against corrupt orders and lawmen, Unforgiven abandons the heroic presentation of just, violent vengeance (but see Jewett, Saint Paul Returns to the Movies, 147–62, for a completely different reading). In fact, one of the most intriguing features of Unforgiven is its play with the Western myth. On one hand, a dime novelist character transforms outlaws into mythic figures throughout the movie, but the movie relentlessly unmasks these heroes. Little Bill’s triumph over English Bob is crucial to this aspect of the movie. On the other hand, Will, who constantly denies that he is anything but an ordinary fellow, finally rises to a legendary level beyond even the rumors about him. Nevertheless, he hardly becomes heroic even here. He remains a villain. 23 Interestingly, Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 6, 169–71, thinks that a materialist approach reveals the core of Christianity to be the loss of hope in the Big Other (which is, not incidentally, the goal of psychoanalysis). 22

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another altogether different way, a way that might appeal to Eli Lapp, the grandfather in Witness. On this reading, the characters are “unforgiven” because they refuse to forgive. They refuse to walk away from slights and pay for murder or accept pay for murder. These characters refuse, that is, to find forgiveness on a simply human level. To do so, the whores would have to refuse vengeance. To do so, Will would have to walk away from his mercenary solution to his financial problems. Perhaps that way, like that of the Amish in Witness, is mere fancy. Even so, Unforgiven still stands as a question mark against the Western sinful, cruciform imagination. Maybe if we did not insist on deserved deaths, on the bestial nature of humans, on vengeful Gods, we would not have public crucifixions and ritual humiliations. Public death is the price of forgiveness in the Western imagination. Neither Paul nor Gibson will let us forget it with their public displays. What if we refused to assert that people deserve to die?

Dark, Fractured (?) Gods Paul and Gibson’s dark gospels and public displays avoid the charge of a sadistic or masochistic delight in suffering by condemning humans. Paul’s justification of God, and the resulting imagination of Western Christianity, requires humans to be sinful.24 Gibson’s leering, sadistic Roman soldiers who scourge Christ mercilessly are the logical consequence of this imagination. As such, they represent all (at least Western) humans. There is such naked, unfettered cruelty in the way Jesus is treated that it makes one ponder the nature of man. And the dark reality is that worse torments have been visited upon others throughout history. Over the centuries, our civilizations and technology have evolved, but that aspect of our essential nature has not changed. Given the chance, we easily revert to the bestial barbarians who derived sadistic enjoyment from the torture of Jesus. It’s a sickness that cannot be expunged.25

Appropriately, Peter Travers says, “The film seems like the greatest story ever told by the Marquis de Sade.”26 The world is an unforgiving, vengeful place in the visions of Gibson and Paul. Not just Christ, but also those who reject him pay (Rom 6:23; 1 Thess 2:15–16). Thus, in The Passion of the Christ, demonic children harry Judas to his death. Immediately after the bad thief reviles Christ, a bird descends from heaven to peck at his eye. When a single raindrop falls from heaven, supernatural events begin that climax in an earthquake that destroys the temple. Certainly, anti-Semitism lurks in Gibson’s horrific expansion of Matthew’s torn temple veil (see Matt 27:51–54), but an even deeper misanthropy troubles the entire movie. Behind it stands a wrathful, vengeful God. The sinful—and we are all sinful—pay. Gibson’s public spectacle reveals the vicious God at the heart of legalistic, imperial Western Christianity. At the cross, God is sadistic executioner. He is not onscreen in Gibson’s film. God Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 72–75, observes that the notion of sin takes God “off the hook” by putting humans “on the hook.” Anthropodicy replaces theodicy. 25 James Berardinelli, “The Passion of the Christ,” http://movie​-reviews​.colossus​.net​/movies​/p​/passion​_christ​ .html (accessed May 17, 2004). By the way, Gibson includes himself in this indictment. In the movie, his hands hold the nails that are hammered into Christ’s hands at the crucifixion. 26 Travers, “The Passion of the Christ.” 24

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does not need to be because the headlines, Isa 53 and Gen 3:15, identify him as the prime mover behind the scenes. The bird and teardrop from heaven are suspicious clues as to the real culprit as well. Gibson’s public spectacle names God as complicit in the suffering of innocents. Unlike Paul’s Christ, he does not share the suffering. He causes it. This God resembles the monster deities of Gen 22, Exodus, and Job. This God, like the gods of Isaac and Job, brings humans to the point of death for no human reason. Human death simply displays this monstrous God’s status, his reputation, and his power (thus, the refrain that punctuates the horrors of the Exodus narrative is “they/you shall know that I am the Lord”).27 Paul’s tortured theodicy in Romans suggests that he had doubts himself about the character of his God. In Paul’s desperate defense of his God against the charges of unjustly betraying Israel, abandoning Torah, and declaring the guilty innocent, Christ’s death is the universal panacea restoring God’s righteousness. Paul’s cross is a means to a good end. No one else in antiquity saw crucifixion so. Paul himself needed apocalyptic visions, or psychotic breaks, to come to this point. In this process, Paul foists his fractured, visionary self onto God. If we follow Paul’s apocalypse, Paul’s God becomes the psychotic who suffers a crack in the real.28 The crucifixion, of course, is a massive, divine cover-up. God sacrifices Christ “to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed” (Rom 3:25b). In Paul’s law court imagery, God is the divine judge. Further, he is a judge who lets his son take the fall for his judicial malfeasance. He commits murder to clear himself for passing over sins. He does what he finally did not demand of Abraham and what Dad Meiks could not bring himself to do. Afterward, this divine judge declares innocent the guilty who align themselves with his crucified (Rom 3:26). That is, the judge absolves those who put themselves completely at his disposal by joining him in his colossal cover-up. No wonder they cannot “boast” thereafter (Rom 3:27–31). It is hardly a matter to speak of publicly. Only Paul has the audacity to publicize this sordid tale of a judge who maintains his justness, loudly and murderously, as he clears the guilty who refuse to protest his murder. Such characters belong to a Coppola or Scorsese mobster movie, not to a gospel. Psychosis is, however, written deeply into religious images of the gods. As gods personify the holy or sacred center of religion, they symbolize both creative and destructive power. In Jack Miles’s creative reading of the Hebrew Bible, this psychosis ultimately renders God inactive and silent.29 In Miles’s equally creative reading of the Gospel of John, Christ overcomes this inactive silence with a suicidal mission. This suicide responds to the Edenic curses, to the fact that the human condition and the world are a divine punishment, by taking these curses (death) upon God himself.30 In this act, God also admits and responds to his inability or unwillingness to keep his covenant promises to Israel. To acknowledge his failure to reenact the Exodus, he elects to share Jerusalem’s fate and entices Jerusalem to deliver him to the Romans. Thereby, the Lord of Hosts becomes the Lamb of God, a repentance that constitutes the argument of the Christian Bible.31 Stephen D. Moore, God’s Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible (New York: Routledge, 1996), inspired by Foucault, provides a helpful critique of this divine quest for power and the spectacles that ensue. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo makes horrific reading on this point as well. 28 T h is transfers Boer’s claims in “Non-Sense” from Paul to Paul’s God. Of course, Paul’s God is his own religious, aesthetic creation. Boer also claims that psychosis is the center of Christianity (ibid., 154). 29 Miles, God: A Biography, 325–29, 402–6. 30 Miles discusses Christ’s death as “suicidal” at length (Christ, 160–78). His Christ deliberately provokes murderous hostility against himself. Compare Luke 4:16–30. 31 Ibid., 244, 313 n. 247. 27

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The Gospel story, a story in which the Jewish God is condemned, tortured, and executed by the foreign oppressor of the Jews, is a particularly violent and dramatic way to announce that that God is no longer a warrior prepared to rescue the Jews from foreign oppression but, rather, a savior who has chosen to rescue all mankind from death. The New Testament story as a whole—combining the Gospel story with the story of the early church—is a particularly radical and disruptive way to announce that God has exchanged warfare on behalf of the Jews for missionary teaching through the Jews.32

More clearly than Paul, the Gospels, and Gibson, Miles presents the cross as a rejection of the infliction of death on others, for, thereby, Christ replaces vengeance with nonretaliation; and death, vengeance, and violence become the enemies, not other humans. The New Testament is hardly so kind. For John—Miles’s precursor—the Jews are the enemies. The Synoptics associate the fall of Jerusalem with the crucifixion, and Paul’s gospel asserts that everyone deserves to die. Miles extends this “dessert” to God and reveals suicide to be the foundation of Christianity.33 James Morrow’s similar story, Towing Jehovah, is a less solipsistic version of the same tale. In his novel, when God dies, various characters struggle with the meaning of God’s death and with the problem of disposing of God’s body. Thomas Wyclif Ockham, Jesuit priest and scientist, finally decides that God committed suicide to clear the way for humans, so that they might finally mature. While this “Nietzsche-like” explanation is only one interpretation of the events in Towing Jehovah, it resembles Miles’s story and that of Donnie Darko. It differs, however, in narrative perspective. Morrow silences God in favor of the humans who struggle with life without the hope of divine deliverance. At their best, they resemble Will Munny and Camus’ Sisyphus, carrying on in frustrating, desperate situations without despair and without making a pact with death. Camus’ characters even rise to acts of creation.34 Perhaps we can glimpse the difference between suicide and mundane creation more clearly by returning to Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Basing the movie on Kazantzakis’s novel of the same name, Scorsese’s interest is the conflict between the spirit and the flesh. As we have seen, his troubled Christ makes Roman crosses and helps crucify messianic claimants in order to distance himself from the God who torments him. Ultimately, however, Christ chooses a monastic life over Mary Magdalene and makes a pact with death, with a God who wants him to suffer. On the cross, Christ has second thoughts inspired by a satanic temptation, a vision in which he leaves the cross for a life with wives and family. As he lies dying in old age, Judas arrives from the burning Jerusalem and castigates Jesus for rejecting his messianic destiny and for being responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem. Thereupon, Jesus returns to the cross as Christ, prays for forgiveness, tells God that he wants to be the messiah, and dies smiling. Once again, Christianity begins with a suicide, but now we see more clearly what the cost is. Jesus trades a normal life for messianic status. He trades the flesh for the spirit. He trades life for suicide. Out of his torment, he manufactures a higher destiny for himself. Perhaps we should say that Jesus dies that Christ might live. Ibid., 207. See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 131. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 28–50, famously describes religion as philosophical suicide, the deification of the absurd. 34 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 93–118. Camus’ absurd creator ultimately abandons “divine fables” for the “terrestrial face,” for “myths with no other depth than that of human suffering” (ibid., 117–18). Although Žižek critiques Camus as “outdated,” his own materialist reinterpretation of Christianity sounds like Camus at this point. See his On Belief, 148–51. A later book by Morrow, the third of what became a trilogy dealing with the death of God, The Eternal Footman, commits itself to human creation even more decisively. Its story focuses on the artist chosen to create God’s sepulcher. 32 33

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If Jesus dies that Christ might live, we have returned to Paul (Gal 2:19–20). Of course, we have also returned to Scorsese’s rather sleazy, murderous Paul. As we have seen, that Paul rejects Jesus for his resurrected Christ, the powerful gospel “truth” that people really need. While this scene may simply be typical Hollywood bashing of religious institutions, it may also speak more deeply about death-gospels. Obviously, when Scorsese’s Jesus returns to the cross to die to become the messiah, the savior of the world, he no longer has any legitimate quarrel with Scorsese’s Paul of Tarsus.

Dying (to Be) Gods/Heroes Leaving the death of this Donnie Darko Jesus aside for a moment, Scorsese’s Christ also resembles the popular superheroes of the comic book, who pass undetected as ordinary people, even nerds, until they slip into a phone booth, the wilderness, baptism “in Christ,” or Recall Incorporated to emerge as a Superman. When these superheroes die, it is only to their weaker or evil selves. This “death” reveals them as the superheroes they truly are. The fantasy they offer us is patent. These superheroes represent our deeper, true selves.35 Our normality or mediocrity is also only a guise. Of course, as we saw with Total Recall’s Douglas Quaid, this fantasy may only be an ego trip, a vacation from self. This possibility does not trouble Scorsese’s Paul. His Christ is far more important than a Jesus indistinguishable from ordinary people. It is Christ, not Jesus, who elevates Paul and his followers to their own superhero status. When Paul dies and Christ lives through him, Paul has died to become his own god (Gal 2:19–20), to conquer all of his weaknesses and inadequacies (Rom 8:35–37). M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable reflects this comic book world. The film’s two protagonists are diametric opposites. Elijah Price is the victim of a disease that makes him terribly susceptible to broken bones. Children call him Mr. Glass. His mother enticed him beyond his pain and fears by providing him comic books as a reward for his ventures into the world. These comic books are the adult Elijah’s livelihood (he sells them as art) and articulate his worldview. Given the dualistic dance between hero and villain in the comics, Elijah searches for his opposite, someone who does not get hurt, someone whom the comics are about, someone who does not really know he has this “gift,” someone “put here” to protect the rest of us. David Dunn is that someone. David is a college security guard who has grown apart from his wife, Audrey, because of his desperate sadness and his inability to communicate with her. Much of the story, like Shyamalan’s earlier The Sixth Sense, centers on a child’s perspective on all this. David’s young son, Joseph, lionizes his father and wants him to be the hero whom Elijah suspects him to be. David comes to Elijah’s attention when he alone survives a train wreck. At first, Elijah doubts that David is the one because David’s football career ended in an injury sustained in a car crash. Nonetheless, Elijah pursues David, and we gradually discover David’s “superpowers.” He has incredible strength, and, more important, he has the ability to see people’s lives (past and future) by simply touching them.36 Elijah’s explanations interest David, but he is frightened away from Joseph Campbell’s studies of myth generally came to this point. The myths, or his modernizing interpretation of them, awaken us to the hero within us all. See, for example, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 36 T h is supernatural “sight” provides another parallel to Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. 35

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his “call” when Joseph threatens to shoot him to prove once and for all that David is “no ordinary man.”37 Scared, David tells Elijah to “stop messing” with his life, but Elijah retorts that he knows that David faked the car injury for Audrey. David shatters Elijah’s dreams, however, when he tells him that he almost drowned as a child. Soon, however, Elijah has an epiphany in a comic book store: all superheroes have a weakness. David’s is water. Meanwhile, David struggles to overcome his sadness so that he can keep his family together. Finally, he calls Elijah and asks him what he is “supposed to do.” Elijah tells him to go to a public place so that he can sense the dangers people face. David does and saves two children from a man who has invaded their house, held their family hostage, and killed their mother and father. To do so, of course, he has to overcome his fear of water.38 When he returns home as the triumphant hero, he connects with Audrey for the first time in ages and begins to re-create his happy family. The next morning, a surprised Joseph finds happy parents at breakfast. While Audrey insists that the family avoid Elijah, David points surreptitiously to a newspaper headline, “Saved,” to let Joseph know that his father is a hero, “no ordinary man.” To this point, the movie is a comic book gospel. Elijah identifies David as the messiah who “saves” people and, in a nice updating for our times, his fractured family as well. In typical comic book fashion, his “ordinary guy” appearance is only a disguise for his true superhero identity. Only his young son and Elijah know his true identity.39 The movie’s denouement, however, deconstructs this story. David visits Elijah’s art gallery to confirm Elijah’s hopes and to thank him. When they shake hands, David “sees” that Elijah has caused several terrible accidents to make his messiah. Elijah confesses: Do you know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world. To not know why you’re here. That’s . . . that’s just an awful feeling. (“What have you done?”) I almost gave up hope. There were so many times I questioned myself. (“Killed all those people?”) But I found you. So many sacrifices . . . just to find you. (“Jesus Christ.”) Now that we know who you are, I know who I am. I’m not a mistake. It all makes sense. In a comic, you know how you can tell who the arch-villain is going to be? He’s the exact opposite of the hero, and most times they’re friends like you and me.

Appropriately, Elijah talks over David’s whispered interjections to this horror (in parentheses above). Nonetheless, end titles tell us that David reported Elijah to the authorities and that Elijah is now in a hospital for the criminally insane. The denouement centers on the question, “Who makes a messiah?” In this regard, the film resembles both Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Hal Ashby’s Being There.40 The movie explores more clearly than those films, however, the narcissism that generates the creation of messiahs. It suggests that we, like Elijah, create messiahs to find our own place in the center of the universe, to lionize, if not deify, ourselves. David was right, then, when he accused Elijah, in their very first meeting, of trying to take advantage of him. Here, Shyamalan’s Elijah resembles Scorsese’s Paul. Both create messiahs in order to position themselves at the center of the world. This messiah-making process also sheds light on Gibson’s public crucifixion. From this perspective, that strange break in perspective, when the camera abandons the terrestrial frame Reportedly, Shyamalan considered this phrase as a title for the film. Submerged in a pool, he rises to superhero status. The similarity to Paul’s “phone-booth baptism” is surely coincidental. 39 Incidentally, that his name is David and his son’s name is Joseph only reinforces these messianic allusions. 40 See Walsh, Reading the Gospels in the Dark, 38–39. 37 38

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to look down on the cross from heaven, is not so strange after all. That break testifies to the movie’s fundamental transubstantiation, our transformation into divine voyeurs untroubled by and not responsible for human passion.41 That Christ dies horribly and that other Jews do, too, in the temple earthquake matters little. We, like gods and Shyamalan’s Elijah, consume the images of rubble, broken bodies, and flowing blood in order to live.42

Leaving Ourselves Behind Dying to be gods allows us to leave the weaknesses and fragmentation of human life behind. Paul speaks eloquently of this human fragmentation in Rom 7:7–25:43 I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (Rom 7:15, 18b–19)

At least according to the interpretation of Augustine, Luther, and Bultmann, he speaks of this human fragmentation. Their interpretation makes Paul the precursor of modern consciousness and modern humans’ desperate, futile desires to find wholeness by overcoming themselves.44 Paul’s answer to this fragmentation is openness to transcendence, a loss of self in the powerful other. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! . . . There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. (Rom 7:24–25a; 8:1–2)

Even if it is unlikely that Paul experiences modern self-doubt, his “already, not yet,” “in Christ” gospel fragments himself and his followers socially, if not pyschologically.45 Paul’s “in Christ” did 41

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The abandonment of responsibility is the issue that Monty Python’s Life of Brian explores with its messiahmaking theme. One could, of course, explore a rather unholy connection to the Dracula movies here. See Tina Pippin, “Of Gods and Demons: Blood Sacrifice and Eternal Life in Dracula and the Apocalypse of John,” in Aichele and Walsh, Screening Scripture, 24–41. Larry Kreitzer, “The Scandal of the Cross: Crucifixion Imagery and Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in George Aichele and Tina Pippin, eds., The Monstrous and the Unspeakable: The Bible as Fantastic Literature (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997), 181–219, connects Dracula and Paul’s cross specifically. This passage presents several famous exegetical problems. Does Paul speak of himself, of humans generally, of Adam, or of some combination of these? Does Paul speak of his or humanity’s pre-Christian or Christian experience? How does this passage relate to the robust, confident attitude that Paul expresses toward the law in Phil 3:4–7? See Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” 78–96. While I used Stendahl’s work in chapter 1 to critique the modern, liberal Paul, I am now concerned with Paul as precursor of modern individualism, not as an apocalyptic stranger to modernity. Stendahl’s Paul may be more historically compelling than the Augustine-Luther-Bultmann Paul, but the Paul of Augustine-Luther-Bultmann is arguably more historically significant than that of Stendahl. More importantly, both Pauls are only interpretative constructs, and such constructs—not some hypothetical, historical Paul—are my concern here. I have carefully extracted the quotes from Rom 7 above to avoid reference to “the law” (at least the “law” as Torah). The role of Torah in light of Paul’s “in Christ” gospel is Paul’s major concern in Rom 7, as Stendahl has shown. Paul turns Torah into an advance guard for his “in Christ” apocalypse as he also does in Gal 3:1–5:1. In

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not end the world. “In Christ” became an enclave of the new age in the world, and Christ and the spirit became enclaves of the colonizing God within the believer. “In Christ,” then, creates dichotomies between the world and the age to come, the world and Paul’s sectarian “in Christ” communities, the self and Christ, the flesh and the spirit, and so forth. In every case, despite the overwhelming material evidence in favor of the former, Paul privileges the latter. This privileging becomes an ethical demand that creates its own dichotomies between the ideal and the actual, between the “ought” and the “is.” Thus, Paul’s descriptions of the life “in Christ” are always also ethical demands to leave the world, the self, and the flesh behind (see Rom 5–8; 2 Cor 3–5).46 As the new age is only tenuously present, Paul’s followers must consciously, deliberately realize it: for example, they have been justified, they should live justly; they have been delivered from the world, they should not conform to it; and they have been set free, they should not live as slaves (see Rom 5:1; 12:1–2; Gal 5:1, 16). Of course, the most succinct versions of the ideal are Christ, Paul, and the spirit, ideals that the followers can never fully actualize.47 As they realize their religious goals, however, there is less and less of the followers and more and more of Christ (Phil 2:5–11; 3:4–11). The result is an ethically and socially schizoid life, lived uncomfortably between ideal and actual, between the apocalypse and the suffering present. At best, Paul and his followers are out of place.48 Paul’s death-gospel creates this tension and resolves it by providing the fantasy that we can become superheroes if only we find the right phone booth. Being John Malkovich imagines another, similar portal, but its “ride” into celebrity scans the dark side of death-wish gospels. Craig Schwartz is a puppeteer whose most basic routine is Craig’s Dance of Despair and Disillusionment. Significantly, the Craig puppet performs this destructive dance after the puppet looks into a mirror, for Craig desperately wants to be anyone else. Puppetry allows him a temporary escape into someone else’s skin, but he fails as a puppeteer and takes a job at Lestercorp, housed mysteriously on floor 7 1/2. There, he meets and becomes enthralled with the seductive but aloof Maxine. He also finds a mysterious half-door behind a filing cabinet that leads him down a dark tunnel into the mind of John Malkovich for fifteen minutes, after which he falls unceremoniously from the sky into a ditch alongside the New Jersey Turnpike.49 Thereafter, Craig’s art becomes his new life. Although Craig is now the ultimate puppeteer and voyeur, the “metaphysical can of worms” of the Malkovich “ride” troubles him. By contrast, when Maxine and Lotte, Craig’s wife, find out about the Malkovich ride, they simply plunge ahead. Knowing that everyone wants to be someone else, Maxine markets the ride for two

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the modern individualism of which Paul is forerunner, “law” becomes a guilty conscience. Larry Kreitzer, The New Testament in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993), 88–126, nicely relates Rom 7:7–25 to modern moral dilemmas by comparing the passage to Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and to various film versions of that story. I have compared Paul’s fragmentation to superhero stories, but Kreitzer’s essay pushes the comparison toward horror films. In that case, the “normal guy” guise covers an evil monster, serial killer, and so on. Superhero films also flirt with the darkness within as well. The hero frequently likes the power or the darkness that his alias provides him. The Batman comics and films are among the best examples of this trope. It is curiously appropriate, then, that scholars are not sure whether Rom 5:1 should read “we have peace with God” or “let us have peace with God.” See Castelli, Imitating Paul. Here, Paul becomes precursor of almost every modern novel and film. Their protagonists are almost always “out of place” and looking for acceptance or self-realization. Peter Weir films are excellent examples of movies that deal with such out-of-place individuals. Roetzel, Paul, 1–3, describes Paul’s own life as caught between various cultural commitments. That tension is, of course, not quite the modern split between private selves and public personas. The time limit creates interesting and amusing plot situations, and it also suggests Andy Warhol’s dictum that in the future everyone will have fifteen minutes of fame.

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hundred dollars a trip. Lotte uses the ride to realize a new transsexual (or lesbian) life in which she inhabits Malkovich’s body while he has sex with Maxine. Facing the loss of Maxine (and Lotte), Craig flexes his puppetry muscles. He locks Lotte in a cage with her pet chimp and forces her to schedule trysts with Maxine and Malkovich so that he can inhabit Malkovich and finally enjoy sex with Maxine. Using his puppetry skills, Craig completely takes over Malkovich, marries Maxine, and launches a successful puppetry career. Intriguingly, Malkovich now dresses and looks like the old Craig Schwartz.50 Meanwhile, Lotte learns from Dr. Lester that the portal was his device and Malkovich his chosen “vessel.” Dr. Lester has been cheating death for some time by entering new “vessels” on their forty-fourth birthday. This time, he intends to take a whole committee of old folk with him. If they miss the deadline, however, they risk being trapped in the subconscious of a younger vessel, forced forever to see life through someone else’s eyes. Desperate, this cadre kidnaps Maxine and threatens to kill her if Craig will not leave Malkovich. Craig, however, refuses to leave Malkovich because he would be only Craig Schwartz if he did so. Ever angrier, Lotte decides to kill Maxine for betraying her with Craig, but Maxine escapes into Malkovich. Lotte pursues her, and they are disgorged after the requisite fifteen minutes. Craig, too, leaves Malkovich in a desperate bid to keep Maxine. All three wind up beside the turnpike, where, unfortunately for Craig, Maxine and Lotte declare their love for one another and leave Craig standing in the rain. Meanwhile, the Lester committee takes over the hapless Malkovich. In the denouement, seven years later, an older Malkovich, who now looks and dresses like Dr. Lester, explains his immortality plan to Charlie Sheen. The new vessel is Emily, the love child of Lotte/Malkovich and Maxine. As the movie closes, we see this child playing with her two mothers at a pool. Then, suddenly, we see the world through her eyes and hear Craig’s trapped, Maxine-obsessed voice issuing seemingly from within Emily’s head. This end is nicely ambiguous. Is Craig lying in wait to manipulate yet another puppet? Or has he, as Dr. Lester’s fears suggest, been trapped as a helpless voyeur in someone else’s life? Read with Being John Malkovich, Paul’s gospel poses the same ambiguities. On one hand, his deathgospel may lead us beyond our weak selves to the superhero’s conquest of death. On the other hand, this death trip may simply render us voyeurs who have abandoned responsibility for our lives and who have become trapped in fantastic ego trips, unable to relate to others or to the world. Or this gospel may simply render us hopeless vessels for colonizing forces like Christ, the spirit, Paul, Dr. Lester, or even the stories and ideologies of the movies. Paul’s gospel is constructive, that is, if we are Douglas Quaid. It is not if we are Donnie Darko. Moreover, in both cases, the death-wish gospel devalues everyday, banal life. As we leave the weaknesses and fragmentation of human life behind, we leave our humanity behind. Craig becomes a monster and still does not overcome his fear of his insignificance nor connect meaningfully with Maxine. He loses himself as we all do when we die to become someone else. Being John Malkovich allows us to see more completely these different aspects of becoming other than ourselves. Paul never really shows us Christ or his followers. Paul’s solipsistic letters completely colonize them. In Being John Malkovich, however, we see both Craig’s banal, frustrated life and his colonizing of Malkovich. We see both his loss of self in this process and what his death wish costs others. We see Malkovich “die” so that Craig and Lester can cheat banal T h e movie plays in amusing ways with the notion of personal identity. As Craig takes over, Malkovich fears that he is going insane. He then stalks Maxine to find out what is going on and discovers their “Being John Malkovich” enterprise. Craig tells him that it is only a simulation, but Malkovich learns the truth when he takes the trip himself. Inside his own head, he discovers a solipsistic world composed entirely of Malkoviches.

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frustration and death. Horribly, despite the sunny light and bright colors of the end, we are left with dark fears for Emily at the hands of either Craig or Lester. It is difficult to tell whether Malkovich and Emily represent Paul’s Christ or Paul and his followers. I am not sure, that is, who is ultimately puppet and puppeteer either in Paul or in Being John Malkovich. That, however, is precisely the point. As in Donnie Darko, the world collapses in this narcissistic gospel. We are John Malkovich. We are Paul’s Christ. Lotte worries at one point: “What is this strange power that Malkovich exudes? All I think about is wanting to be him.” We could say the same thing of Paul’s Christ. Like Paul’s Christ, Malkovich exudes promises of power and immortality. Being John Malkovich warns that the price of such immortality is narcissistic self-annihilation. Interestingly, Lotte asks Dr. Lester the question quoted above. In response, he tells his tale of immortality and offers her a place in Malkovich, but her pursuit of Maxine—through the bizarre, amusing world of Malkovich’s subconscious—leads her away from this opportunity (or catastrophe). Instead, in the denouement, she winds up happy in a lesbian, we suppose, relationship with Maxine. She also winds up more herself. As the movies teach us so frequently, perhaps our banal lives are not so bad after all. Perhaps we should consider Lotte, if not Craig, happy. That would take us beyond Paul. He would have us crucify the whole world (Gal 6:14) for our own salvation. If we consider Craig, not Craig/Malkovich, happy, that would take us beyond the movies, too.

Bearing Jesus’ Death in the Body According to his letters, Paul strives to turn his life and his ministry into a proclamation of his gospel. Accordingly, he boasts not of his success and “powers” but of his sufferings on behalf of Christ (2 Cor 3:7–6:10; 11:1–12:10). He and his associates are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus” (2 Cor 4:10). Paul’s life and the lives of his associates and followers are themselves public displays of the crucified. Probably neither 2 Cor 4:10 nor 2 Cor 12:7–9 indicates that Paul was stigmatic. Paul’s idea of bearing the cross is more metaphorical. As he puts it at another point, his followers should be a “living sacrifice” (Rom 12:1). The stigmata, of course, have been far more literal for mystics like Saint Francis. The movie Stigmata imagines a rather unconventional modern occurrence of these wounds of Christ. The movie begins with the separate stories of Frankie Paige, a young hairdresser, and Father Andrew Kiernan, scientific debunker of miracles for the Vatican. When Frankie receives a rosary originally belonging to Father Alameida, a deceased South American priest, from her mother, she begins to have frightening stigmatic attacks (nail holes in her wrists). Meanwhile, Father Andrew visits Father Alameida’s parish and finds an inexplicably bleeding statue of the Virgin Mary.51 At the Vatican, Cardinal Houseman rejects Andrew’s findings, saying that faith is based on the church, not on miracles. Frankie and Andrew’s stories come together when the cardinal sends Andrew to Pittsburgh to investigate Frankie after receiving a video from a local priest of her second stigmatic attack (the T h e movie suggests with music and images that Frankie is a new Mary. When we first see Frankie, as she goes out for a night on the town, the background music is “Whatever Happened to Mary?” Soon after her first stigmatic attack, she has a vision of a woman in blue carrying a baby in red that she drops in traffic. Religious art often shows Mary, of course, in a blue cloak. Not surprisingly, Frankie rushes into traffic to save the baby (Jesus). After her second attack, Frankie arrives at work in her own blue cloak. Later, we find out that Frankie does indeed bear the gospel, if not Jesus.

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scourging). When Andrew meets Frankie, he rejects the possibility that she is a stigmatic because she is an atheist. After all, only the most devout have the stigmata, the five wounds of Jesus, a gift of God representing a battle with evil in the body. The nail holes in her wrists and a note written in a language unknown to her perplex him, however, and he continues to meet with Frankie, who has more stigmatic attacks (wounds from the crown of thorns, nail holes in her feet). When she investigates the stigmata herself, she takes comfort from Christian art displaying the wounds in Christ’s palms. In her mind, her wrist wounds prove that she is not really a stigmatic. Unfortunately, Andrew explains that Christian art is devotional, not accurate. In fact, the crucified Christ would likely himself have been nailed through the wrists. Then Father Delmonico, a scholarly friend of Andrew’s at the Vatican, reports that Frankie’s mysterious language is Aramaic. Furthermore, her words resemble a recently discovered first-century Aramaic gospel, which Delmonico believes may come from Jesus himself. Ominously, Delmonico warns Andrew that Cardinal Houseman has squelched work on this gospel. The cardinal wants to keep the gospel a secret because its message supports a mystic, personal religion—its kingdom is within the individual—not the institutional religion of Roman Catholicism.52 The tension heightens when this evil cardinal arrives to take over Frankie’s case. While Andrew prays alone in a church, a mysterious visitor arrives who tells Andrew that he, Delmonico, and Alameida were the translators of the suppressed Gospel of Thomas and that Alameida was a stigmatic. Concluding that Alameida, not Christ, has possessed Frankie, Andrew rushes to save her. He arrives in time to stop Cardinal Houseman’s murderous exorcism. He then proves his faith by walking through a supernatural fire and taking on Alameida’s gospel mission. Satisfied, Alameida leaves Frankie after a final stigmatic attack. Andrew then carries Frankie into the garden past a statue of Saint Francis. As she recovers, birds land upon her so that she mirrors the statue. In the denouement, Andrew returns to Alameida’s South American church and recovers the hidden Gospel of Thomas. Stigmata is a stereotypical Hollywood treatment of religion. It focuses on individual religion while disparaging institutional religion as hopelessly corrupt and submerges traditional religion beneath modern heroism and romance. In short, Stigmata celebrates modern individualism. It does, however, strive to span the gap between secular modernity and tradition. Accordingly, its atheist has the stigmata and eventually “saves” a doubting priest. In short, modernity redeems that which is valuable in traditional religion.53 In light of Paul’s gospel of death, however, the intriguing element in this movie is another common Hollywood device, that is, the relegation of religion to the genre of horror. In the hands of Stigmata, “carrying in the body the death of Jesus” becomes demonic possession and a death sentence.54 Not incidentally, Scorsese’s treatment of Jesus’ relationship with God as a torment and Gibson’s treatment of Christ’s passion in The Passion of the Christ are also horrific. For these movies, the cross is a horror. It negates the world (Gal 6:14). Only Gibson suggests, like Paul, that it is somehow salvific for anyone else, and Gibson does so only by abandoning the cross for Catholic ritual (the flashbacks to the Eucharist). Stigmata quotes passages from the Gospel of Thomas, a Coptic gospel variously dated by scholars from the mid-first to the late second century. The church has not suppressed it. It is widely available, even online. 53 Frankie’s rushing into traffic to rescue the baby (Jesus) is emblematic of the movie’s thrust. For complaints about the movie’s treatment of Catholicism, see Roger Ebert, “Stigmata” http://www.suntimes. com/cgi-bin/print​.c​ ig (accessed June 21, 2004). By contrast, James Berardinelli finds the movie “almost relevant.” See “Stigmata” http://movie​-reviews​.colossus​.net​/movies​/s​/stigmata​.html (accessed June 21, 2004). 54 To the contrary, Ebert, “Stigmata” contends, “It is not a dark and fearsome thing to be bathed in the blood of the lamb.” Given his comments on The Passion of the Christ, he may have changed his mind. 52

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Stigmata ultimately abandons the cross and apocalyptic death-gospels in a different way. Stigmata eschews the horror of possession and death for an affirmation of this life in the stereotypical Hollywood form of the romance. Instead of the death-cross, Andrew carries the recovering Frankie into a garden. Stigmata offers romance-love-sex as an attractive option to stigmata and death. Neither Paul, who thinks marriage an unfortunate encumbrance (1 Cor 7), nor Gibson explores this option. Perhaps this is why, even though all historians agree that Jesus was crucified nude, Gibson does not explore this aspect of his hero’s humiliation. His Christ, like the Christ of most Christian art and almost all movies, remains strategically clothed.55 Despite his sadistically in-depth exploration of Christ’s suffering, Gibson’s passion hero does not plumb the depths of shame involved in sexual humiliation. I wonder, in fact, if Gibson’s financial success and the failure of Scorsese’s Jesus movie are not linked at precisely this point. Although he strategically avoids full frontal nudity, Scorsese films Christ nude on the cross. More daringly, he visualizes Christ’s temptation to depart from the cross for a “normal” life of marriage and children. That climax threatens both the ascetic, crucified Western imagination and the model of the Hollywood passion hero. By contrast, Gibson is far too savvy to offer us a nude, sexual Christ. Of course, Scorsese imagines this normal life only as a temptation. In fact, his Satan is an angelic young girl, typically the height of innocence in American and Hollywood mythology. By contrast, Stigmata affirms “normal” romance. Instead of death and evil ages, Stigmata offers us life in an idyllic garden. The traditional religious figures have become mere statues in the background. This espousal of modern liberalism resembles imaginations like those in movies such as Tender Mercies. I am now using something like what I challenged in chapter 1 to counter Paul’s apocalyptic gospel of death; nevertheless, I am not quite ready to extol the liberal Paul. What I would like to do is to leave various Pauls, including liberal and apocalyptic Pauls, in play against one another. If we can use an apocalyptic Paul to challenge liberal ideology, we can use liberal Pauls to counter apocalyptic death wishes. If we affirm only one, we are left unable to dispute either present culture or attempts to escape said culture. We need both liberal Pauls and apocalyptic Pauls to thwart that dilemma. Multiple Pauls, or the constant attempt to recognize that we interpret and construct, might be the best path toward whatever freedom from determinism, domination, and death is humanly possible. Perhaps we simply choose life instead of death gospels (see Deut 30:15–20).56 The Big Lebowski is a humorous expression of this point. In the midst of determinism (at least mysterious forces) and death, it manages to affirm life. A mysterious narrator tells the story of the Dude, Jeff Lebowski, who becomes embroiled in and gradually escapes various insane plots involving a millionaire, a kidnapping, and a nymphomaniac. In the midst of these absurd, chaotic plottings, Donny, one of the Dude’s friends, dies in an inane conflict with a roving band of German nihilists. The hero of The Big Lebowski simply accepts this death as he does the rest of life. He does not expect to conquer, to escape, or to find some larger meaning. He is far too inept and too lazy. T h e crucifixion that is part of the passion facade of Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is a notable exception. There is already some discussion about what the Roman Catholic Church will do with this nude Christ when the completed church becomes its property. For photos, see http://www. photo​​guide​​.to​/b​​arcel​​ona​ /s​​agrad​​afami​​​lia​.h​​tml. 56 If this suggestion comes too close to an uncritical endorsement of modernity, we need only return to apocalyptic rebels or watch a movie like Trainspotting. Opening and closing narrations in that movie assert that the hero and we should “choose [middle-class] life.” The hero is hardly convinced, however, and the narration and the movie ultimately compare the addictions of drug use and middle-class life. By the end of the movie, neither lifestyle seems a choice for life. 55

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He simply “takes it easy” at his neighborhood bowling alley. The rambling narrator’s last words57 affirm his approach to life: The Dude abides. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowing he’s out there. The Dude. Taking her easy for all us sinners. Shush. I sure hope he makes the [bowling] finals. Well, that about does her. Wraps her all up. Things seemed to have worked out pretty good for the Dude and Walter. And it was a pretty good story. Don’t you think? Made me laugh to beat the band. Parts anyway. I didn’t like seeing Donny go. But then, I happen to know that there’s a little Lebowski on the way. I guess that’s the way the whole durn human comedy keeps perpetuating itself down through the generations.

Life goes on. This human comedy is the alternative to the determinism and death of apocalyptic gospels. Of course, if we are going to live such lives, we will have to accept our own deaths, not that of Christ. Barabbas is quite instructive on this point. The protagonist lives while Jesus dies in his place. Barabbas is hardly thankful. He is angrily perplexed. He does not understand this event or his girlfriend’s fascination with Jesus. Finally, after various debaucheries, he returns to his outlaw life only to be captured by the Romans again. Pilate, who represents the law, cannot condemn him to death. He has been “redeemed,” so Pilate sentences Barabbas instead to the living death of the sulfur mines. Barabbas then descends into hell because, as he angrily observes, Christ has “taken his death.” In fact, despite various near escapes and cruel Roman punishments, Barabbas lives while everyone around him dies. Christ has taken his death. His hellish life goes on and on. Eventually, as a gladiator in Rome, he is surrounded by Christians. He cannot escape them or the silent God who will not reveal himself clearly to Barabbas. Finally, Barabbas tries to set fire to Rome in order to bring in the apocalypse. All that he does is to bring himself and various Christians to their own deaths. As the movie ends, he finally dies on his own cross, entrusting himself to and embracing the dark, as God has never made himself known to Barabbas as light. In short, Barabbas is an object lesson in the folly of living someone else’s life. He would be, and is, better off dying his own death rather than accepting someone else’s (Christ’s) voyeuristically and vicariously. To do so is to cheat oneself of all the life that is.

Comically, the narrator loses his place on occasion. This ineffectuality raises questions about any overarching providence. James Berardinelli, “The Big Lebowski,” http://movie​-reviews​.colossus​.net​/movies​/b​/big​_lebowski​ .html (accessed June 21, 2004), cites this mockery of the voiceover as one of the most entertaining features of the film.

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Why Girls Cry Gender Melancholia and Sexual Violence in Ezekiel 16 and Boys Don’t Cry1 Erin Runions

I start with an inkling that perhaps Ezekiel 16 and Kimberley Pierce’s 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry have something to say to each other. Certainly they are both texts about repeated, excessive, and fatal sexual violence; beyond that, it might be said they really have nothing to do with each other. Nonetheless, the task that I have set for myself, here and elsewhere, is to consider how like scenes in Bible and film can be read together productively. To my mind, the framing, focus, and staging of each can illumine what might otherwise go unnoticed in the other. Such a comparative endeavor may seem an impossible leap over millennia and cultures, destined to miss its mark and fall into an abyss of wild analogies and generalities. However, I have higher hopes for this kind of reading, largely because the Bible is still read as a definitive text, and so the world it projects becomes part of culture and may be influential on the same level as film. While it is not my intent to set out the points of convergence and divergence in the way that religious and filmic texts operate within culture, I start out on the premise that both contribute to, reinforce, and occasionally challenge norms in contemporary constructions of gender. As a feminist critic concerned with working against the harmful effects of binary gender norms, I find it pertinent not only to examine the internal gender dynamics of culturally potent texts, but also to look at the ways they are read and identified with, as well as how they might be read and identified with differently. Along these lines, reading together the unlikely candidates of Ezekiel 16 and Boys Don’t Cry leads me to draw connections between sexual violence, gender melancholia, and trauma. More precisely, I would like to show that the sexual violence in both film and text is the acute and traumatic outworking of what Judith Butler has called the gender melancholia at work in heterosexual identity. Put another way, these texts, when read together, show the traumatic nature of heterosexual identification, enacted through the matrix of social relations. I am less interested in the psychic make up of the characters in these texts than what the details of these two culturally influential texts might reveal about the social construction of gender. The My choice of theory and the kinds of arguments made are indebted to the readings and discussions that were part of the seminar “Psychoanalysis and Ethics” at Columbia University (spring 2001), cotaught by Ann Pellegrini and David Eng, which they graciously allowed me to audit. My focus on melancholia and trauma and my attempt to link them is the immediate result of the attention directed toward these themes in the seminar. Pellegrini’s comments about the film in more informal conversations have also been helpful in my thinking through the issues.

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proposition of heterosexual identification as a kind of socially enacted traumatic neurosis—to put it a little too bluntly—is one that can only be tentatively sketched out within the limited space allotted here, and will require more detailed attention later. Moreover, due to constraints of form, I cannot engage the extensive range of psychoanalytic and critical theory that exists on these questions. Rather, I simply work through a few theoretical links and connections that I have noticed in a limited number of texts, specifically as I see them relating to the question of gender melancholia and its impact on social relations. As indicated, Boys Don’t Cry and Ezekiel 16 are remarkably similar in portraying graphic and traumatic sexual violence against women: stripping, beating, murder. However, the significant differences between the two are what led me to consider gender melancholia in relation to sexual violence and trauma. The film—with its central transgendered tragic hero—highlights questions of gender (is this really about violence against a woman?), while the text—with its male competition played out in violence against the female beloved (is this really about Yahweh’s love for Jerusalem?)—brings the question of motivation for sexually violent rage to the fore. These differences can be put to work, somewhat paradoxically, as a kind of mutually heuristic binding agent, bringing the two texts together in an exploration of the formation of heterosexual gender identity and its relationship to violence. Bearing both the similarities and differences in mind, I proceed first by offering a negative assessment of each text, which I then soften in a negotiation with each through an exposition of gender melancholia, my application of it to the texts, and consideration of what these texts might say about gender melancholia and trauma. Finally I look briefly at the way readers have identified with these texts in order to think about how reading this way might urge readers to interrogate the kinds of identifications and foreclosures that form their own positions within gender.

Traumatic Texts? Ezekiel 16 is one of the most disturbing texts of the Hebrew Bible for those concerned about violence against women. Many feminist biblical critics have worked to expose the depths and implications of the misogyny and violence in Ezekiel 16.2 In brief (because others have done the work of detailed exposition), Yahweh chastises Jerusalem for idolatry, which is repetitively figured in terms of a woman’s sexual appetite for her neighbors, the nations—she is accused not only of “whoring” but worse of giving gifts to her lovers, of pursuing them (16:23–44). She is compared with her mother, an unnamed Hittite, and her erring sisters, Sodom and Samaria, and found to be infinitely more wanton (16:44–52). As if it were not enough that Jerusalem’s cultic Katheryn Pfisterer Darr, “Ezekiel,” The Women’s Bible Commentary: Expanded Edition, ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1998); J. Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996); Julie Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel, the City as Yahweh’s Wife (Atlanta: Scholars, 1992); Peggy L. Day, “The Bitch Had it Coming to Her: Rhetoric and Interpretation in Ezekiel 16,” Biblical Interpretation 8 (2000): 231–55; Linda Day, “Rhetoric and Domestic Violence in Ezekiel 16,” Biblical Interpretation 8 (2000): 205–30; Johanna Stiebert, “Shame and Prophecy: Approaches Past and Present,” Biblical Interpretation 8 (2000): 255–75; Mary E. Shields, “Multiple Exposures: Body Rhetoric and Gender Characterization in Ezekiel 16,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 14 (1998): 5–18; Carol J. Dempsey, “The ‘Whore’ of Ezekiel 16: The Impact and Ramifications of Gender-Specific Metaphors in Light of Biblical Law and Divine Judgment,” Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, ed. Victor H. Matthews, Bernard M. Levinson, and Tikva Frymer-Kensky (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998); Renila J. Weems, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995).

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practices are construed, condemned, and shamed as too-free feminine sexuality, criminalizing women’s sexuality in the place of idolatry, the text takes it that extra mile and punishes her sexually too: Yahweh strips her and further incites her lovers and her enemies against her, gathering them to stone and cut her to bits (16:35–42). Somehow she lives on through all of this and is told repetitively to bear her shame, and never to open her mouth again (16:63). How to deal with such violence and misogyny in a purportedly sacred text?3 Some feminist critics, without trying to redeem the passage, have made a call to read this text differently, so as not to justify contemporary violence against women or other groups or to highlight and work against contemporary problems of conjugal violence.4 To my mind this kind of rereading is the only option for dealing with the text, since it is still firmly fixed within the biblical canon, and since that canon still operates as authoritative in many communities. The challenge is to create a tradition of reading the text differently so that it becomes another kind of cultural influence. What then if this text were to be read, as the film seems to be, as a text with something interesting to say about the construction of gender identity? There are in fact more similarities between Boys Don’t Cry and Ezekiel 16 than one might imagine. Like the biblical text, the film portrays a woman (Teena Brandon), though living as a man (Brandon Teena), who pursues lovers throughout small town Nebraska, giving them gifts and pleasure. Brandon returns to his pleasures time and time again, almost reveling in the variously motivated chases this provokes from angry men. After hooking up with new friends in one of these pursuits, he ends up in Falls City, in love with the local Lana Tisdel, and buddies with his killers-to-be, John Lotter and Tom Nissen. As in the biblical text, her/his sexual behavior—which plays out in flirtations of all kinds and then in passionate lovemaking to Lana—is rewarded with excessive sexual violence by John and Tom, after she is identified as Teena Brandon by the police. They strip her, beat her, rape her, and kill her. So, like the biblical text, the film depicts the shaming of a woman, here double shame because it exposes a female to male transgenderist as a woman, “the pussy” he tries so hard not to be. Though Boys Don’t Cry is ostensibly a film about a transgendered man, at the end of the day it hits home as a film of violence against a woman who defies heterosexual norms of gender. The film starts out with Brandon as a young man confidently wooing women, but by the end of the film we are in no doubt that Brandon Teena is in fact a woman; the film goes out of its way to show it. In an extended scene, Brandon is stripped, her womanhood revealed in a long zoom-in on her vagina (unusual in film in any case, and unusually long here). In an even more protracted scene, she is beaten and raped twice (by John followed by Tom), forcing us to witness her penetrability. Following the rape, the film continues to expose her as a woman, revealing her unbound breasts as she speaks to the nurse who examines her, and showing her curves in the shower (this in a mainstream, soap-commercial type pose—shot from behind and headless, with a focus on thighs and hips, off balance, on one leg). Then, before Brandon can possibly have time to recover, Lana is engaging her sexually as a woman. “You’re so pretty,” Lana initiates, to which Brandon replies in high femme fashion, “You’re only saying that ‘cause you like me.”5 Not long after this moment of first-time lesbian romance, we see Brandon’s head blown off in the film’s traumatic climax, as John “takes care of a coupla’ dykes.” Thus the film forces Brandon to admit what he does not believe is true, fulfilling the wish of his frustrated cousin, “You are not a boy! . . . Shields notes that this is “the only text banned from use in the synagogue (Meg. 4:10; b. Hag. 131)’’ (“Multiple Exposures,” 5–6); so also Steibert, “Shame and Prophecy,” 268. 4 Shields, “Multiple Exposures,” 18; Dempsey, “The ‘Whore’ of Ezekiel 16,” 76 n. 28. 5 Quotations from the film are my own transcription. 3

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You are not a boy! . . . Why don’t you just admit that you are a dyke?!” Though Brandon replies, “Because I’m not a dyke,” the film apparently thinks it knows better.6 However similar the film might be to the biblical text, it has not been subjected to feminist critique in the same way. Whereas feminist biblical critics have argued that enough is enough with Ezekiel 16, that it is profoundly unhelpful as a religious metaphor let alone as a culturally influential text, the acclaim for the film has been almost entirely positive. The reasons for the film’s amnesty from feminist critique, as far as I can see, are threefold. First, the main subject of the film is the tragic end to a conflicted transgendered life, which makes it both unusual and iconic for people who are interested in questions of gender identity,7 thus giving the film a place in the world of alternative film. Second, the film depicts a true story, which makes it seem like an honest specimen of truth telling, rather than a fictional figment of misogynist imagination. And finally, the film’s director, Kimberly Pierce, identifies as queer, as does its feminist producer, Christine Vachon;8 there may be some tacit understanding that queer feminists would not produce something damaging to women, or that they might stand outside the patriarchal loop. But to my mind, “truth telling” (which somewhat ironically is how the Bible has traditionally been read) and “authorship” are not enough to grant the film absolution from feminist critique: I see no inherent radical political program in watching in detail—as entertainment—the violence that really happened to a wo/man. Nor do I think that an author’s self-stated identity guarantees an alternative message. The question for me—as with my question of the biblical text—is whether this film has something interesting to say about gender identity and the violence that surrounds gender transgressions. At one level it seems that it does not, because it frames the story in a very traditional way (apart from the twist of gender and the inclusion of lesbianism at the end): two boys battle it out over a girl, one boy wins, the other boy loses and is punished (but here—grafting in another very traditional story—punished for sexual “misdemeanor” in the same fashion as are many women). But perhaps there is more complexity than first meets the eye, and this I would like to explore with the help of Butler and Ezekiel 16. Indeed, the plot of the biblical text is slightly more elaborate than that of the film and may provide a way into thinking about the dynamics in the film. In Ezekiel 16, the two competitors (Yahweh and the nations) attack the object of their desire (Jerusalem), rather than each other (whereas in the film the contested object of desire, Lana, is one of the few who remains both alive and unincarcerated). Elsewhere, I have argued using the theory of René Girard on mimetic desire and violence that this complexity in the biblical text suggests that perhaps Jerusalem is violently barred from her desire for the nations because it mimics, and so competes with, Yahweh’s (possibly homosexual) desire for the nations.9 Over the years since the time of writing that essay, I have come to see that one of the problematic implications of the argument is that It seems from an interview in Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide that perhaps Kimberly Pierce viewed Brandon primarily as a woman crossing gender lines (rather than primarily as a man with the wrong genitals). She says—and it is interesting to notice the use of pronouns and the order she chooses to use for name and surname here—“I really fell in love with this kid Teena Brandon, who one day put a sock in her pants and a cowboy hat on her head and reinvented herself into her fantasy of a boy and then went out and passed . . . and then after it all came crashing down, and Brandon found a deeper truer self ” (“Putting Teena Brandon’s Story on Film: An Interview by Francesca Miller” [fall 2000], 40). This deeper truer self that Pierce sees in Brandon, it would appear from the film, is a female, lesbian self. 7 See Vernon A. Rosario, “Transgenderism Comes of Age,” Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide (Fall 2000): 31–33. 8 Pierce, “Putting Teena Brandon’s Story on Film,” 39; Erika Muhammad, “Independent Means,” Ms. Magazine (February/March 2000): 76–77. 9 Erin Runions, “Violence and the Economy of Desire in Ezekiel 16.1–45,” Prophets and Daniel: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001). 6

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it might be read as predicating violence against a woman upon homoerotic desire, instead of upon misogyny and heterosexual misconduct. Further, my argument there depended upon the idea that Yahweh’s love for Jerusalem was not sexual, but parental (or both). Though I do not think this latter implausible, it may also be useful to think through the more traditional and predominantly accepted understanding of Yahweh’s love for Jerusalem as (hetero)sexual. However, I still believe the basic instinct of that essay—to relate the strange working of the plot to questions of sexual and gender identity—to be on track; but I now find it more important to take into consideration the unconscious working of heterosexual gender identifications as they relate to violence, and it is here that Butler is informative. I worry that the argument I make here runs the same risk of being read as blaming violence on homoerotic desire—given that Butler predicates heterosexual identification on disavowed homosexual attachment—and that I argue that heterosexuality, thus formed, gets lived out violently. However, I want to be clear that it is not the actual same-sex attachment that I am accusing here, but rather the socially formulated prohibition against homosexuality that comes before and causes the loss, for which the heterosexual world need take responsibility.

Gender Melancholia Judith Butler’s writing on gender melancholia—to give a brief and simplified summary here of the basic lines of the theory with which many feminist and cultural critics are by now familiar—is an attempt to engage and move beyond structuralist and psychoanalytic accounts that separate biological sex from gender. In contrast to these accounts, whereby patriarchal law is understood to impose itself on essential raw nature, sex, to produce gender, Butler wants to see sexed bodies as equally discursively constructed. In other words, she sees “sex” constructed in the same operation in which gender and sexual orientation are also constructed. This proposition moves away from the reliance of feminism on essentializing (Western) conceptions of sex and gender, particularly femininity. Instead, patriarchal law is conceived of as a kind of culturally bound set of psychic processes serving to establish norms and prohibitions that inaugurate and regulate the means by which people come to identify and live out their gender and sexuality. In interrogating structuralist (Lévi-Straussian) and psychoanalytic (Freudian, Lacanian) notions of the incest taboo as a founding moment for heterosexual assignments of sex and gender, Butler asks whether there might be another taboo operating in the construction of sex and gender, an even more primary taboo, against homosexual attachments.10 Working through Freud’s influential works, “Mourning and Melancholia” and The Ego and the Id, Butler aligns the incest taboo with mourning, and the homosexuality taboo with melancholia. For Butler following Freud, mourning represents a gradual and healthful letting go of a lost love object, a loss that is acknowledged. Melancholia, on the other hand, represents the inhibition of grief, a disavowal of loss, and an internalization of the lost loved object in a way that continues to haunt the bereaved. In other words, in melancholia the lost loved object is “set up inside the ego,” or incorporated into the ego.11 Such an internalization, Freud tells us, manifests itself as an Judith Butler is at pains to point out that homosexual attachment is not something that comes “before” cultural constructions of sex and gender; it is a possibility opened up within culture, but on the margins and powerfully foreclosed from dominant culture (see Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [London & New York: Routledge, 1990], 77–78). 11 Freud uses the word “introjection,” but later theorists, including Butler, have called this “incorporation,” following the distinction elaborated by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok between introjection and 10

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identification with the lost loved object. This unavowed loss and subsequent identification is made manifest through melancholic self-reproach and depression. Self-reproach, which to Freud seems exaggerated and out of proportion in melancholic subjects, is a result of the ambivalence that the patient feels toward the lost loved one (love and anger), and represents the rage that should properly be directed toward the lost loved one, but is instead internalized. In The Ego and the Id, Freud takes the mechanism of melancholic loss further to think of the inward-turned loss as actually forming parts of the ego. The ambivalence toward the lost object is understood to be configured both as identification (ego-ideal) and as critical agency (super-ego).12 As Butler puts it, the ambivalence is “set up as internal parts of the ego, the sadistic part [the super-ego] takes aim at the part that identifies [with the lost object], and the psychically violent drama of the super-ego proceeds.”13 The super-ego, or critical agency, acts tyrannically against the object set up inside the ego (the ego-ideal).14 In fact, as Butler points out—and this will be important to my own eventual argument—in melancholia the super-ego becomes the agent of the death drive, “a kind of gathering-place for the death instincts.”15 The super-ego, Freud tells us, also “has the task of repressing the Oedipus Complex,” that is, of forbidding incest.16 Following this trajectory, Butler suggests that the heterosexual incest taboo represents forbidden objects of desire which, because they are known, are grievable and therefore within the realm of mourning. On the other hand, the strong cultural prohibition on homosexual desire, she argues, produces melancholia by creating disavowed same-sex attachments, and therefore ungrievable, lost loved objects (“I never loved, therefore I never lost”).17 In elaborating the relationship of the lost loved object to the formation of the super-ego—a relationship that both film and biblical text also articulate—Butler shows that Freud comes to understand melancholia as constitutive for the ego and the super-ego. Melancholia, therefore, is the condition of possibility for mourning. Thus, for Butler, gender melancholia can be read as the condition of possibility for heterosexual norms: the melancholic, disavowed loss created by the taboo on homosexual attachments prepares the way for the incest taboo that governs heterosexual gender. Put another way, in order for the grievable incest taboo (in Freudian terms, the Oedipus complex) to operate, the child has first to identify with the same-sex parent, so as to compete for the opposite-sex parent. According to the logic of the system then, this initial incorporation. Introjection, Abraham and Torok suggest, is the process within mourning in which the object is known to be lost, and can thus be spoken of and represented. Incorporation, on the other hand, is the establishment of the lost object in such a way that it cannot be acknowledged, and cannot be represented; it is “anti-metaphorical” (Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Introjection—Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia,” Psychoanalysis in France, ed. Serge Lebovici and Daniel Widlöcher [New York: International Universities Press, 1980 (1972)], 9–10). Abraham and Torok call this a kind of encryption: “grief that cannot be expressed builds a secret vault [crypt] within the subject” (ibid., 8; see also Abraham and Torok, “A Poetics of Pyschoanalysis: ‘The Lost Object—Me,’” trans. Nicholas Rand, Substance 43 [1984 (1978)]: 4–5, 10–13). This crypt, Abraham suggests, can house either the subject’s own secret, or a disavowed secret inherited from others (Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” trans. Nicholas Rand, The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis, ed. Françoise Meltzer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 (1978)], 75–80). 12 T h ough Freud does not delineate the different functions of the super-ego in The Ego and the Id where the notion first appears, in later writings he distinguishes the various roles of the super-ego, in which the ego-ideal operates as the ideal standard by which the critical agency judges the ego; see J. Laplanche, J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York and London: Norton, 1973 [1967]), 144–45. 13 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 189. 14 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, vol. 19, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1961 [1923]), 51. 15 Ibid., 54; cited in Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 188. 16 T h e Ego and the Id, 34. 17 T h e Psychic Life of Power, 138–40, 147.

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identification is accomplished through a loss, that is, the ungrievable loss caused by strong cultural prohibitions against sexual attachments to the same-sex parent (homosexual taboo), which also at the same time sets up the prohibition against incest. Moreover, for Butler this operation not only forms gender identifications, but also constructs sex at the same time. The lost object, as it is incorporated into the ego, she suggests—building on Freud’s statement that the ego is “first and foremost a bodily ego”18—“literalizes the loss on or in the body” as a sexed body, as “the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear ‘sex’ as its literal truth.”19 In other words, one of the ways in which the loss comes to haunt the bereaved is as “sex.” In this way Butler is able to move away from an understanding of sex as the a priori to gender; for her, sex and gender are part of one and the same melancholic operation.

Violence and Gender Melancholia Both Boys Don’t Cry and Ezekiel 16 might be said to portray the kind of identification with the lost object that is operative in gender melancholia. The gender identifications made in film and text can be read as the incorporations of lost loved parental objects. If Brandon is understood as identifying as a heterosexual man, and Jerusalem as a heterosexual woman, then following the theory that I have laid out, it is not surprising to find that these sex/gender identifications can be correlated to the loss of same-sex attachments. In each case we find parental loss: Jerusalem’s mother abandons her in the field and Brandon’s father, it is revealed at the end of the film, is lost to him before he is born. Not only is Jerusalem’s mother—the unnamed Hittite—lost, but any remaining attachment to her, or grief over her loss, is foreclosed by the open derision of Hittite identity and the prohibition against Israel mixing with other nations.20 In this sense, the loss is the double loss of which Butler speaks: a loss that cannot be avowed or grieved. In Brandon’s case, though, the death of his father before his birth makes the loss a literal never, never (never loved, never lost), therefore also ungrievable in a way. These losses seem to precipitate gendered identification. Certainly the biblical text makes much of Jerusalem’s identification with her mother (in spite of not knowing her). As an insult, Jerusalem is told how alike she is to her mother: “all who recite proverbs against you will recite one saying, ‘Like a mother her daughter. The daughter of your mother, you are one who loathes her husband and her children’” (Ezekiel 16:44–45).21 Likewise, Brandon, born—as he tells Lana—a “girl-girl,” takes on the identity of a man, arguably an identification with his lost father. The filmic depiction of identification formed with the lost object is both less and more obvious T h e Ego and the Id, 26. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 68. For an interrogation of Butler on this point, see Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 27–44. Prosser takes issue with what he sees as Butler’s “displacement of sex from material interiority into fantasized surface” (ibid., 44). As I read it, his concern is with establishing the reasons why material sex might need to be changed in order to match up with what Freud calls the bodily ego (what Prosser calls interior perceptions of sex); Butler’s emphasis on discursivity seems, to Prosser, to render sex abstract and imaginary, and therefore easily accommodated in whatever body one finds oneself. Though I do not read Butler (or Freud on the bodily ego) in quite the same way, Prosser’s insistence on the need for transsexuals to change the materiality of their bodies is part of an important critique of what he calls queer theory’s appropriation of transsexuality (ibid., 31)—the use of transsexualism as a deliteralized metaphor for “the essential inessentiality” (ibid., 14). Such an appropriation refuses transsexuals’ need to literally change their bodies. 20 For comment on the conflation of racism and misogyny here, see Dempsey, “The ‘Whore’ of Ezekiel 16,” 62–63, 77. 21 Translations of biblical texts are my own. 18 19

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than in the biblical text. On one hand, the film does not make much of this identification. There are hints, though, that it may be operative: in one of the film’s more nuanced details, Brandon reveals an internalized identification with his father by offering—in a quiet moment, without his usual bravado—to sing Lana to sleep with a song that his (never known, never loved, never lost) father taught him. On the other hand, it might be said that Brandon has quite obviously incorporated the lost father into/as a heterosexual male identity. Indeed, he might be seen as an example par excellence of the literalizing effect of the lost same-sex attachment on and in his body, as “sex.” Of interest here though is that Brandon, born a biological girl, has later taken on heterosexual male identity, so the primary loss of a “same-sex” attachment is in some sense retroactive. This of course bears out the notion that “primary” loss is not original or foundational as much as negotiated within and through culture. Arguably, then, both film and text demonstrate the working of gendered and sexed identifications as structured through a disavowed loss. But, following from this, it is interesting that neither Brandon nor Jerusalem seems to engage in much self-reproach, signifying anger at the incorporated lost object, as one might expect of melancholic dispositions (in fact, we do not get any of Jerusalem’s internal dialogue at all). Indeed, for the most part, Jerusalem and Brandon appear well-nigh “shameless” in their (hetero)sexual pursuits: the biblical text goes on at length about Jerusalem’s willingness to make herself available to her lovers (Ezekiel 16:23–34), and Brandon seems always to be on the make, unabashedly using the women who fall for him for food, shelter, and money. There are a few brief moments in the film, however, that let slip at least a little hostile judgment upon the internalized heterosexual male object with self-deprecating comments. During the ritual of dressing—binding his breasts, inserting his penis, slicking his hair—Brandon looks in the mirror and (approvingly) tells himself, “I’m an asshole.” Later he responds to Lana’s question, “What were you like, before all this, were you like me, a girl-girl?” with “Ya, like a long time ago, and then I guess I was just like a boy-girl, then I was just a jerk. . . . It’s weird, finally everything felt right.” But as Freud points out, there is a kind of ambivalence in melancholia whereby the melancholic subject is both reproach-filled and unabashed about it. In this fashion, Brandon’s professions, though reproachful, are accompanied by a distinct lack of regret—and one gets the feeling that Jerusalem would have no regrets either, if she could speak. But this too fits with Freud’s description of the melancholic, who, he says, exhibits a remarkable lack of shame. As he states it, “feelings of shame in front of other people . . . are lacking in the melancholic. . . . One might emphasize the presence in him of an almost opposite trait of insistent communicativeness which finds satisfaction in self-exposure.”22 So perhaps this shameless but at points derogatory selfdisplay that Brandon and Jerusalem exhibit might be enough to make the case for the operation of gender melancholia in these texts. Both texts also depict another kind of brutal reproach that culminates in self-abasement. This reproach comes from the outside but finally extorts self-reproach. In the film, John and Tom first shame Brandon by stripping him and exposing his “true sex,” then reproach him verbally, “you know you brought this upon yourself,”23 and finally degrade him further through rape and Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1957 [1917]), 247. As an interesting counterpoint to my argument here, I might note that in the film, we witness Brandon—in response to this shaming revelation of his “lack” of manhood—step out of his body and look on, as the man he knows himself to be. This could be read as an instance of the by now rather banal psychoanalytic “truth” that the phallus stands in for lack. Or, alternatively, it could be read as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick might read it, as a queer and liberating response of identity formation in response to shame (“Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The

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beating. Their threat to kill him if he reports the rape seems finally to wrest the sarcastic but self-reproachful response from Brandon: “Of course, I mean, this is all my fault, I know.” The same pattern of verbal and physical shaming followed by self-reproach also occurs in the biblical text. Before Yahweh gathers the nations against Jerusalem to strip and batter her, he verbally reproaches her, calling her “whore,” “weak of spirit,” “adulterous,” “worse than other whores,” and all other manner of insult.24 In response to her abuse by Yahweh via the nations, Jerusalem is said to acknowledge her wrongdoing (self-reproachfully), to accept Yahweh’s covenant, and to remain silent (although as Shields points out, we never actually hear her giving voice to her penitence25). I would suggest that these scenes are in some way reminiscent of the violent drama of the super-ego. Indeed, John, Tom, Yahweh, and the nations might be seen as standing in for the super-ego, performing the function of the tyrannical critical agency through physical shamings and verbal abuses that ultimately lead Brandon and Jerusalem to some form of self-reproach. Not only is condemnation threefold (physical shaming, verbal reproach, and self-reproach), in both cases death is the final reproach (though somehow Jerusalem lives on after being cut to bits).26 Thus the tyrannical male figures in these stories can be read as powerfully critical agencies that enforce self-reproach on the part of the melancholic heterosexual figures. And like the super-ego, they seem also to represent a gathering place for the death instincts, driving their reproaches unto death. It appears then that gender melancholia manifests itself in these texts through reproachful super-egos, as expected, but in a slightly altered, externalized form. This externalization of painful processes within the ego, I will argue presently, is similar to what happens in traumatic neurosis; but first I would like to consider other ways in which Brandon and Jerusalem might also represent externalized interior processes within the melancholic formations of heterosexual identity. To this point, I have tried to show how these texts can be said to depict heterosexual identifications under attack by other, external, tyrannical figures. But significantly, these aggressors, as also heterosexual, must likewise operate within the matrix of gender melancholia. Their identities too would be constructed through loss, identification, and judging critical agency. It might make sense, then, to see how their cruel actions work out their own gender melancholia. I would submit that as much as Yahweh, the nations, John, and Tom can be read as inhabiting the role of super-ego, so also can Brandon and Jerusalem be read as standing in for the lost loved objects of their tormentors (particularly John and Yahweh, on whom the texts focus). In other words, Brandon—as the ideal handsome, kind, and daring man—and Jerusalem—as the ideal nation—might be said to be incarnations of John’s and Yahweh’s own disavowed samesex attachments, turned into ideal points of identification. In fact, these disavowed attachments might be unacknowledged bonds between John and Tom, or between Yahweh and the nations. Certainly some critics have hinted that the relationship between Tom and John betrays some kind of repressed love relationship;27 and I have already floated the possibility that Yahweh desires Art of the Novel,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (1993): 12–15). This might point to the role that shame plays in enforcing the loss of same-sex attachments, and therefore in shaping subsequent identifications. 24 Linda Day points out that this kind of language is typical of batterers who use insults like ‘“dirty slut,’ ‘whore,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘cunt,’ ‘slave,’ ‘dummy’ . . . with great frequency” (“Rhetoric and Domestic Violence,” 220). 25 Shields, “Multiple Exposures,” 7. 26 Shields argues that a similar thing occurs in Ezekiel 23, where Oholah and Oholibah live on in spite of being killed because they are necessary “as warnings (object lessons) to other women . . . [and] as testaments to YHWH’s power and identity” (“Identity and Power/Gender and Violence in Ezekiel 23,” Postmodern Interpretations: A Reader, ed. A. K. M. Adam [St. Louis, Mo.: Chalice, 2001], 149). 27 Donald Moss and Lynne Zeavin, “Film Review Essay: The Real Thing? Some Thoughts on Boys Don’t Cry,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 81 (2000): 1228. John Gregroy Dunne’s story in The New Yorker also hints at this (“A Report at Large: The Humboldt Murders” [13 January 1997]: 44–52).

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the nations. If these loves are disavowed and so lost, they might also be set up, here externally, as points of heterosexual identifications that can then be both loved and berated. The sticking point here is that rather than being male points of identification, as one would expect, Brandon and Jerusalem are destroyed as women, the “worst kind” of women at that (whores and dykes).

Repudiating Femininity Perhaps this can be seen as a moment within the formation of heterosexual male identification that Butler calls the repudiation of femininity. On the way to establishing heterosexual desire through identification with the same-sex lost object, the melancholic heterosexual male must prove that he is not a woman. Butler describes it thus: Becoming a “man” within this logic requires repudiating femininity as a precondition for the heterosexualization of sexual desire and its fundamental ambivalence. . . . Indeed the desire for the feminine is marked by that repudiation: he wants the woman he would never be. He wouldn’t be caught dead being her: therefore he wants her. . . . One of the most anxious aims of his desire will be to elaborate the difference between him and her, and he will seek to discover and install proof of that difference.28

Both film and text, it seems to me, show male figures performing exactly this kind of work; in repressing their own same-sex attachments, and establishing identifications with them as masculine ideals, they must first thoroughly abjure their femininity. At the very least, reading along these lines makes some sense of several peculiarities in the biblical text: that is, the strange working of the plot whereby Jerusalem’s competing lovers gang up on her rather than on each other; the fact that Jerusalem lives on, even after being cut to bits; and finally, an odd spelling that occurs throughout the chapter. As mentioned earlier, one of the points where film and text do not match up is in the treatment of “the object of desire.” Where in the film, Lana—the contested object of desire—remains unharmed, in the biblical text Jerusalem is destroyed. But if the primary object of desire in the biblical text is actually not Jerusalem, but the male nations—for instance the sons of Egypt, whose “largeness of flesh” seems to be of some interest to Yahweh (v. 26)—then Jerusalem’s role can be understood differently. If this samesex attachment to the male nations is disavowed, which clearly it is, and so lost, it makes sense (within the logic of gender melancholia at least) that a replacement nation is set up as a point of identification. Though the figure of a beloved nation (Jerusalem, and also Samaria and Sodom in Ezekiel 16:46–52) may be the perfect stand-in object for the lost love, the question remains as to how to make sense of her femininity.29 That Yahweh identifies himself with the nation of Israel, and in particular with the city of Jerusalem, is so much received theological wisdom. But as Shields points out in a discussion of the sister passage to this one, Ezekiel 23, Yahweh’s identity as a powerful deity is dependent on Jerusalem as a political entity; he is nothing without her. There is Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 137, emphasis added. Freud writes: “The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only, if, owing to the return of the object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object” (“Mourning and Melancholia,” 252). Figuring the nation as woman-as-sexual-object may be a convenient and culturally accepted way of doing this. For elaboration on the point of objectification of the women in Ezekiel 16 and 23, see Shields (“Multiple Exposures,” 13; “Identity and Power/Gender,” 146–49).

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therefore a strange conflation that occurs between the abuser/abused, subject/object, masculine/ feminine.30 This is one of the reasons, Shields argues, that Jerusalem lives on although she has been killed; she is an essential part of Yahweh’s identity. In a sense, he cannot be “caught dead” being her. Yet as Shields notes, Jerusalem’s continued life also poses a continual threat to Yahweh’s power. This threat, I would suggest, resides at least partially in her feminine identification, that thing that Yahweh must repudiate (within himself) in order to disavow his love for the nations and to complete the accompanying masculine identification.31 Of particular interest with respect to the overlap in identity between Yahweh and Israel is a strange linguistic quirk, which produces an ambiguity between first-person verb forms (describing Yahweh) and second-person feminine verb forms (describing Jerusalem). Eight times in the chapter, the written consonants (Ketib) spell the first-person singular suffix form (“I, Yahweh”), but are vocalized as the second-person feminine singular suffix form,32 and corrected in the margins (Qere) to the second-person feminine consonantal form (“you, Jerusalem”) (vv. 13, 18, 22, 31a, 31b, 43a, 43b, 51).33 While this orthographical oddity may simply be, as scholars maintain, an archaic second-person form,34 it is curious that it occurs with such frequency in the chapter. The high concentration of the ambiguous form in this particular chapter is at the very least suggestive of an uncertain identification between Yahweh and Jerusalem. In the most notable of these occurrences, an ambiguity appears between Ketib and Qere as to whether you (Jerusalem) or I (Yahweh) put “my incense” before the images of lovers (v. 18), whether you or I build your high places (v. 31a), whether you or I go beyond the call of duty for a regular prostitute (v. 31b), and whether you or I have a hand in devising your abominations (vv. 43b, 51). With this ambiguity in place, the speech of Yahweh sounds very much like that of the self-deriding melancholic, accusing himself of wrongdoing while at the same time accusing the lost loved object. The film has fewer ambiguities overall. However, one aspect that stands out as somewhat difficult to decipher is the relationship between John and Brandon. Clearly Brandon is both in awe and jealous of John. But John, as opposed to what one might anticipate in response to a newcomer in a small town, is immediately friendly and warm with Brandon (Tom is much more the bully we might expect). He fights Brandon’s first fight with him; he jokingly shows him how to throw a punch; he tells him of his love for Lana; he sets him up to (dis)prove his manliness in bumper skiing; and he directs him in a car chase, leaning over his shoulder and telling him how and where to drive. Indeed, there are moments, in long, close-up camera shots of John’s face, when it seems that John looks at Brandon with genuine love and tenderness. This kind of attitude is not reflected at all in his relationship with Tom, although the film hints that they do have some kind of a special bond (“I’m the only one who can control that fucker,” says Tom). But if Brandon,

“Identity and Power/Gender,” 151. For a different kind of psychoanalytic reading, in which this rage is read as Ezekiel’s rage against his own mother expressed in the metaphor of Yahweh’s rage against Israel, see David J. Halperin, Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 160–67. 32 T h is form does not occur again in Ezekiel, though a related form occurs in Ezekiel 36:13 in which the secondperson feminine singular pronoun (’t) is spelled with a yod at the end (’ty), but is vocalized as usual. However, this spelling of the second-person feminine suffix form does occur elsewhere in the MT, particularly in Jeremiah (e.g., Jeremiah 2:33; 3:4, 5; 4:19; 31:21; 46:11). 33 T h e reverse occurs in v. 59, with the feminine form corrected to the first-person form. 34 Walther Zimmerli, A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, vol. 1, trans. Ronald E. Clements, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979 [1969]), 325 n. 13; John W. Wevers, Ezekiel, The Century Bible (London: Thomas Nelson, 1969), 122 n. 13; Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910), §44. 30 31

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as a point of masculine identification, can be seen as holding the place of John’s (incorporated) lost love for Tom or other men, John’s mentorship of Brandon might begin to make some sense. Although on the surface the film mobilizes John’s anger at Brandon as jealousy over Lana, perhaps John’s tendency to push Brandon into danger is telling both as a kind of identification and as judgment upon that identification. In setting Brandon up to bumper ski, he tells him that he “can do it . . . don’t let ‘em scare you,” and then (judgingly) that he “can do better than that,” not satisfied. Strangely, as he introduces Brandon into the game, he pulls off his own shirt as if he were introducing himself: “this here’s a mean prize fighter up from Lincoln . . . very tough” (this comes as a voice-over while John leads Brandon toward the truck; it is not clear who actually says it, or if it is just in John’s head). After Brandon’s failed attempts to stay upright aboard the hurling truck, John commends him with what could also be read as an ominous, foreshadowing threat, “you’re one crazy little fucker, whadd’re we gonna do with you?” Later, he urges Brandon on in a reckless car chase, head close, voice low, again somewhat beratingly (“c’mon ya’ pussy, go faster, y’cocksucker . . . don’t stop, don’t stop, go faster, go faster”). At one point he mysteriously leans over (in response to Brandon’s “I can’t see”) and looks as if he will fix something (but what?), or perhaps as if to touch Brandon between the legs (though we can’t see that either), before he leans back in orgasmic bliss. Yet once they have been stopped by the police, John lashes out at Brandon, “don’t you never pull that shit again . . . you got me stopped by the fuckin’ cops.” It is as if Brandon lives out John’s fantasies for him, but also takes the heat for them (fantasies that include making love to Lana, although this without John literally in the background). Little wonder, then, with this kind of male identification being established, that when John finds out that Brandon is actually a woman, he goes ballistic,35 frenziedly seeking to establish proof of the difference between himself and Brandon (the “pussy”), with whom he has identified.36

The Trauma of Gender Melancholia These texts might be seen as aptly depicting the workings of gender melancholia. But beyond reading film and text simply as parables of individual psychic processes, I think that it may be possible and even helpful to consider these texts as cultural renditions of the psychic workings of the social order. I would tentatively suggest, therefore, that these texts reveal sexual violence as the social outworking of gender melancholia. More specifically, they seem to depict the violent drama of the superego, acting as the gathering place for death instincts, externalized and enacted by others also affected by gender melancholia. This kind of reading picks up on the notion, advanced by Butler at the end of The Psychic Life of Power,37 that the social metaphors in Freud’s writing make way for a consideration of the relation of the psychic to the social (Butler notes that Freud uses language of institution and polity to describe the psyche38). Butler seems to see this relation along the lines of ideological interpellation, that is, the means by which (ideological) social prohibition becomes an effaced imprint on the psyche.39 But another possible way to look Several reviewers open up the question of masculine identity and violence without providing answers as to what within heterosexual masculine identification gives rise to such rage (Moss and Zeavin, “The Real Thing?”; Melissa Anderson, “The Brandon Teena Story and Boys Don’t Cry,” Cineaste 25, no. 2 (2000): 54–56; Stuart Klawans, “Rough and Tumble: Fight Club, Boys Don’t Cry, The City,” The Nation, 8 November 1999, 32–36). 36 Perhaps then, Pierce’s decision to play up Brandon’s femininity and lesbian sexuality at the end of the film counters this violent repudiation of femininity. 37 T h e Psychic Life of Power, 178–98. 38 Ibid., 178. 39 Ibid., 190–98.

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at it might be to consider how these kinds of interior psychic relations come to be externalized and lived out on the level of the social.40 To this end, I have found it productive to think about the film and the biblical text alongside the muted connection that appears between melancholia and traumatic neurosis when Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the Id are read together. I have already outlined the connection, drawn out by Butler, that Freud makes in The Ego and the Id between melancholia and the death drive, whereby for the melancholic the super-ego acts as a gathering place for the death instincts. Given that Freud develops the idea of death drive out of his consideration of trauma and loss in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it seems natural to speculate on the relationship between trauma and melancholia, then specifically on gender melancholia. In trying to understand why the ego will withstand unpleasure in spite of the pleasure principle (by which instincts continuously seek satisfaction), Freud begins Beyond the Pleasure Principle with a discussion of the compulsion to repeat. He notices—in the famous example of his grandson’s game of fort-da41—that children, in their play, will repeat unpleasurable experiences as a way of renouncing instinctual satisfaction, but also as a way of mastering certain unpleasant experiences. What I would like to notice here is that the unpleasant experience of reality that the child deals with in this game—reality that gets in the way of instinctual satisfaction—is the unpleasant experience of loss, both of the child’s mother (leaving the room) and of the child’s father (at the front). This discussion of unpleasant but productive repetition then leads Freud into a discussion of trauma and traumatic repetition compulsion, whereby a person who has been traumatized engages in a similar process of uncannily repeating the traumatic experience in order to master it. Freud speaks of trauma particularly in terms of fright as a forceful stimulus for which the external protective system of the ego is unprepared. The ego then works to shore up the breach in the ego’s protective shield by repeating the unpleasurable experience in order to master it.42 The actual experience of trauma is so sudden and so violent that it is repressed; therefore, it returns in alternate forms (dreams, etc.). As Cathy Caruth puts it, since trauma cannot be known, traumatic repetition is always the attempt to reclaim a “missed experience.”43 As an aside here, this already makes a rather obvious connection to melancholia, which is often precipitated by a loss for which an individual is unprepared, and in which the loss is unknown or repressed.44 Moving on from the discussion of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, reflecting more generally on why it is that individuals are driven to repetition, particularly of past unpleasurable experiences, Freud concludes that human organisms are essentially conservative, seeking a return to the past. Thus Freud rounds out his discussion of unpleasurable repetition by proposing the notion of death drive, that urge in the ego to return to “an earlier state of things,”45 which is ultimately death. In a sense, in the death drive the ego works to restore what has been lost to it in the passing of time. Building from Freud’s discussions of repetition of unpleasurable experience (culminating in the development of the notion of death drive), I would suggest—and perhaps this is an obvious point, Judith Butler makes a related but differently focused argument in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York & London: Routledge, 1997), where she looks at how both social and psychic prohibitions on homosexuality are at once internalized and externalized (119–26). 41 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Standard Edition with a Biographical Introduction by Peter Gay, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989 [1920]), 12–17. 42 Ibid., 26–39. 43 Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 60–63. 44 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245. 45 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 45. 40

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but I think it still bears mention—that they are all based in some sense on the idea of mastering loss.46 The melancholic’s tendency to berate herself can be seen as one means of trying to master this loss, just as the traumatized individual constantly reencounters the trauma as a way of trying to master the “lost” encounter.47 My point, lest it remain obscure, is that melancholia, traumatic neurosis, and the death drive are all similar in their repetitive attempts to deal with loss, and that the kind of loss that provokes melancholia can therefore be said to be in some way traumatic. Thus, Freud’s appellation of the super-ego as a gathering place for the death drive goes beyond just describing its destructive impulse. It might be said that in the unpleasurable experience of the super-ego’s judgment upon the lost object, the ego in some senses puts itself in the position where it must, once again but in a different form, try to master the unpleasurable experience of loss. Following from this connection between melancholia and trauma, I would make the parallel link between trauma and the loss of same-sex attachments that gives rise to gender melancholia. That is, part of the reason that the loss of the same-sex love is disavowed—as with a loss that brings on melancholia rather than mourning—is the ego’s (culturally enforced) unpreparedness for this loss, and unwillingness to accept it. Further, if, as Butler argues, this loss is constitutive for heterosexual identification, then perhaps the loss of same-sex attachments can be seen as a constitutive trauma, which the ego, via the super-ego, seeks to master. I belabor this point because to my mind it establishes the groundwork for thinking about how gender melancholia might operate on a social level. What is interesting in Freud’s discussion of trauma, and—as I think these texts show—is applicable to gender melancholia, is the fact that while at times the ego relives the trauma actively, through dreams, at other times these repetitions occur as if by chance, as if by some external demonic force that causes the ego to constantly confront the same traumatic experience.48 This, he hints, but does not develop as fully as one might like, is because when internal unpleasures become too great “there is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defence [sic] against them.”49 Given my discussion of the film and text, I would suggest that when the superego’s threats become too great, then perhaps they are externalized and acted out on the level of the social. Indeed, Freud writes in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety that the “loss of an object . . . and the threat of castration are just as much dangers coming from outside as, let us say, a ferocious animal would be.”50 This kind of social outworking of psychic processes may be possible because of the liminality of the ego. As others have pointed out,51 in The Ego and the Id, Freud also describes the ego, particularly the system perception-consciousness within the ego, as a (bodily) surface that forms a borderline between internal and external perceptions and processes.52 He writes, “A person’s own T h is same muted connection between the death drive, trauma, and incommensurable loss (melancholia) appears in Caruth’s work. At one point she calls the death drive “the traumatic ‘awakening’ to life. Life itself, Freud says, is an awakening out of a ‘death’ for which there is no preparation” (Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996], 65, emphasis added). Likewise her discussion of trauma as awakening is developed out of Freud’s famous story of the grieving father who dreams of his dead (lost) son calling to him, “Father, father don’t you see I’m burning” (Unclaimed Experience, 8–9). 47 Freud’s description of melancholics’ enjoyment of their suffering (“Mourning and Melancholia,” 251) is remarkedly like his description of the child’s enjoyment of the game of loss and recovery. 48 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 22–25, 43. 49 Ibid., 33. 50 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety: The Standard Edition with a Biographical Introduction by Peter Gay, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989 [1926]), 77. 51 E.g., Prosser, Second Skins, 40–41; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), 58–59. 52 T h e Ego and the Id, 24–27. 46

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body and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring.”53 Moreover, the ego mediates between internal and external “excitations” and processes. It would seem that at points, external excitations can be rolled into the ego’s work, and perhaps stand in for unpleasurable internal excitations. As part of the ego (the borderline between the external and internal worlds), the super-ego’s judgment can possibly seem to occur from the outside. The way that gender melancholia seems to function socially, in the two texts I have discussed here at least, suggests that the primary loss of same-sex attachments can operate in the same way as Freud describes traumatic events; that is, giving rise to uncanny, repetitive, seemingly demonic encounters with destructive forces. Here the self-reproach to which the melancholic is inclined seems to come from without, as life-destroying danger. These might be thought of as repetitive encounters (repetition compulsion) with the externalized superego, also called the death drive, as a result of the traumatic event of the loss of the loved object. Perhaps this makes sense of why, in the film, Brandon repeatedly seeks out and revels in unpleasurable chase scenes,54 and in the text, Jerusalem is said to repeatedly take pleasure in the very thing that angers Yahweh most. The larger implication here is that this reading points to the rather unfortunate conclusion that if gender melancholia produces the norm (heterosexuality), as Butler suggests it does, then the norm inherently lends itself to violence, and traumatic violence at that.

Readerly Identifications In summary, I have tried to show that both Ezekiel 16 and Boys Don’t Cry do indeed have something interesting to say about the construction of gender. I have tried to indicate how both texts demonstrate Butler’s conception of gender melancholia lived out on the level of the social, as the traumatic reenactment of the primary loss of homosexual attachments. More specifically, I have tried to show how these texts lay out the ways in which the construction of heterosexual identifications and identities, predicated as they are on a traumatic loss, lend themselves to violent externalizations of melancholia. There is an added layer of complexity in all of this, however, when readerly identification is taken into account. Earlier I mentioned that, identifying as a woman, I initially experienced Boys Don’t Cry as a text of terror, even traumatic,55 and to this I would most certainly add Ezekiel 16. But as commentary shows, other readers have engaged with these texts differently, more positively. A number of feminist biblical critics have shown how male scholars writing about Ezekiel 16 identify with Yahweh and see Ezekiel 16 as fundamentally about Yahweh’s goodness and Israel’s depravity.56 Likewise those writing about the film have shown how many viewers, both straight and transgendered, have identified with Brandon as a male hero, charmer, and especially, daring self-inventor.57 Ibid., 25. Interestingly—in thinking about the connection between dreamwork and trauma—the film begins with what Pierce calls a “dream sequence” (Danny Leigh, “Boy Wonder,” Sight and Sound 10 [March 2000]: 20), which includes moments from the car-chase scene. 55 T h e film magazine Premiere ranks Boys Don’t Cry among one of the twenty-five most dangerous films ever made (Glen Kenny, “Extreme Cinema: The 25 Most Dangerous Movies Ever Made,” Premiere 14 [February 2001]: 92–97). 56 L. Day, “Rhetoric and Domestic Violence,” 224–27; P. Day, “The Bitch Had it Coming to Her”; Runions, “Violence and the Economy of Desire.” 57 Rosario, “Transgenderism,” 31; Michael Giltz, “Hilary’s Journey,” The Advocate [cited 28 March 2000]; available from http:/www​.advocate​.com​/html/ stories/808/808​_cvr​_hilary​.​asp; Kimberly Pierce, “Brandon Goes to Hollywood,” The Advocate [cited 28 March 2000]; available from http://www​.advocate​.com​/html​/stories​/808​ 53 54

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Yet, if these texts can be said to mirror each other in some way—and I hope I have shown that they do—then read together they might provide an eye-opening reflection of readers’ favored points of identification. For instance, if those readers who identify themselves with Yahweh can see that Yahweh is much like John and Tom (all of whom may be much like readers’ own superegos), then perhaps they might find this reflection disconcerting enough to consider loosening their identification with Yahweh. Likewise, those (especially straight) film viewers who identify with Brandon (as a straight man) might see that he is not that different from Jerusalem, and that both are figures of repudiated femininity and disavowed loved objects. Perhaps this might further interrogate opinions about the revered American ideal of self-invented heroes, and shed light on the violence and exclusions that support the “extolled virtue . . . [of] the ‘self-made man.’”58 Moreover, both texts are structured in such a way that they invite divided identifications. As Shields points out, readers, as addressees of the biblical text, are invited to identify with whores, but (especially if readers are male), there is “pressure . . . to identify with YHWH” and therefore to identify as both women (whores) and men (Yahweh).59 Likewise, Linda Day suggests that perhaps in refusing to acknowledge Yahweh’s behavior as problematic, commentators, although taking the part of Yahweh, are in a sense identifying with abused women before they decide to leave their partners.60 I would also add that the reversibility of the pronouns I and you in Ezekiel 16, not to mention the ambiguity between the first- and second- person forms discussed above, also lend themselves to this kind of transgendered cross-identification.61 A similar kind of thing might be said to occur in the film as well. In an interview, film director Pierce states that she deliberately tried not to demonize Tom and John, but to characterize them so that the audience could identify with them as well as with Brandon.62 In this way, viewers are given a wide range of identifications: cruel straight men, ideal straight man, and abused woman (or in psychoanalytic terms: critical agency, ideal identification, and repudiated feminine). Readers are also invited to consider and perhaps to identify with a wide range of sexual preferences: as men liking women, as women liking women, as men liking men. By way of parting reflection, I might say that by opening up these various kinds of identifications for readers, these texts might possibly also begin to unearth the disavowed primary attachments underlying readers’ gender identifications. In other words, these texts might provide a way of “tracing the ways in which identification is implicated in what it excludes.”63 Going one step further, I would ask whether these varied openings for readerly identification in both film and text mean that the experience of engaging with these texts can mirror the melancholic structure of their characterizations. If so, it would seem that read together, Ezekiel 16 and Boys Don’t Cry remind readers that every heterosexual identification—in the words of Brandon Teena—is a gender identity crisis.64 /808​_cvr​_peirce​.asp; also Anderson, “The Brandon Teena Story,” 54; Moss and Zeavin, “The Real Thing?” 1227; Xan Brooks, “Boys Don’t Cry,” Sight and Sound 10 (April 2000): 44. 58 Anderson, “The Brandon Teena Story,” 54. 59 “Multiple Exposures,” 150. 60 “Rhetoric and Domestic Violence,” 227. 61 For a more in-depth look at what role forms of address might play in forming readerly identification, see Erin Runions, “Called to Do Justice? A Bhabhian Reading of Micah 5 and 6:1–8,” Postmodern Interpretations: A Reader, ed. A. K. M. Adam (St Louis, Mo.: Chalice, 2001), 158–61; and Erin Runions, Changing Subjects: Gender, Nation and Future in Micah (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). 62 “Putting Teena Brandon’s Story on Film,” 40. 63 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 119. 64 T h e film picks up and makes several uses of this phrase with which Brandon explained himself to the Falls City sheriff after his rape. This horrifying interrogation, in which the sheriff harasses and accuses Brandon, is aired in the documentary The Brandon Teena Story, directed by Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir.

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Reading “This Woman” Back into John 7:1–8:59 Liar Liar and the “Pericope Adulterae” in Intertextual Tango Jeffrey L. Staley

A Brief History of Reading I began writing this essay in 1985,1 just after completing my dissertation, just after securing my first teaching position, and just after the birth of our first child. It was a boy. Our only son. I presented the paper in an unpolished form at the first Pacific Northwest Regional Society of Biblical Literature meeting I ever attended. That was 1986, in Portland, Oregon. The paper had a rather mundane title: “The Rhetorical Structure of John 7:14–8:59,” and in it I argued that a close reading of that lengthy Johannine dialogue revealed an intricate rhetorical unity. At the time I knew that “reading” was a problematical category for many literary critics, but for me the words “reading” and “reader” were unambiguous terms that referred to a textual entity and process evoked by those little pesky black marks on white paper. For me, “reading” and “the reader” had no existence apart from texts. They were, in fact, rhetorical constructs within texts (thus the title of my 1986 paper); they were constituent elements of an “implied reader” that could be carefully reconstructed by eagle-eyed critics like myself.2 As this essay will make clear, today I believe in many other kinds of readers (yea verily, even in different kinds of viewers) besides just an implied, textually encoded reader/viewer. I now give credence to supplied and replied reader/viewers; to the single-plied and the double-plied; to the real and the unreal; to historical and hysterical reader/viewers; and to multi-plied combinations of all of these. Even more importantly, I believe that all these reader/viewers and their attendant reading/viewing processes are fictional constructs in some way, whether I am talking about an intratextual “implied reader/viewer,” a first-century reading audience, or myself as a “real, intertextual reader/viewer.” Every audience is an intentional, fictional construct with its own distinct rhetorical purpose and ideology.3 This essay, then, is an attempt to explore some of those intergalactic intercalations between contemporary audiences and ancient texts. An earlier version of this essay was finally published as “Liar Liar and ‘This Woman’ in John 7:1–8:59: From Rhetorical Analysis to Intertexual Rereading,” in Amy M. Donaldson and Timothy B. Sailors, eds., New Testament Greek and Exegesis: Fetschrift in Honor of Gerald F. Hawhorne (Grand Rapid: Eerdmans, 2004), 99–119. 2 And thus I defined the “implied reader” as “an intratextual entity evoked by the temporal quality of narrative.” The Print’s First Kiss: A Rhetorical Investigation of the Implied Reader in the Fourth Gospel (SBLDS 82; Atlanta: Scholars, 1988), 34. 3 See my Reading with a Passion: Rhetoric, Autobiography, and the American West in the Gospel of John (New York: Continuum, 1993), esp. 113–16, 198–99. 1

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Sometimes reading and viewing are subtexts for other experiences; they may represent hopes deferred or they may be painful reminders of lost innocence. Such is the case with my reading today. I don’t really want to be reading John’s gospel. I have fallen out of love with it, but I don’t know how to tell it goodbye. Perhaps this essay is part of that goodbye. It is an early fall morning at Holdne Village in Washington’s North Cascade Mountains. Shadows from a recent snow shroud the east side of 8,500-foot-high Dumbell Mountain. A coppery crush of leaves spin lazily in an eddy of Railroad Creek. The sky is sapphire blue. The air is crisp and clean. I don’t want to be sitting here, writing at this rickety, wooden table. I want to be outside, hiking up to Copper Basin. Some place I’ve never been before. When I first started writing about John 7–8, I wanted to show how a literary and rhetorical analysis of the text could reveal the unity of one of the most fragmented of Johannine scenes.4 I had not spent much time thinking about lengthy direct-speech segments like John 7–8 when I wrote my dissertation. But I knew that in the history of the text (both real and imagined), this direct-speech section of John seemed to have undergone more corruption than any other Johannine monologue or dialogue. If I could show that there was a rhetorical unity to John 7–8 in its present canonical state, then my literary reading of the entire gospel would gain credibility, and my construction of its “implied reader” would be vindicated before the academic world. The most obvious corruption of this Johannine text is, of course, that lady come lately— “the woman caught in adultery” (7:53–8:11). “This woman” somehow had forced her way into the canonical gospels, and from there, had been thrust splayed-legged into the midst of Jesus’ Johannine conversation without so much as a “thank-you, ma’am.” Eventually she strutted out into the open; into the full color of Hollywood movies and the red-hot exegetical debates of contemporary scholarship.5 But she was no concern of mine when I was writing in 1986. She didn’t play any role in my earliest interpretations of John 7–8, since there was excellent manuscript evidence for excluding her from the text. However, in the imaginations of many Johannine scholars who had studied John 7–8, the text displacement theories of Bultmann, Schnackenburg, and others before them lay not far beneath this woman’s abrupt textual eruption. These scholars proposed transposing chapters 5 and 6, and then parts of chapters 7 and 8, in order to make sense “Die Kapitel 7–10 sind ‘cin sinnloses Durcheinanderer,’” wrote E. Schwartz in 1908 (quoted by Ludger Schenke, “John 7–10: Eine dramatische Szene,” ZNW 80 [1989]: 172). Similarly, Gérard Rochais quote J. Wellhausen as saying about John 7:14–8:59: “On peut pas découvtir un fìl conducteur, an progrès. C’est toujours la méme chose qui est répétée, dans quantité de variants, et l’on n’avance pas d’un ponce” (“Une Construction Litéraire Dramatique, á la Maniére d’un Scénario,” NTS 39 [1993]: 355). 5 See especially, Bart D. Ehrman, “Jesus and the Adulteress (Jn 7:53–8:11),” NTS 34 (1988): 24–44; John Paul Heil, “The Story of Jesus and the Adulteress (John 7:53–8:11) Reconsidered,” Bib 72 (1991): 182–91; Gail R. O’Day, “John 7:53–8:11: A Study in Misreading,” JBL 111 (1992): 631–40; Daniel B. Wallace, “Reconsidering ‘The Story of Jesus and the Adulteress Reconsidered,’” NTS 39 (1993): 290–96; John Paul Heil. “A Rejoinder to ‘Reconsidering “The Story of Jesus and the Adulteress Reconsidered”’ (John 7:53–8:11 ),” ET 25 (1994): 290–96; James I. H. McDonald, “The So-Called Pericope de Adultera,” NTS 41 (1995): 415–27; T. van Lopik, “Once Again: Floating Words, Their Significance for Textual Criticism,” NTS 41 (1995): 286–91; Brad H. Young, “‘Save the Adulteress!’ Ancient Jewish Responsa in the Gospels,” NTS 41 (1995): 59–70; Rita Nakashima Brock and Susan Thistlerhwaite, Casting Stoner: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1996); Alan Watson, “Jesus and the Adulteress,” Bib 80 (1999): 100–108; Larry J. Kreitzer and Deborah W. Rooke, eds., Ciphers in the Sand: Interpretations of the Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7:53–8:11) (Biblical Seminar 74; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); Leticia A. Guardiola-Sáenz, “Border-crossing and Its Redemptive Power in John 7.53–8.11: A Cultural Reading of Jesus and the Accused,” in Musa W. Dube and Jeffrey L. Staley, eds., John and Postcolonialism: Travel, Space, and Power (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 129–52; Jean Kim, “Adultery or Hybridity? Reading John 7:53–8:11 from a Postcolonial Context,” in Dube and Staley, John and Postcolonialism, 111 28; Barbara A. Holmes and Susan R. Holmes Winfield, “Sex, Stones, and Power Games: A Woman Caught at the Intersection of Law and Religion (John 7:53—8:11),” in Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, ed., Pregnant Passion: Gender, Sex, and Violence in the Bible, SemeiaSt 44 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 143–62. 4

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out of the peculiar narrative sequencing of John 4–8.6 Thus, the multiple narrative disjunctions, textual corruptions, and aporiae of John 7–8 (whether real or imagined) were the perfect ground on which to test my unitary theories of the Johannine implied reader. While working on my dissertation, I thought I had detected a certain argumentative pattern in Johannine dialogical style, one that consistently moved from what I termed a “less personal” to a “more personal” tone and content.7 This movement could be seen in the specific metaphors that the narrator used to describe Jesus, in terms of Jesus’ own argumentative strategies, and in the broad, overall outline of the book’s plot. For example, with regard to the narrator’s language, many scholars have noted how the Johannine prologue moved the Logos from God, to the world, and back to God again.8 But what had not been observed were the changes in metaphors that went along with this progression. Curiously, in the chiastic structure of the prologue, the abstract language of logos, light, and God (1:1–4) moves to the more personal language of kinship (only child, bosom, father) in John 1:17–18.9 Moreover, in the narrative’s second monologue (5:19–47), the same progression can be found. There, Jesus begins by speaking vaguely about “the father,” “the son,” and “everyone” (5:19–29). But then in the second half (5:30—47), his language becomes more direct and personal with “I” (egō), “my,” “you” (humeis), and “my father” becoming more prevalent. Finally, this same movement can be traced in the general plot of the book as a whole. For example, in the second half of the gospel (chaps. 11–21) Jesus speaks for the first time of his love for friends and followers, the narrator describes Jesus’ love for individuals, and Jesus gives a lengthy farewell speech to his disciples. These elements all point to a more personal turn in the narrative.10 Thus, in my early reading of the Fourth Gospel, a remarkable argumentative unity permeated the book’s narrative design. I turn my uncomfortable wooden chair to face a window in the cramped Holden Village Library, hoping to catch a glimpse of the late afternoon sun as it filters through dusky green cedars. The sharp blast of an air horn stirs me out of my imaginary hike to Copper Basin, and I stare outside as a group of staff members chase a stubborn yearling brown bear down the village main street and back into the wilderness from whence it came. I have a sudden urge to follow that bear.

A Rhetorical Analysis of the Text I began my 1986 regional SBL paper by arguing that despite the seemingly confused, disjunctive dialogue of John 7–8, there was a clear chiastic structure to the narrative unit and an overarching progression in its argument. Thus, despite any proposed source-critical or displacement theories, the final form of John 7–8 was coherent and unified on at least two rhetorical levels: symmetry (stylistics) and argumentation. An underlying subtext in my paper made the additional point that if one really wanted to enjoy Johannine rhetoric, one needed to move beyond the mere Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 209–325: Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John (trans. Kevin Smyth; New York: Crossroad, 1990), 1:55–56. 7 The Print’s First Kiss, 55–56, 69. No doubt some would use the term “ethnocentric” to describe my choice of the word “personal” (e.g., Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998], 163–64). Nevertheless, the language of the monologues does change, with many more personal pronouns being used in the second halves of each. 8 E.g., R. A. Culpepper, “The Pivot of John’s Prologue,” NTS (1980): 1–31. 9 Staley, The Print’s First Kiss, 55–56. 10 Staley, Reading with a Passion, 63–66. 6

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analysis of narrative symmetry. The critic should also explore the narrative’s argumentative structure—which might or might not follow its symmetric, chiastic divisions.11 Now what I didn’t say in the title of that 1986 paper (or explain anywhere in the body of the paper) was why I had excluded John 7:53–8:11 from my rhetorical analysis of 7:1–8:59. The answer to that implicit question was all too obvious. John 7:53–8:11 just didn’t belong in John. It was a late addition to the text, as proven by manuscript study and vocabulary analysis. But still, why should I leave John 7:53–8:11 out of my reassessment of the rhetorical structure? Especially since I was struck at the time (though I didn’t voice the opinion out loud), with the fact that “this woman’s”12 story was actually positioned near the center of my chiastic divisions and fit into them rather nicely. But of course I was writing nearly ten years before the moicheia of Bill and Mo[n]icheia (8:3); long before President Clinton dropped his chitōn for “that woman” in the hallowed halls of the White House. It is perhaps not coincidental that “this woman” has enjoyed a fairly wide appeal of late in Johannine studies.13 Perhaps “that woman” might even be the underlying cultural pretext for why I eventually put “this woman” back into the Johannine narrative of John 7–8. But with or without “this woman,” my 1986 analysis of Johannine narrative structure argued that John 7–10 stood together as a narrative unit whose primary focus was on two central Jewish institutions: synagogue and Temple. Surrounding the two dialogical Temple scenes with its “police” (7:14–8:59; 10:22–39) was the story of the man born blind and Jesus’ monologue about the good shepherd, both of which seemed to focus on the synagogue and the Pharisees.14 Here, then, is my 1986 analysis of John 7:14–8:59—now filtered through the bifocals I was finally forced to purchase a few years ago. My first look at the text focused on stylistic analysis— that is to say, on the text’s chiastic structure and the repetition of ideas or vocabulary within that structure. I hoped that by highlighting the repetition of certain words and ideas I would convince the uninitiated reader of a symmetrical structure that might otherwise appear highly imaginative or grossly idiosyncratic. My second look at the Johannine text focused on its argumentative structure, borrowing heavily from Chaim Perelman’s analysis of rhetoric in his The New Rhetoric.15 Now as anyone working with chiasms knows, their beginnings and endings are often the easiest parts to delineate. That is because those segments usually deal with important plot T h is could be one of the real values of Malina and Rohrbaugh’s work on John (Social-Science Commentary), which has an appendix arguing for a chiastic structuring of the entire gospel (295–319). For other models for the symmetrical structuring of John 7–8, see John Breck, The Shape of Biblical Language: Chiasmus in the Scriptures and Beyond (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1994), 191–232; Wes Howard-Brook, Becoming Children of God: John’s Gospel and Radical Discipleship (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), 171–210; and Stephen Motyer, Your Father the Devil? A New Approach to John and “The Jews” (Cambridge: Paternoster, 1997). 141–59. Although there are quite a few differences between other scholars’ structural analyses of John 7–8 and my own, I will not attempt to delineate all those differences here. For the most part, other analyses do not see any overarching chiastic structure in John 7–8, nor do they see an argumentative progression between John 7 and 8 (but cf. Howard-Brook, Becoming Children of God, 172). 12 Cf. 2 Sam 13:17; 2 Kgs 6:28. 13 Actually, a number of articles on John 7:53–8:11 were written during the first Bush presidency (no pun intended). But the title of Holly Joan Toensing’s recent study seems to reflect more the Clinton years (“The Politics of Insertion: The Pericope of the Adulterous Woman and its Textual History” [Ph.D. diss, Vanderbilt University, 1998]; cf. also Loren Glass, “Publicizing the President’s Privates,” Postmodern Culture 9, no. 3 [1999]: 7–13). 14 The Print’s First Kiss, 64–66. There I called this section “The Third Ministry Tour.” Fernando Segovia is much clearer on the issue of the Johannine plot than I originally was (“The Journey(s) of the Word of God: A Reading of the Plot of the Fourth Gospel,” Semeia 53 [1991]: 23–35. 42–43). See also Schenke, “Joh 7–10,” 172–92; Rochais, “Une Construction Litéraire Dramatique,” 355–78; and Catherine Cory, “Wisdom’s Rescue: A New Reading of the Tabernacles Discourse (John 7:1–8:59).” JBL 116 (1997): 95–116. 15 Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969). 11

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developments.16 In John 7–8, for example, the rhetorical unit 7:14–8:59 is clearly marked off by Jesus’ entrance into and exit from the Temple. But as I mentioned earlier, I did not include the textually suspect John 7:53–8:11 in my analysis, even though it lay near the center of the exposed chiasm and made reference to another exit and re-entrance to the Temple (7:53–8:2). The second movement of the chiasm was not as easy for me to delineate. But after many hours of slow, tortuous reading, I was able to isolate the next inward chiastic step. This segment focused on the crowds’ (ochloi) arguments with Jesus over the authority of his teaching (7:15–24). I believed its seven argumentative points were paralleled in chapter 8, but with important new elaborations and developments in plot. There, “the Judeans” (Ioudaioi)17 argue with Jesus over the implications of his teaching (8:31–58).18 I tried not to worry about the fact that the segment in John 8 was nearly twenty verses longer than its parallel segment in John 7.19 Furthermore, the only way I could come up with a convincing delineation of these two parallel segments was by not requiring that their seven argumentative points be repeated slavishly in consecutive order. Up to this point, the argumentative points I highlighted in John 7:14–8:59 were these: A Jesus goes up secretly to Jerusalem, enters the temple, and begins to teach (7:10–14). A’ Jesus hides himself and leaves the temple (8:59). B The crowds argue with Jesus over the authority of his Teaching (7:15–24). 1. “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God” (7:17). 2. “Those who speak on their own seek their own glory . . .” (7:18). 3. “Did not Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keeps (poiei) the law” (7:19). 4. “Why are you looking for an opportunity to kill me?” (7:19). 5. “You have a demon!” (7:20). 6. “I performed one work” (7:21). 7. an analogy: circumcision on Sabbath (7:22—23), an allusion to Abraham (“the fathers,” Gen 17:9–14). B’ The Judeans argue with Jesus regarding the implications of his teaching (8:31–58). 1. “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth” (8:31–32) (“whoever keeps my word will never see death,” 8:51). 2. “I do not seek my own glory” (8:50). 3. “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing (epoieite) what Abraham did” (8:39). 4. “you are trying to kill me” (8:40). 5. “Are we not right in saying . . . you have a demon?” (8:48). George A. Kennedy, New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 34. In my original 1986 regional SBL presentation, I called the Judeans “the Jews,” I’m still not entirely convinced of the value of the word “Judean” over “Jew” for the Fourth Gospel, but like Agrippa in Acts 26:28, I am “very nearly persuaded” by recent anthropological arguments (Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, 44–46). 18 Raymond E. Brown’s commentary on the Gospel of John had made the same text division (The Gospel According to John I–XII [AB; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966], 315, 361). However, Raymond Brown was not particularly interested in dividing Johannine narrative into large chiastic segments (Brown, The Gospel According to John, 343: cf. Breck, The Shape of Biblical Language, 192). But if Brown had been so inclined, he might well have divided John 7–8 exactly the way I have. 19 I can now take solace in Breck’s argument that one should not be overly concerned about the “unequal length of parallel subsections” (The Shape of Biblical Language, 196, 197), even though I am not completely convinced by this argument. 16

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6. “You are indeed doing what your father does” (8:41). 7. an analogy: a slave in a household (8:34–38), an allusion to the Abraham story (Gen 21:8–15; cf. Gal 4:21–31).20 The third symmetrical movement of the chiasm was the most difficult for me to frame. For although John 7:25–36 is easily delineated by the arguments Jesus has regarding his identity,21 John 8:13–30 does not fall as easily into a discernable segment.22 However, a certain parallel framework became evident when I compared the latter with John 7:25–36. C Arguments with Jesus regarding his possible identity (7:25–36). (The first subdivision emphasizes who Jesus might be [the Messiah], the one who sent him, the Jerusalemites, and Jesus as one doing signs [7:25–31].) 1. “You know me and you know where I am from” (7:28). 2. They tried to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him (7:30). 3. his hour had not yet come (7:30). 4. Yet many in the crowd believed in him (7:31). (The second subdivision emphasizes where Jesus might be going and the Pharisees [7:32–36].) 5. “You will search for me but you will not find me” (7:34). 6. “Does he intend to go to the Dispersion . . .?” (indirect question) (7:35). 7. “Where I am you cannot come?” (7:36). C’ Arguments with Jesus regarding his true identity (8:13–30). (The first subdivision asks where Jesus’ Father is, emphasizes the Pharisees, and Jesus as witness [8:13–20].) 1. “you do not know where I come from” (8:14). 2. no one arrested him (8:20). 3. his hour had not yet come (8:20). (The second subdivision asks who Jesus is, emphasizes the Judeans, and Jesus as one doing what is pleasing to his Father [8:21–30].) 4. many [Judeans] believed in him (8:30). 5. “you will search for me, but you will die in your sin” (8:21). 6. “Is he going to kill himself?” (indirect question) (8:22). 7. “Where I am going, you cannot come?” (8:21–22). So far, this chiastic arrangement looks pretty nice. However, I may have cheated a bit to make it look as neat as it does. To be honest, in 1986 I thought that both John 7:25–36 and John 8:13–30 could be broken down into two additional segments (7:25–31, 32–36; and 8:13–20, 21–30). But when I did that, the following imperfection was revealed: C The Jerusalemites wonder whether Jesus might be the Messiah, and Jesus responds by talking about the one who SENT HIM (7:25–31). 1. “You know me and you know where I am from” (7:28). 2. they tried to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him (7:30). Jerome Neyrey makes a strong case for connecting this seemingly innocuous metaphor of slavery with the ancient Abraham story. “Jesus the Judge: Forensic Process in John 8.21–59.” Bib 68 (1987): 522. 21 Again, I seem to be tracing over Raymond Brown’s fingerprints (The Gospel According to John, 317). 22 Brown, The Gospel According to John, 342. 20

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3. his hour had not yet come (7:30). 4. many in the crowd believed in him (7:31). D The Pharisees and Judeans wonder whether Jesus might be going to the Dispersion when he talks about where he is going and about the one who sent him (7:32–36). 1. “You will search for me and you will not find me” (7:34). 2. “Does he intend to go to the Dispersion?” (indirect question) (7:35). 3. “Where I am you cannot come” (7:36). C’ The Pharisees challenge Jesus’ testimony and ask where his father is (8:13–20). 1. “You do not know where I come from” (8:14). 2. no one arrested him (8:20). 3. his hour had not yet come (8:20). D’ The Judeans wonder whether Jesus is going to kill himself when he talks about where he is going and about the one who sent him (8:21–30). 4. many [Judeans] believed in him (8:30). 5. “you will search for me, but you will die in your sin” (8:21). 6. “Is be going to kill himself?” (indirect question) (8:22). 7. “Where I am going, you cannot come” (8:21–22). Clearly, if one wants a “perfect” chiasm, John 8:13–20 should come after 8:21–30 (for example, C–D, D–C). And so the only way that I could keep my chiasm “perfect” was by combining C and D under one general heading, C. A generation ago I could easily have reconstructed an urtext with these two segments reversed, and invented a redactional argument for the present (corrupt) state of the text. No doubt a reputable journal would have published the “research.” But my training had been in literary and rhetorical criticism, and a reconstruction like that was not a viable option for me. Back in 1986 I still wanted perfection in my John, but it would have to come from the argumentative and stylistic structure of the text as it now stood (excluding, of course, 7:53–8:11), rather than from some hypothetical, reconstructed pre-text. Thankfully, the final two segments of the chiastic structure of John 7:14–8:59 were much easier to identify than B and C. D Jesus’ metaphorical proclamation regarding his true identity (7:37–39).23 (the one who believes in me . . . shall flow rivers of living water) D’ Jesus’ metaphorical proclamation regarding his true identity (8:12). (the one who follows me . . . will have the light of life) E Arguments among the crowd regarding Jesus’ identity (7:40–43). (the Messiah does not come from Galilee) (Jesus is not on the scene) E’ Arguments among the authorities regarding Jesus’ identity (7:45–52). (no prophet is to arise from Galilee) (Jesus is not on the scene) F The second attempt to arrest Jesus ends in failure (7:44). Malina and Rohrbaugh dislike the word “identity” when talking about ancient Mediterranean constructions of personhood (A Social-Science Commentary, 143–45, 163–64), but that is the term I used in my 1986 presentation.

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Thus, the simplified chiastic structure that appeared in John 7:14–8:59 was: A Jesus goes up secretly to Jerusalem, enters the Temple, and begins to teach (7:10–14). B The crowds argue with Jesus over the authority of his teaching (7:15–24). C Arguments with Jesus regarding his possible identity (7:25–36). D Jesus’ metaphorical proclamation regarding his true identity (7:37–39). E Arguments among the crowds regarding Jesus’ identity (7:40–43). F A second attempt to arrest Jesus ends in failure (7:44). E’ Arguments among the authorities regarding Jesus’ identity (7:45–52). D’ Jesus’ metaphorical proclamation regarding his true identity (8:12). C’ Arguments with Jesus regarding his true identity (8:13–30). B’ The Judeans argue with Jesus regarding the implications of his teaching (8:31–58). A’ Jesus hides himself and leaves the Temple (8:59). What gradually became apparent to me as I struggled to make John 7–8 chiastically coherent was that I was operating on two different rhetorical levels. While my large chiastic segments focused on the development of Jesus’ arguments with his opponents, the miscellany of words and themes simply isolated common material—regardless of plot or direct discourse arguments. So I wrote in my unpublished 1986 regional SBL presentation: We have clearly established that the narrative unit delineated by Jesus’ entrance and exit from the Temple has a chiastic structure, determined by the clustering of certain themes and motifs (a kind of “surface structure”). However, we want to show that there is also a rhetorical cohesiveness from an argumentative perspective. Here we will be looking not so much at the repetition of similar motifs, as at the differences and development of thought in John 7–8.

Jerome Neyrey has published extensively on the argumentative structure of John 7–8 since I first wrote these lines in 1986.24 In his analysis of the text, he argues that John 7 and 8 are best understood as a “trial” in which Jesus undergoes a “formal forensic process.”25 “Forensic” rhetoric is simply another term for what Perelman and Kennedy call judicial rhetoric; that is, a species of argumentation where the speaker “is seeking to persuade an audience to make a judgment about events occurring in the past.”26 More appropriate to John 7–8, however, is Malina and Rohrbaugh’s phrase “challenge and riposte”—an expression Neyrey also uses in the second half of one of his essays.27 An Ideology of Revolts: John’s Christology in Social-Science Perspective (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 37–58; “The Trials (Forensic) and Tribulations (Honor Challenges) of Jesus: John 7 in Social Science Perspective,” BTB 26 (1996): 107–24. 25 “The Trials (Forensic) and Tribulations (Honor Challenges) of Jesus,” 110, cf. 109, 116. See also Mark W. G. Stibbe, John (Readings: A New Biblical Commentary; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 99; and Stephen Motyer, Your Father the Devil? 141–59. 26 Kennedy, New Testament Interpretation, 19. Kennedy, following Aristotle, identifies three species of rhetoric: judicial, deliberative, and epideictic (New Testament Interpretation, 19–20, 23–24: cf. Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca, The New Rhetoric, 47). “[D]eliberative . . . aims at effecting a decision about a future action, often in the very immediate future; and epideictic . . . celebrates or condemns someone or something, not seeking an immediate judgment or action, but increasing or undermining assent to some value” (Kennedy, New Testament Interpretation, 36). 27 Malina mid Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, 146–67: Neyrey, “The Trials (Forensic) and Tribulations (Honor Challenges) of Jesus,” 116–23. Interestingly, Malina and Rorhbaugh do not use the terms “forensic” or 24

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But when I first analyzed the argumentative structure of John 7–8, the two chapters seemed to reflect the deliberative genre of rhetoric, rather than the judicial or forensic genre as Jerome Neyrey has argued.28 The deliberative genre is directed toward persuading an audience of a future decision. This made the most sense to me at the time, since Jesus’ opponents raise questions about the authority of his teaching (7:15), after which he reacts with a statement that is oriented toward the future (“Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own,” 7:17).29 A judicial argument would have focused more on the past: for example, “Rabbi Joseph was my teacher, and you all respect him, so go ask him what he taught me” (cf. 18:21). Obviously, Jesus cannot put forward a judicial argument in his own defense, since the origin of his teaching is not open to the same kind of external verification (God is his teacher, not a human).30 Thus, challenge and riposte, insinuation, innuendo, and gossip—all informal means of argumentation and exhortation, will play a more prominent role in John 7–8 than any formal “forensic trial.” Yet classification of rhetorical species is not always easy to make, as George Kennedy has made abundantly clear through his rhetorical interpretation of the New Testament. In his argument with Hans Dieter Betz over the classification of Paul’s rhetoric in Galatians, Kennedy states, “the basic argument of deliberative oratory is that an action is in the self-interest of the audience, or as Quintilian prefers to put it, that it is right (8.3.1–3).”31 On the basis of this distinction, Kennedy goes on to categorize Galatians as deliberative rhetoric rather than as judicial rhetoric, a position for which Betz had earlier argued. Like Galatians, the rhetorical species of John 7–8 is not easy to define. But following Kennedy’s lead in Galatians, I believe that the language of judgment and the strategy of attack and defense evident in John 7–8 are not in themselves proof of judicial (“forensic”) rhetoric. The key question is: To what end are these argumentative devices being used? In John 7–8, Jesus’ use of the future tense and his focus on future benefits clearly show that these argumentative devices are being used in a deliberative framework. Jesus is acting as a prophet, not a judge. His audience recognizes this, but is unconvinced by his prophetic message (8:12–13). Of course, the strongest piece of forensic/judicial rhetoric in John 7–8 is found in the “pericopae adulterae”—the one section I had left out of my rhetorical analysis. In John 8:12–59, Jesus manages to put the issue of his authoritative teaching back into the maelstrom of ultimate authority—“the Father who sent me” (8:18; “though you do not know him,” 8:55)—which is an issue he has been trying to raise since John 7:15. But the changes in vocabulary between John 7 and 8 are significant here. Now the personal pronouns egō and humeis are more prevalent, as is kinship language (patēr, huios, and Abraam). The word egō occurs four times in John 7:14–52, but twenty-one times in John 8. Similarly, the pronoun humeis is only found four times in John 7:14–52, but fourteen times in John 8. Moreover, the kinship nouns patēr, huios, and Abraam are found one and seventeen times, zero and three times, and zero and ten times in their respective chapters. The noun theos is found only one time in John 7:14–52, but seven times in John 8. Finally, the climactic inclusio egō eimi (8:12, 24, 28, 58) exemplifies “trial” in their social-scientific analysis of John 7–8, even though they list Neyrey’s essay in their bibliography. “Jesus the Judge,” 510–11. 29 Kennedy shows how important exhortation and the future tense are in deliberative rhetoric. New Testament interpretation, 145–47: compare John 7:24, 28, 34, 37; 8:12, 21, 24, 28, 31–32, 36, 46, 51. 30 By way of contrast, Jesus’ hearing before the high priest (John 18:19–24) is clearly couched in judicial rhetoric. There, when asked about his teaching, Jesus responds with references to the past: “I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple. . . . Ask those who heard what I said to them . . .” (my emphasis). 31 New Testament Interpretation, 146. 28

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the heightened drama of the challenges and ripostes between Jesus and his opponents.32 Now theology mutates into Christology as Jesus’ deliberative claims begin to center more and more on himself (for example, “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God,” 7:17, “if you continue in my word,” 8:31, and “whoever keeps my word,” 8:51; and “You will search for me, but you will not find me,” 7:34, and “you will search for me, but you will die in your sins,” 8:21). Just as in the prologue, in the monologue of John 5:19–47, and in the gospel as a whole, the movement from John 7 to John 8 moves always toward a more personal, revelatory, and confrontational climax. I concluded my 1986 paper with the following paragraph: John 7–8 is framed by the inclusio of Jesus’ entrance and exit from the temple, and within this inclusio the plot to arrest Jesus and put him to death is highlighted. These repetitions, along with others, help to separate the text into a chiastic superstructure. But this seemingly static superstructure undergirds a deliberative argument that is only revealed by subtle changes in the language between John 7 and 8. These changes are similar to other argumentative developments in the Fourth Gospel, and thus they are not isolated argumentative devices. What once were thought to be aporiae and editorial glosses in John 7–8 are, in reality, evidence of a remarkable narrative unity.

My interaction with John 7–8 is much messier than this antiseptic textual analysis would lead one to surmise. I spill coffee on the white pages of my Greek text, smudging the black letters. My children interrupt my early morning study with their cries of “What’s for breakfast, Dad?” And I hurry off to meet their needs. I am much more easily distracted now than when I wrote the first draft of this essay back in 1986. I work now in fitful starts. My body can’t take long periods of sitting without aches and pains intruding upon my consciousness, and I can’t stay up as late at night as I once could. And then there is my preoccupation with my son. My only son. He is nearly grown now, and already I miss him. He is only eleven, but I know I will not have him forever.33 Yet I will have him forever. I am not ready for him to go away, and so I let him talk me into doing strange things. Sometimes he pulls me away from my writing, from the Johannine text with its blotches and stains. And I am quickly in another place. And it is not my study. And it is not Copper Basin above Holden Village.

An Intertextual Rereading34 Here is my son. He is the one who made the following intertextual rereading possible. He is in junior high and out of control. He is standing beside me, begging me to take him to the most recent Jim Carrey movie. Jim Carrey is his favorite actor and my son has seen every major movie that Jim Carrey has been in. Jim Carrey is responsible for making my son the way he is. “Is it supposed to be better than Dumb and Dumber?” I start at a point below which I will not go. “Oh yeah, way better.” He replies much too quickly, and there is a tenor of conviction in his pubescent voice that I find somewhat unsettling.

T h is increasingly agonistic language is well noted by Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, 162. As I redact this essay a final time, my son, now eighteen, is away at college in southern California. 34 For an excellent introduction to the theoretical issues of postmodern intertextuality, see Graham Allen, Intertextuality: The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2000). 32 33

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“Better than Ace Ventura, Pet Detective?” I’m holding out for something more intellectually challenging—maybe a film like The Cable Guy or Mask. “No contest, dad. My friends say this is his best movie yet.” “What friends?” “Jeez, dad, come on! Just look at his initials! J. C. Don’t you get it, Dad? J. C.? Carrey’s got the same initials as Jesus does, and you’re always talking about Jesus. So maybe you need to see this movie too! Come on! Please? Maybe this is one you’ll be able to use in one of your classes.” “Oh, yeah, I’m sure. Well, do your chores first and then we’ll see.” My son finishes his Saturday tasks in record time, and against my better judgment I take him to the movie. It’s called Liar Liar,35 and I manage to sit through the entire thing without taking even one twenty-minute potty break. In fact, I watched the film and came away a believer. Liar Liar is, indeed, a Bible film. Jim Carrey, a.k.a. Fletcher Reede,36 actually quotes the New Testament in the movie—John 8:32, to be exact. With arms raised in triumph, after having just won a settlement for his client Mrs. Samantha Cole, he shouts out the much abused phrase to a packed courtroom: “And the truUuuth shall seEeet you freEEEE!” The film begins with nothing, with a blank, black screen. Then a voice speaks out in the darkness, just as in Gen 1:1. It is the feminine voice of a schoolteacher—wisdom personified— spelling out the word “work” for her students. Work is an important theme of Gen 1 and one that the film develops in some detail. Furthermore, the implications of Jesus’ teaching and his “work” (ergon) just happen to be the starting point of Jesus’ volatile argument with the Judeans in John 7–8 (7:14—17, 21; cf.5:17–20; 6:27–29). “W-O-R-K. Today we are going to share what our parents do for work.”37 Suddenly we are in the light, in an elementary school classroom. A little girl pipes up, “My mommy is a doctor.” A boy chimes in, “My dad is a truck driver.” Then a third child adds, “My mom is a teacher.” “And your dad?” the teacher asks the same child. “Mmm, my dad? He’s a liar.” “A liar? Oh, I’m sure you don’t mean a liar!” “Well, he wears a suit and goes to court and talks to the judge.” “Oooh, I see, you mean he’s a lawyer!” The teacher says with a relieved smile. But the boy just shrugs bewilderedly. And thus we are introduced to Max (Maximilian), only child of Fletcher Reede, and to two important themes from John 7–8—lying (8:44) and the law (7:19–24). The premise of the film is a simple one: Can a white, upper-middle-class male lawyer make it through one business day without lying? Fletcher Reede has recently been divorced and is trying to make senior member in a southern California law firm. His son Max is almost five years old and Fletcher seems to care about him—but can rarely fit the boy into his busy schedule. And so he never keeps his promises to his son. After Fletcher fails to show up to his

Directed by Tom Shadyac and written by Paul Guay and Stephen Mazur, the movie was released in March 1997. Interestingly, Tom Shadyac’s next film, Patch Adams, also combined christological themes with a gospel-like plot. See Jeffrey L. Staley, “Meeting Patch Again for the First Time: Purity and Compassion in Marcus Borg, the Gospel of Mark, and Patch Adams,” in George Alchele and Richard Walsh, eds., Screening Scripture: Intertextual Connections Between Scripture and Film (Harrisburg, ΡA: Trinity Press International, 2002), 213–28. 36 Jim Carrey’s character (Fletcher Reede) carries within himself a homonym for the reading experience. 37 All quotes from the film are from the DVD subtitles. Tom Shadyac, director, Liar Liar (Universal Studios, 1997). 35

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son’s fifth birthday party, Max makes a wish: “Please, make it so my daddy won’t be able to tell a lie for one whole day.” Unbeknownst to Fletcher, the little boy’s wish comes true. And as soon as Fletcher realizes he cannot lie, he knows it will be impossible for him to win his next court case. Fletcher has a twofold problem. First, to remain true to his own materialistic values, he must lie in order to win a large monetary settlement for his client Samantha, who is divorcing her husband and wants half of his wealth. However, according to her signed prenuptial agreement, she is not entitled to any of her husband’s wealth if she has committed adultery. And she has, with several different men. Fletcher, therefore, cannot represent her without lying, and his future status in the law firm depends on his winning the case. Fletcher’s second problem is that his former wife is planning to remarry and move across the country to Boston to be with her new husband. If she does that, father and son will never see each other again. His son’s birthday wish fulfilled, Fletcher is forced to find a way to win both the court case and his son—without ever lying. And so the plot goes careening off in the wacky style typical of Jim Carrey films. Faithful to the genre, Fletcher finds a way to win in the end. I must confess the quote of John 8:32 in this film has gotten to me. Over the next few years I rent the movie a number of times and watch it again and again, looking for other hints of Johannine themes. I don’t really expect to find any, but then I didn’t expect to hear Jim Carrey quote John 8:32 either. Suddenly I am struck by another Johannine thunderbolt. Liar Liar seems to evoke explicit christological metaphors from the Gospel of John. John is well known for its seven “I Am” metaphors, and the film quotes what is perhaps the best known secular “I Am” saying in contemporary American culture—that of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham.38 When Fletcher finally discovers the wish his son made on the night of his fifth birthday, he shrieks “Oh, my God!”39 and drives off to Max’s school to try and get him to reverse the wish.40 Fletcher bursts into his son’s classroom in the middle of story time, just as the teacher is reading the famous lines. “I do not like them Sam I am, I do not like green eggs and ham. . . .” I hesitate to put this “finding” in my essay. Surely I have watched the film too many times by now. I am giving the producer far too much intellectual credit. This connection is too bizarre to be “real.” But then I remember that someone once published a book arguing that the Gospel of John was a midrash on the book of Esther.41 Can my intertextual reading be any stranger than that? At least there was an actual quotation from John in Liar Liar that got me started on this adventure. As far as I know, no one has ever found an explicit quotation from Esther in the Gospel of John. Encouraged by this thought, I start noticing a myriad of other Johannine motifs in the film. Written by Theodor Seuss Geisel (New York: Random House, 1960). Interestingly, one of Jim Carrey’s next feature film role was “the Grinch” in Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, released in November 2000. 39 While this is not the first reference to God in the film, the very next sentence is the “I Am” saying from Green Eggs and Ham. The close temporal connection between Fletcher’s divine expletive and the “I Am” saying can hardly be coincidental. It is the narrative marker of Fletcher’s first revelatory experience, and a subtle interpretive key to the film’s central miracle. Interestingly, Tom Shadyac uses the same kurios strategy in his next film, Patch Adams, which helps the viewer associate Patch’s metaphoric death and resurrection with Jesus’ passion (Staley, “Meeting Patch Again for the First Time,” 223). The technique occurs in a more exaggerated fashion in The Matrix science fiction thrillers (1–3), where it functions as a marker to connect the main character, Neo, with Jesus Christ. 40 As in the first two Johannine signs (2:1–11; 4:46–54), we as viewers know a miracle has happened long before the characters in the film know it. And as I have argued elsewhere, John is unique among the gospels in employing this rhetorical device (The Print’s First Kiss, 84–86). Furthermore, the proof that this “miracle” has occurred comes to us through the experience of someone (Fletcher) who has no idea a miracle has happened (ibid.). 41 John Bowman, The Fourth Gospel and the Jews: A Study in R. Akiba, Esther, and the Gospel of John (PTMS 8; Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1975). 38

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Time is also a significant plot device in both the film and the Fourth Gospel (esp. 7:6, 30; 8:20). However, unlike Jesus or his Father, Fletcher is never able to keep his promises about the “appointed hour.” He forgets every important meeting he has promised his son, and nearly misses his son’s leaving (on a jet plane to Boston; cf. John 7:33–36; 8:21–23). As in the Fourth Gospel, the references to time are closely linked to the father/son relationship (7:28–30; 8:19–20). Water and light play significant symbolic roles in the Festival of Booths (John 7–8) and in the film as well. Three times in Liar Liar candles are blown out (five candles, then one, then six—does that make twelve?), and with each extinguishing of the light, a promise is made or remembered. With regard to water imagery, a revelatory moment occurs during Samantha’s divorce hearing when Fletcher sees a pitcher of water sitting on the table in front of him. He pours himself one glassful, then another and another, until he drinks the entire pitcher empty. Fletcher then asks the judge for a short recess so that he can take a bathroom break. I am reminded of “from his side shall flow rivers of living water” (7:38). Fletcher’s ensuing prolonged absence from the courtroom represents his desperate attempt to postpone the inevitable verdict for a few hours. The incongruous ruse nearly works, for the judge is ready to grant Fletcher a reprieve—until Fletcher’s truth-telling forces him to continue the case. However, the additional time gained helps Fletcher “save” Samantha and his own career. Thus, in both the film and the gospel, water is linked to salvation. This hokey film is beginning to look like a piece of art to me, a grand theological expression, the work of a mastermind. The Johannine connections are coming fast and furious, and I begin to worry about myself. Somewhere in the film Fletcher says, “The madman is me”—which now reminds me of the accusation against Jesus, “You have a demon” (8:48, 52). Perhaps his madman is also in me, and I won’t be able to contain it. Do I see John everywhere, anywhere I look? I know the answer to that is no. I am not completely insane. But I am beginning to think I need to go for a walk to clear my head. Maybe that hike up to Copper Basin would be perfect now. I need an interruption—my son, to sneak up behind me and wrestle me to the ground. But my son is hundreds of miles away from me, in Bothell, and so my mind continues to work, long after I’ve asked it to shut down. Then suddenly I realize I’ve missed the film’s most obvious connection to John 7–8: Samantha Cole, the woman Fletcher is asked to represent in court. Because I had excluded John 7:53–8:11 from my original rhetorical analysis of John 7–8, I had overlooked what was the clearest narrative connection between the Gospel of John and the film. As with Fletcher, Samantha Cole’s entire life is held together by lies. She lied about her age in order to get married at the age of seventeen, without parental consent; she lied about her weight and hair color on her driver’s license; and she is in court now because her voice was caught on a tape recorder, as she was in the very act of committing adultery. She is the adulterous woman of John 7:53–8:11, and is so carefully set into the plot of the film that her story is easily overlooked—until J. C. shouts out “The truth shall set you free!” Like Jesus who writes mysteriously on the ground in front of the adulteress’s accusers, Fletcher writes furiously on pieces of paper—his desk, his face—trying to force himself to lie so that he can win the looming case with Samantha Cole. And although no one in the film picks up stones to throw at Samantha because of her sin—or at Fletcher either, for that matter (John 8:5, 7, 59; cf. 10:31), throwing is an important motif in the film. Fletcher gives his son Max a baseball and glove for his birthday, but father and son never actually play catch; they just make plans to play. The only person who actually throws anything in the film is Fletcher himself, who throws his shoes at a jet plane as it taxis down the runway, with his ex-wife and son on board. After the shoes bounce off the plane’s windshield, the pilot stops taxiing, and Fletcher saves his son and ex-wife from leaving him. In the film, then, the act of throwing is a motif that reflects familial love and

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brings about ultimate redemption. The motif is not connected with violence and hatred as it is in John 8 and 10. I am exhausted by this tango of reading and viewing. I’m ready to leave “this woman” behind and go outside to skip stones in Railroad Creek. Thanks to my son, my reading of John 7–8 has been forced out into the open, but I have “revealed myself to the world” in ways I never intended. His toothy grin has set me free.

Postmodern Intertextuality and Canonical Authority A postmodern sense of text and intertextuality does not require that the writers or director of Liar Liar have John 7–8 in mind when making their film. Rather, it argues that all texts, simply by being texts, are intertwined with other texts.42 They feed on each other and nourish each other. So, by explicitly quoting John 8:32, Liar Liar invites biblically attuned viewers to look for other Johannine allusions in it. And surprisingly, I have found fragmentary connections. For some people, assessing the significance of these allusions may threaten their political, scholarly, or religious commitments. Minimally, one can argue that viewing the film against the back-drop of John 7–8 gives the viewer an appreciation for a Jim Carrey movie that otherwise might appear to have no redeeming qualities.43 But a postmodern sense of intertextuality moves in more than one direction. Unlike the “adulterous woman” of John 7:53–8:11, Samantha Cole is not an arbitrary addition to the plot of Liar Liar. However, she is a flat character with no positive character traits. She is a “bad” woman who only cares about herself, and Fletcher feeds upon her selfishness. Yet without her, Fletcher himself would not be redeemed. Samantha’s one true insight—that her husband, who has just divorced her, is a good father—is the catalyst that causes Fletcher to see himself in a new light and sends him running back to his former wife and son. By way of contrast, the adulterous woman in John 8 has been viewed as an unnecessary intrusion into Jesus’ controversy with the Judeans, with no particular plot function. But can the film Liar Liar lead one to reassess “this woman’s” connection to John 7–8? Can she somehow redeem the biting challenges and ripostes of Jesus and the Judeans? As a Johannine scholar and first-time viewer of Liar Liar, Fletcher’s grand exclamation, “The truth shall set you free,” was my entrance to another intertextual level of the film. Until that moment, nothing in the film would have made me think about the Gospel of John. It was pure entertainment. Funny, but not worth watching more than once. The divorce proceedings with Samantha Cole were easily forgotten, since they seemed like an unnecessary subplot to the “lying” conceit that drove the film. That is to say, any type of legal proceeding, any cast of characters, could have been used to make fun of Fletcher, the stereotypical lying lawyer. However, once the choice was made for an adulterous woman to be the catalyst for Fletcher’s turnabout, she became a necessary character in the movie’s plot. When the Johannine intertext is evoked (8:32), “this woman’s” voice, Samantha’s voice— caught on tape in the very act of adultery—becomes another important Johannine connection. But in John 7–8, “this woman” intrudes, interrupts, and arrests the fierce diatribe in the Temple. In contrast to Samantha Cole, she has no name. And she has no voice, except when she says Allen, Intertextuality, 174–99. More recently, Jim Carrey has starred in The Truman Show (1998), the Majestic (2011), and Bruce Almighty (2003), all of which reflect even stronger christological and theological themes.

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“No one, sir” (8:11). In the Johannine text she is a narrative interlude, a glaring, in-your-face, disconnected question mark that turns the virulent, disembodied voices of John 7–8 into an intensely personal confrontation. She literally brings the rhetorical situation of John 7–8 down to stony earth. She is the canonical counterpoint to Fletcher’s intrusive, jarring quote of John 8:32: the intertextual connection that raises the movie to another level. I have come a long way from the reading of John 7–8 I did in 1986, where the boundaries of “text,” “rhetoric,” and “reader” were clear and distinct; where I was careful to keep my personal experience out of my scholarly discourse on the biblical text. Today I am more apt to find John anywhere, and apt to consider all sightings seriously. Some people may challenge what seems to be an idiosyncratic reading, wondering at the end whether I am even reading John at all. What is at stake in a postmodern sense of rhetoric and intertextuality? If Liar Liar gains some credulity from its intertextual repertoire, is it not conceivable that John 7–8 could also gain something from its connection to Liar Liar? Need it lose in the exchange? If Jesus can stoop so low as to write in the gritty dirt of ordinary human experience, then perhaps we should feel empowered to lift up popular culture’s allusions to the Christian canon into serious dialogue with postmodern rhetoric and textuality.44 So I shall go back and read John 7:53–8:11 once again. Perhaps this time, in the midst of a complex Johannine chiasm, an adulterous orgasm, I will find JC poised, contorted in silence, ready to cast the first shoe. And perhaps I will find “this woman,” now named, embodied, shouting with a voice that moves her beyond the confines of patriarchal stereotypes; with a voice strong enough to redress the judicial subtleties that have thrust her and her rescuer so dangerously into the spotlight of imperial power. And when I am done reading, I will step outside this cramped Holden Village Library in the North Cascades, and make that hike up to Copper Basin, to a place I have wanted to go for the past three days and have never yet been. And if I get up there, I just might never pick up the Gospel of John again.

I have written to this issue recently, arguing that Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony opens up a new way of envisioning biblical border women (“Changing Woman: Postcolonial Reflections on Acts 16.16–40,” JSNT 73[1999]: 134–35).

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Part V

Next Stages Posthumanism, Affect, and Critical Race Theory This final section presents a selection of work, which, I believe, is on the leading edge of the methodological trajectory for Bible and cultural studies. Of the array of potential “next phase” conversations for cultural studies in the humanities, I’ve selected two general theoretical foci: posthumanism (with subdivision into animal studies, affect theory, and new materialism) and critical race theory. Though recent history has clearly shown, with its political unrest, economic instability, and sudden change in circumstance prompted by both climate change and global pandemic, that prediction of the future is a tenuous game, I believe these two critical orientations will persist and both permeate critical work in the humanities in this first-quarter of the twentieth century. Posthumanist scholarship, as we will read in the chapter by Koosed, is a work that decentralizes human beings, even as it does so, in part, to interrogate what we mean by the term. What makes the human unique? Is the human unique? In what ways does exceptionalist thinking about what it means to be human contribute to a culture that destroys the nonhuman (particularly animals and the environment)? Posthumanist work emerges from a mixture of cultural studies and continental thought, particularly poststructuralism (in a sense, posthumanism is challenging the binary between “human” and “non-human,” exposing the metanarrative of human exceptionalism, and challenging long-standing assumptions about what is, and is not, “rational” thought. Within the realm of posthumanist studies lie three overlapping interests, which I’ve chosen to foreground: animal studies, affect theory and new materialism). Animal Studies (as we will note later) is precisely what one might imagine: attention to the non-human animal (or to the human as animal). Genesis 1 and 2 have been used, again and again, as defense for human domination over the animal and plant kingdom. Yet the modern world persistently calls for attention to how humans interact with the environment, struggling as it does with the impact of human-produced global warming, the sudden increase in mass extinction of non-human life forms by both human consumption and territorial encroachment, and the role both unexpectedly play in threats such as zootypic, novel viruses, and climate migration. Animal Studies approaches will examine both where and how animals and the

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environment appear in biblical text, and how human communities have used their readings of biblical text in the construction of modern culture. Affect Theory is, as we will see, also an outgrowth of continental philosophy (often some of the same philosophers and critics, such as Eve Sedgwick). The social scientist Silvan Tompkins first defined and analyzed human “affect”—involuntary pre-cognitive responses to stimuli, such as disgust, arousal, fright, and more. Affect criticism entered the humanities, as we will read, via two schools of thought: a critique interested in affect and its relationship to emotion and cognition (represented by the work of scholars like Eve Sedgwick) and affect as a means of meaning-generation and of the transmission of that meaning (represented by the work of scholars largely citing Giles Deleuze). In either sense, Affect approaches decenter and de-prioritize rational cognition and logic. Both approaches would stress that a scholar looking to decenter herself from her work, to have no affective response to it, is not likely to succeed. Indeed, affect critics would argue that attention to the inherent affect of a text or idea is necessary to grasp its meaning and interpretation. Clearly, such an interest also disrupts a long-standing conceit among many biblical scholars that their own, professional, “rational,” and scientific biblical interpretation supersedes and is ontologically different from the reading of the “ordinary” readers. Finally, posthuman scholars, turning from the human to the animal and to the “impulse,” note that this shift raises difficult questions about Agency and action and prompt attention to the “things” within the world around us. This attention is mostly complicate presumptions. Of human uniqueness, even as it also seeks to define it further. Culture is, fundamentally, the production of “things”—both physical and ideological. New Materialism looks at these things and how they produce and reflect meanings. By current census data, by 2044 the United States, long a majority white nation ethnically, will transition to majority Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color (BIPOC). Increased attention to how, when, and why BIPOC readers engaged and interpreted the Bible is certain. Further, whether Bible scholars like it or don’t, the academic field of biblical studies is driven by—depends upon—the interests of-and-by readers from faith communities. The population centers in general, and most certainly the density of confessional Bible readers per capita, are shifting to the Global South. Biblical studies as an academic field has long been marked by the interests and agendas of white, European, generally affluent males. That will change. In many ways, the substantive beginning of that change is occurring in the present and long overdue. Critical race theory (defined more fully in the chapter by Delgado and Stefancic) is generally identified as originating in the work of the (then Harvard-based) legal scholar Derek Bell. Bell posited that law, rather than reflecting some abstract and universal “rightness” and justice, was instead organized to protect and perpetuate society and culture. Given that the society and culture of the United States—a nation founded and built by slaves, whose original constitution not only enshrined slavery but was written by slave owners to perpetuate their interests—has been a society and culture of white domination, Bell argued that US law was, essentially, in place to perpetuate structural racism and secure and preserve white supremacy. Bell’s ideas were, at their outset, highly controversial, but they are gaining credence. Critical race theory which has emerged from Bell’s (and others’) early work, argues that cultural studies and “interpretation” must also include the examination of race and how systems, texts, and so on of culture perpetuate racial and racist structures. Critical race theory lies in direct continuity with continental philosophy (particularly critical theory and poststructuralism) and cultural studies (particularly interest in both cultural materialism and systems of hegemonic control created/enforced by culture). Critical race theory foregrounds the way culture creates

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and invests privilege in some individuals and groups and also attends to the complex ways that hegemony and control intermingle (“Intersectionality”). Sometimes, these systems attenuate to create complex webs of oppression. Sometimes they produce unpredictable (in)equities. Scholarly BIPOC readings and interpretation of the Bible have a long, sadly under-attended history in biblical scholarship. As Lisa Bowens has noted, even during slave eras, American biblical interpretation had engaging and critically important African diaspora readers (sadly under-attended), many of whom played a notable role in debates over Abolition. Certainly, the Bible, as a text, was integral to those debates. Early Post-bellum African American cultural readers engaged with biblical texts, and the Bible (and biblical tropes) was a frequent topic of interpretation, adaptation, and allusion during the Civil Rights movement. Cain Hope Felder and others were early leaders and authorities for-and-on African American Bible readers. A cultural studies infused approach to critical race theory would examine the way the Bible has participated in the creation of larger cultural forces and structures that perpetuate racial inequity. Further, such an approach considers, as well, ways of reading the Bible via differing methods than those long associated with the construction of cultural hierarchy. The chapters in this section open with a chapter introducing us to “posthuman” studies via the traditional opening: Animal Studies. In “The Question of the Animal” by Hannah Strømmen, we are treated to one of the first substantive animal studies and the Bible-oriented monographs, interacting heavily with continental thought. From there, we turn to affect, with a quick orientation to the field (and particularly its potential to biblical scholars by Jennifer Koosed and Stephen D. Moore) taken from the introduction to a jointly edited special issue of the journal Biblical Interpretation. Maia Kotrosits’s very fine work on new materialism appears next with an excerpt from her 2021 book The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity. Kotrosits has been among the earliest and most adept of biblical scholars turning to affect. Her earlier work on rethinking Christian origins via the lens of affect (listed later in the bibliography) is a required reading on the subject. Affect is further fleshed out (and applied to Bible and film) in my own chapter “Seven Stations of Affect: Religion, Affect, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.” The final three chapters turn to critical race theory and its potential for Bible and cultural studies. I opted to open with an introduction to Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory. For the bulk of this collection, I have tended toward methodological overviews written by biblical scholars and applied, specifically, to biblical scholarship. Critical race theory is vitally important and, one worries increasingly, not fully understood by a number of biblical critics. Too much, too often, has been blunted by popular political resistance to critical race theory steeping into the discourse on religion and culture more broadly. After this orienting introduction, I selected two excerpts from titles published in 2021. The first, “Freedom Is No Fear: The New Testament and a Theology of Policing” by Esau McCaulley, is notable in that it is from a scholar not only deeply—and personally—invested in issues of race and racial equity, aware of critical race theory, committed to social justice but also deeply committed to a faith tradition that prizes and prioritizes devotion to the Bible as the inerrant, inspired word of God, lived in a faith community seeking deeper communion with God. McCaulley also takes up one of the most critical questions surrounding race and equity in the United States at present: the challenge of equitable policing. The volume ends with an excerpt from Black Samson by Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Samson.” Their breathtaking and brilliant volume, surveying the racially tinged allusions and appearances of Samson in US mass culture from colonial times

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to the present, demonstrates, in many ways, the fusion of all the interests thus far explored in this reader.

Annotated Bibliography: Further Readings Note: since this chapter reviews three major categories of work—posthumanism, affect, and critical race theory, I have divided the bibliography into three sections, as well, each under an appropriate heading.

Posthumanism (Including Animal Studies and New Materialism) Alamio, Stacey and Susan J. Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. Though not biblical scholars nor addressing Bible, this collection provides a wealth of insight on New Materialism as well as its relationship to feminist/queer studies and Affect. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. One of the definitive collections on new materialism. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Published posthumously from lecture notes, this book is foundational to Animal Studies approaches in critical theory and the humanities. A second, equally foundational work by Derrida is The Beast and the Sovereign. 2 vols. The Seminars of Jacques Derrida. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 2017). Grusin, Richard, ed. The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. This collection, again not specifically addressing Bible, collects together some of the leading scholars in “posthumanism,” noting the scope of the field to include Animal Studies, Affect, and New Materialism. Koosed, Jennifer L., ed. The Bible and Posthumanism. Semeia St, 74. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2014. This book is one of the first collections to gather biblical scholars on the subject of posthumanism (with an emphasis on animal studies approaches). Moore, Stephen D., ed. Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology. TTC. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. This collection is another of the earliest dedicated to Animal Studies approaches to Bible and Religion. The collection contains chapters from a “who’s who” list of Animal Studies and Religion along with respondents. Readers may also benefit from the solo monograph by Stephen Moore, Gospel Jesuses and Other Nonhumans: Biblical Criticism Post-Postructrualism. SemeiaSt, 89 (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2017). This volume has an excellent introductory chapter on the scope of the field. Stone, Ken. Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Along with Strømmen’s Biblical Animality (excerpted earlier), this is one of the strongest early monographs to take a sustained and critically engaged approach to Animal Studies and the Bible.

Affect and Affect Theory Black, Fiona and Jennifer L. Koosed, eds. Reading with Feeling: Affect Theory and the Bible. SemeiaSt, 95. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2019. This volume collects several biblical scholars

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using affect to inform their work. The introductory chapter is also an excellent overview of affect, its history of development and its potential to the field of biblical studies. Bray, Karen and Stephen D. Moore, eds. Religion, Emotion, Sensation: Affect Theories and Theologies. TTC. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. This book, another publication from Drew University’s influential “Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia,” collects together many of the leading humanities scholars using Affect Theory. The volume primarily addresses Religious Studies, generally, but includes much that specifically addresses biblical criticism. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. This reader is an excellent first stop for understanding Affect and its many variations in the humanities and social sciences. Seigworth also edits a journal featuring new work on Affect titled Capacious, which is published primarily online with occasional print editions collecting selected works. Koosed, Jennifer L. and Stephen D. Moore, eds. “Bible and Affect Theory.” Biblical Interpretation 4.4–5 (2014). Themed issue. This special, guest-edited themed issue collects several scholars working on Affect and biblical criticism. It is one of the earliest, and foundational, collections highlighting this approach. Kotrosits, Maia. How Things Feel: Affect Theory, Biblical Studies, and the (Im)Personal. BRPHSS. BRPBI. Lieden: Brill, 2016. Maia Kotrosits is one of the earliest and most innovative scholars applying affect theory to biblical studies. This volume continues her work, expanding into new materialism. Readers should also consult her Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), which, in addition to being one of the most interesting and invigorating new collections on early Christianity, is an excellent introduction to affect. Schaefer, Donovan O. Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Donovan Schaefer’s first major book on Affect unites its interests with Animal Studies (underscoring the connection between affect and posthumanism) and is an excellent resource to begin thinking of the potential for Affect in Religious Studies. It is matched (in some ways, for beginning students, exceeded) by his amazingly cogent introduction The Evolution of Affect: The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Study of Power. Elements in the Histories of Emotions and the Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Race and Critical Race Theory Bennett, Jr., Robert A. “Black Experience and the Bible.” ThTo 27 (1970–1): 422. This article is an excellent overview, particularly notable for its brevity. It makes a very good first orienting overview. Bowens, Lisa M. African American Readings of Paul: Reception, Resistance, and Transformation. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020. This volume is an amazing overview and history of African American scholarship on Paul. Though there are some potentially liberational moments (Romans), Paul’s letters contain some of the most difficult language in the New Testament for those struggling with the Bible’s condemnation of slavery (in the US context, an intensely racialized experience), particularly Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Corinthians, and Philemon (if read with its traditional reconstructed context). Further, African Americans were long prohibited from the avenues of formal education. This volume traces the complex history of scholarship within this context. Cone, James H. Black Theology and Black Power. New York: Seabury Press, 1969. This volume is an extremely important book which opened a conversation that, in many ways, is only presently being attended to. Felder, Hope Cain, ed. Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991. This extraordinary collection gathers the leading African

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American biblical scholars of its day in a single volume. At the time of its writing, there were scarcely over thirty African Americans with PhD in biblical studies. The issues raised in this volume, alas, remained under-attended for three decades. Felder’s introduction anticipates McCaulley’s “Black Ecclesiastical Interpretation,” noting the unique ways the Black church experience affects African American biblical scholars (both in their interests and in their approach to biblical importance). Junior, Nyasha. An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation. Minneapolis, MN: Westminster / John Knox Press, 2015. Junior’s survey and introduction is a welcome and a complex contribution. Reviews of Junior’s book have focused on her distinction that not every womanist critic does womanist criticism in a foregrounded and methodologically intentional way. Wimbush, Vincent L. The Bible and African Americans: A Brief History. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003. This remarkably complete survey is easily the best first stop for scholars new to African American interpretation of Scripture. For a supplement to this historical review, readers would do well to note Wimbush’s White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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The Question of the Animal Hannah M. Strømmen

What is termed the “question of the animal” is one of the foremost challenges in the humanities. Briefly put, the question of the animal pertains to the issue of human/animal difference: To what extent, and in what ways, are humans and animals different, or indeed similar? Generally speaking, animal studies seeks to move away from anthropocentric attitudes and to reject an absolute distinction between humans and animals. In these debates, the Bible is frequently blamed as a weighty anthropocentric inheritance. I aim to move these debates further through close engagement with the biblical archive. What might a biblical inheritance constitute for thinking about animality? Can anything definite be said in the slippery name of the biblical? By examining four significant texts in the biblical archive for the topic of animals, I demonstrate the importance of probing the question of the animal further with regard to the Bible, both in light of the nuances, tensions, and ambiguities of biblical literature, and for exploring the possibilities of inheriting this complex and composite corpus otherwise—beyond biblical blame. The biblical texts I explore fall into two main groups. First, texts that especially address questions of eating: namely, Gen 9 and the aftermath of the flood where humans are given animals to eat; and the question of clean/unclean animals in Acts 10. Second, texts that address questions of power and politics: the book of Daniel with its lions, animal-king, and hybrid animal visions; and the battle between the Lamb and the Beast of Rev 17. These different and disparate texts provide the material and momentum to show important instances of how “the Bible” conceptualizes humans, animals, and gods as well as how it characterizes the relationships between them. I propose that often in the same spaces in which these characterizations might be fixed as detrimental to animal life lie also the possibilities of seeing animals radically otherwise. Specifically, I engage the biblical archive by examining and building on Jacques Derrida’s work on the question of the animal. What does it mean to read the Bible after Derrida? In his work on animality, which I discuss in more detail below, Derrida provides an important starting point by taking up the topic of human/animal difference and in problematizing assumptions about this difference in philosophical texts and traditions. Before attempting such a response with this study, I address three questions in this introduction. First, why the question of the animal? Secondly, why the Bible? And finally, why Jacques Derrida as an interlocutor? I devote a rather long explication of Derrida’s contribution to animal studies in this introduction because it provides the theoretical underpinnings to the chapters that follow. It is worth noting the larger picture in this part before drawing on aspects of Derrida’s thinking as they help to unpack the biblical texts I analyze.

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Humanity’s Identity Crisis The surge of interest in the topic of animals in the humanities has accelerated in the last few decades, with research steadily receiving more and more critical attention, reaching a pitch in the last ten years. Earlier scholars such as Peter Singer, Richard Ryder, Andrew Linzey, Tom Regan, and Mary Midgley fought for academic attention for animals in the 1970s and 1980s—focusing on animal rights and animal liberation—by building on the pioneers of utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill for an appeal to decrease the suffering of animals. In the 1990s, the debate continued to explore the differences between humans and animals and what this might mean both philosophically and politically (Sheehan and Sosna 1991; Garner 1997; DeGrazia 1996). This is coupled with feminist issues of exclusion and marginalization in Carol J. Adam’s work (1990, 2004, 2018; Adams and Donovan 1995, 2007; Adams and Fortune 1995). The turn of the century has seen an increase in interest, with a range of thought-provoking scholarship on animals, from Stephen R. L. Clark’s The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics (1999), Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton’s Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought (2004a), and Cary Wolfe’s Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (2003) to Marc R. Fellenz’s The Moral Menagerie: Philosophy and Animal Rights (2007), Paola Cavalieri’s The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue (2009), and Calarco’s Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (2008), to mention only a few significant examples.1 This scholarship engages historically, ethically, and philosophically with animal issues, from questions of the human/animal distinction and whether it can be retained to extensive discussions of consciousness, rights, tradition, rationalism, and Darwinism (e.g., Fellenz 2007); psychoanalysis, microorganisms, and DNA (e.g., Roof 2003, 101–20; Hird 2009); as well as concepts of technology and pets, such as Donna J. Haraway’s well-known discussion of “cyborgs and companion species” (2003, 4).2 Clearly, the debate over animal welfare, rights, and status is attracting much attention in current scholarship, engaging with contemporary popular attitudes to animals, such as the fashion and food industry, as much as with philosophical theories and cultural legacies. An important factor for the rise of animal studies comes from the natural sciences and critical engagements with scientific research. Zoological, ethological, and ecological research has provided the empirical grounds and impetus for reassessing dominant assumptions about the differences between human and animal life. Merely one example is tool use, commonly thought to be a uniquely human characteristic. Research done in behavioral ecology shows, for example, that New T h e increase in scholarship on this topic is only continuing, with a number of prominent animal-focused publications. To name a few, Cavell et al. 2010; Beauchamp and Frey 2011; Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011; Rudy 2011; Norwood and Lusk 2011; DeMello 2012; Cohen 2012; and Tyler 2012. 2 For scholarship that engages historically, ethically, and philosophically with animal issues, see particularly Calarco 2008 for the continental philosophy tradition and Clark 1999 for a thorough discussion of philosophical traditions on animals, particularly Aristotle and Plato, that also touches on slavery, children, women, kings, and apes in relation to rethinking the concept of the animal. For questions of the human/animal distinction, see, for instance, Calarco’s (2008) thesis that human/animal distinctions should no longer be maintained and that we must move away altogether from anthropological modes of thought. Calarco concludes with a critique of Derrida for maintaining the terms human and animal despite his criticism of the absurd distinction on which they are founded, calling this a rarely dogmatic moment in Derrida’s writing (3, 10, 143−48). In my view, it is rather that Derrida (e.g., 2004, 66) insists on a number of limits and distinctions. Further, it is not a matter of simply erasing the word animal (or human) and thus acting as if the problematic issues surrounding these words go away. For “cyborgs and companion species,” see also Haraway 1990 and 2007. Haraway (2003, 16) focuses on dogs and what she calls the “implosion of nature and culture in the relentlessly historically specific, joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in significant otherness.” 1

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Caledonian crows can be observed not only to use tools frequently but also to manufacture tools, create new designs to suit their needs, and select sophisticated tools according to a particular task.3 The destabilization of concepts and characteristics thought to be exclusive to humans has set in motion something of an identity crisis. As Wolfe (2003, xi) points out, such knowledge has “called into question our ability to use the old saws of anthropocentrism (language, tool use, the inheritance of cultural behaviors, and so on) to separate ourselves once and for all from animals.” He argues that the humanities are “now struggling to catch up with a radical revaluation of the status of nonhuman animals” (xi). Troubling the absolute distinctions between humans and animals has opened up most pertinently, perhaps, questions of ethics in reflecting on the status of animals in relation to humans and a concomitant attempt to rethink the exclusivity of human rights and strictly human ethical considerations.4 Wolfe (2003, xi) also draws attention to new theoretical paradigms over the past few decades: cybernetics, systems theory, and chaos theory, paradigms that “have had little use and little need for the figure of the human as either foundation or explanatory principle.” Technology has played a key part in this rethinking of the human. In her now famous “A Cyborg Manifesto” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature from 1991, Haraway discusses the boundary breakdown between human and animal, as well as between animal-human (organism) and machine. We are, she writes, “creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted” (149). We are “cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras” (177). Rather than continue what she calls the “border war” of human/animal and humananimal/machine, she calls for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries as well as responsibility in their construction. Emphasizing new technologies, she suggests that a cyborg world might be “about lived social and bodily relations in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines” (154). Concern and compassion for animals is nothing new. From Pythagoras to Theophrastus, Seneca to Porphyry, Percy and Mary Shelly to Arthur Schopenhauer, Bentham, John Locke, and Mill to Jacques Derrida, the debate around attitudes to, and appropriation of, animals has existed. But from an increased interest in animals burgeoning in the 1970s, the last three decades have seen this interest gain momentum toward rethinking more radically and systematically about animal life as a subject in the humanities. The “question of violence and compassion toward animals has, in a certain sense, become one of the leading questions of our age” (Calarco 2008, 113). It is not a question that has simply appeared on the academic scene as if from nowhere. As Stephen D. Moore (2014a, 2) points out, the challenge to the human/animal hierarchy could be placed “in a continuous line with the interrogations of the male/female, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual, white/nonwhite, and colonizer/colonized hierarchies entailed in feminist studies, gender studies, queer studies, racial/ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies.” Certain dualisms have been dominant that work to mirror the self not only where the self is human but where the human is a man, and such dualisms, as Haraway (1991, 177) writes, have been “systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals.” The animal question bears important connections with the question of the slave, the native, the Jew, and the woman, as will become clear in the chapters to follow. T h ere are numerous studies now that testify to characteristics thought to belong only to humans observed in various animal species, such as the research done by Jane Goodall, Arthur Schaller, and Dian Fossey, developed from the founders of modern ethology, Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. More about the New Caledonian crows can be found on the website of the Oxford University research group on Behavioral Ecology: http://users​ .ox​.ac​.uk/​~kgroup​/tools​/introduction​.shtml. 4 See for instance Regan 2004 and Waldau 2011. 3

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The question of the animal does have its own concerns and its own challenges; however, in the fact that those who are at the heart of animal studies do not speak or write in human languages, and so the question of their status as objects of study is a perennial one. It may not be a matter of urging animals to seize “the tools to mark the world that marked them as other,” as Haraway (1990, 175) puts it, even if we think many animal species are capable of using tools of various kinds. Haraway’s insistence on displacing “hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities” and “retelling origin stories” (175), however, is in many respects what animal studies is about. It is also instructive for my turn to the Bible as a source of origin stories. While the history or prehistory of the animal question is multifaceted, then, there are at least two crises that are important to note. The first, concerning the idea of the human subject, is crucial for continental philosophy and the specifically Derridean focus in this study. The second, the idea of environmental crisis, pertains to a broader context for animal studies and accounts for the urgency and advocacy with which animal studies has been marked. As for the first crisis, there has been what might be termed a crisis of the subject and the desired “exiting” of an “epoch of the metaphysics of subjectivity” (Jean-Luc Nancy in Derrida 1995b, 257) promulgated most prominently by thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Derrida. This crisis has taken shape under the shadow of the Enlightenment era as a critique of conceptualizations of the human subject, particularly around concepts of autonomy, consciousness, freedom, and reason. This Enlightenment subject has come under critique as “absolute origin, pure will, identity to self, or presence to self of consciousness” (Derrida 1995b, 265).5 Notions of the subject in relation to definitions of humans can be traced as far back as Aristotle’s writings, but the idea of the subject as it is understood today comes most clearly to the fore with René Descartes’s (1989) famous je pense done je suis, or the cogito ergo sum, and what is often called the beginning of modernity.6 It has become commonplace, as Nick Mansfield (2000, 13) points out, to characterize the modern era as an era of the subject. The intellectual trends sparked by critiques of the subject proffer interrogations of the debt of Enlightenment thinkers, such as Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the ways in which their thinking undergirds modern conceptions of selfhood as well as sociopolitical structures and institutions.7 An important work in this regard is Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1997), originally published in 1944, which put forward a powerful critique of an Enlightenment tradition and rationalist thinking that appeared to go hand in hand with the bloodshed of the twentieth century. They asked why humanity has not entered into a new kind of living but rather sunk “into a new kind of barbarism” (xi). In 1947, Heidegger (1993, 219) asked in his “Letter on Humanism” how meaning can be restored to the term humanism, criticizing

Derrida is being somewhat facetious here in that he is questioning Heidegger’s characterization of an “epoch of subjectivity” by giving the example of Spinoza as someone who does not present a metaphysics of absolute subjectivity. 6 As Nick Mansfield (2000, 15) points out, in Descartes “we find together two principles that Enlightenment thought has both emphasized and adored: firstly, the image of the self as the ground of all knowledge and experience of the world (before I am anything, 1 am I) and secondly, the self as defined by the rational faculties it can use to order the world (I make sense).” 7 Mansfield (2000) discusses the importance of Heidegger’s critiques of the subject as something determined by certain attributes such as consciousness or reason; what Heidegger proposes we ought to consider, rather, is a more fundamental ground for the subject, namely, existence itself, Dasein. Foucault’s name has stood for a thinking of subjectivity that is not a naturally occurring “thing” that anyone has but rather a construct of dominant socioeconomic, political, and cultural structures and institutions. 5

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ways in which humanism has been understood in relation to man, his essence, and existence.8 The story for Adorno and Horkheimer ([1944] 1997, xi) was one in which humanity had not met its own expectations and had trusted too much in the triumphs of modern consciousness. The Enlightenment “must examine itself, if men are not to be wholly betrayed” (xv, emphasis original). Liberating people from superstition and myths seems, for them, to have resulted in a sovereignty of man (or the autonomy, power, will, and force of the subject) that manifested itself in domination and mastery of nature, power, and technology as well as other people on the grounds of calculation and utility (4). As a result of such examinations and critiques, Calarco (2008, 12) suggests the subject has become disassociated from “the autonomous, domineering, atomistic subject of modernity” and now recognizes his or her coming into being by and from events, powers, structures, cultures, and institutions. “The subject, when understood as one who bears and is responsible to an event and alterity that exceeds it,” is, then, not a “fully self-present and self-identical subject” (12). This latter idea would be the subject “whose existence and death have been proclaimed in the discussions over humanism and the metaphysics of subjectivity” (12). Discussions of the subject and critiques of the Enlightenment are of course diverse, complex, and multifaceted and by no means form a straightforward consensus. Similarly, the Enlightenment tradition is itself an amorphous and composite web of thinkers far more diverse and multifarious than implied here. But, broadly speaking, particular conceptions associated with Enlightenment thought concerning the subject and its relation to autonomy, reason, freedom, the individual, and consciousness have come under close and critical scrutiny in the last century, a scrutiny that appears to have generally taken the form of a crisis as to what the human subject is or might be. These discussions—and the critiques and alternatives that have emerged from them—have been crucial for postcolonial, feminist, race critical, and queer theoretical questions of subjectivity and humanity. It is a matter of challenging what Haraway (1991, 156) calls the “Western” sense of self as “the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman.” The second crisis is the ecological concern for the natural world, the seemingly detrimental impact of human life and civilization on the world, and the critical attempts to alter attitudes to the world’s natural resources, the environment, and the habitat in which humans and animals live.9 Ecological thought could be characterized as a “humiliating descent” for humans (Morton 2008, 265). Tracing such a descent much further back than the twentieth-century critique of the Enlightenment subject, Timothy Morton (2008, 265) argues that from “Copernicus through Marx, Darwin and Freud, we learn we are decentered beings, inhabiting a Universe of processes that happen whether we are aware of them or not, whether we name those processes ‘astrophysics,’ ‘economic relations,’ ‘the unconscious’ or ‘evolution.’” While explaining that the term anthropocene has been applied to the period reaching back to the industrial revolution as well as even further back in time, Timothy Clark (2015, 1) suggests that its force as a term is connected to the time after the Second World War, when “human impacts on the entire biosphere have achieved an unprecedented and arguably dangerous intensity.” This term has become Heidegger (1993, 226, emphasis original) proposes that the first humanism, “Roman humanism, and every kind that has emerged from that time to the present, has presupposed the most universal ‘essence’ of man to be obvious. Man is considered to be an animal rationale.” This is not only a literal translation of the Greek but a metaphysical one as well, he argues. Metaphysics, Heidegger says, thinks of the human being on “the basis of animalitas and not in the direction of his humanitas” (227). The human body and existence is something essentially different to animals, according to him, and so humanism and the human must be rethought on this basis. Derrida (1989, 169−73; 2008, 142−60; 2009−2011) critiques Heidegger for this supposition on several occasions. 9 For further discussions of ecology, see, for instance, Morton 2007 and 2010. For a critical discussion of ecology, animality, and humanism, see Ferry 1995. 8

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popular in the humanities as shorthand for climate change, deforestation, overpopulation, and the general erosion of ecosystems (2). Connecting ecological issues to animals, Val Plumwood (2002, 2) comments that our “failure to situate dominant forms of human society ecologically is matched by our failure to situate nonhumans ethically, as the plight of non-human species continues to worsen.” She argues that we need to think self-critically about the irrational decisions that are made for “our collective cause” and scrutinize the dominant illusions that inform such decisions (2). Rather than move entirely away from an approach of human-centeredness, however, Plumwood argues that the global crisis we find ourselves in should not result in the idea that it is necessary to choose between human concerns and nonhuman concerns. Rather, it is a matter of recognizing, for instance, how “our own danger is connected to our domination of earth others” and how the human species is not set apart or isolated from other species and ecosystems (124). A major element of the current ecological crisis is species extinction; animals and their disappearance thus serve as a wake-up call and horror mirror-image to humans. Midgley (2004, 171) calls the relations between humans and the world a “war” against nature and proposes that it is only recently that: modern people might actually in some monstrous sense win their bizarre war, that they might “defeat nature,” thus cutting off the branch that they have been sitting on, and thus upsetting, not only the poets, but the profit-margin as well. To grasp this change calls for an unparalleled upheaval in our moral consciousness.

A double anxiety is embedded in animal species extinction: first, a sense of responsibility and guilt at animals disappearing at what appears an alarming and unprecedented rate; second, a recognition of humans as vulnerable (human) animals who may suffer the same fate if a balance is not regained of sustainability in the ecosphere. The ecological crisis and concern for the environment have functioned as a profound challenge to what is now condemned as human sovereignty. Critical questions as to human superiority and a self-serving human culture are rife in debates over the state of the world today, and much of this debate figures as a powerful indictment of humanity, calling for radical change. Such change is not merely about practical alterations to some human lifestyles, industry, and culture—existing at the cost of the natural world and its resources—but about attitudes to the concept of humanity and its place in the world. Rethinking human superiority could potentially set in motion a wide-ranging critical examination of practices that are central to human life, such as the appropriation and exploitation of natural resources and the commodification and commercialization of animals in the food, sport, and fashion industry. Part of such a rethinking inevitably involves questioning notions of progress, particularly in facing up to the dismal forecasts of climate research and in formulating potential solutions. The question of the animal, Calarco (2008, 1) exhorts, “should be seen as one of the central issues in contemporary critical discourse,” rather than tucked away somewhere distant as a niche in applied ethics. Moral philosopher Christine Korsgaard (2009, 3) writes that animals are: conscious beings, who experience pleasure and pain, fear and hunger, joy and grief, attachments to particular others, curiosity, fun and play, satisfaction and frustration, and the enjoyment of life. And these are all things that, when we experience them, we take to ground moral claims on the consideration of others.

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Why, then, are animals ipso facto excluded from such consideration? Fellenz (2007, 5) calls this exclusion an “inattention” on the part of moral philosophers and suggests it is “the challenge philosophy must face in the coming century” (6). The question of the animal might be summed up, then, as: (1) an appeal to face and challenge the industrialization, commercialization, exploitation, and objectification of animals and the suffering this entails in the contemporary world; (2) a concern and care for the impact of anthropocentrism for wider ecological, environmental, political, and ethical issues; and (3) a critical engagement with conceptions of the subject in light of current philosophical and scientific discourse, along with a commitment to reevaluate concepts of the “human” and “animal” in scientific, political, literary, religious, and philosophical traditions, past and present.

Biblical Blame What does the Bible have to do with any of this? The Bible is a crucial archive to explore in the context of animal studies because much contemporary philosophy on the animal refers to the Bible (either explicitly or implicitly) as an anthropocentric cultural weight to blame for humanity’s superiority complex. In much the same way as feminist scholars have argued for the importance of critical engagement with the patriarchal structures of the Bible, it is necessary to engage critically with the ways in which this scriptural archive has seemingly also trod animals underfoot. A main aim of my study is to probe more closely the assumptions about the Bible put forth in this regard—particularly, as I go on to discuss, the way that the Bible becomes a corpus assumed to contain anthropocentric attitudes based on a handful of citations, if that. To apportion blame to a complex canon of texts from vastly varying times, places, styles, contents, and contexts as if dealing with a singularly coherent work is at any rate a dubious practice. I engage with the Bible precisely because of its importance in cultural memory as a powerfully persistent archive with a complex diversity of characters—animal, human, divine. The Bible demands more sustained attention in order to grapple with its texts in light of the concerns and criticisms of animal studies. Scanning the field of contemporary philosophy on the question of the animal, it is interesting to note that in measuring blame for the concept of the human as a superior being, the Bible is frequently brought up in the beginning, in introductions to rigorous discussions over the status of animal life. Seemingly, this is done to name and shame the Bible as blamable without putting it under much, if any, critical investigation. Engaging with the status of animals in the world, the Bible is held accountable for our rigid, exclusive, and inflated notion of the human. Anchoring popular and philosophical conceptions of the animal in the deeply entrenched anthropocentric structures of Western intellectual thought, the tendency is to mount the Bible as an originating stable point of blame, to be put on trial, hurriedly condemned without prosecution, and thereby rushed to the marginal spaces of muted censure. Of course, no scholar says exactly this: I will take the Bible to court and put it on trial for the killing and eating of millions of animals and for intensive farming, hunting, fur-production, pet-keeping, and other similar practices so commonplace in the Western world. Nonetheless, there is an implicit assumption that the Bible is responsible for the current ideological underpinnings that justify animal abuse. While it is not afforded the privilege of closer examination—perhaps deemed somehow unquestionable—the Bible nonetheless persistently stands accused of sacrificing the animal in favor of the human, thereby acting as scaffolding for the metaphysical assumptions that have traditionally held the human in place, central and aloft. The human is privileged by the divine, the prime receiver of

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the logos: a powerful gift that has long equated humans to sovereign masters over the nonhuman in creation. Turning to significant recent publications in animal studies, already mentioned above, demonstrates this marked tendency. For instance, Wolfe (2003, x) writes in Zoontologies that “the animal as the repressed Other of the subject, identity, logos” reaches “back in Western culture at least to the Old Testament,” and yet none of the diverse contributors to this exciting collection of articles follow up on this particular Old Testament heritage. It is briefly brought to the fore only to be dropped again as a muted point. In Singer’s (2004, x) preface to Animal Philosophy, his second reference to the long history of animals having “no ethical significance,” or at least “very minor significance,” is Paul (after Aristotle), further mentioning Augustine and Aquinas. It is from this vantage point that Singer opens up into “most Western philosophers” (x). In the introduction to the same book, Calarco and Atterton (2004b, xvii) contend that the transition from Aristotle’s man as “rational animal” to simply “rational being” (in which “man” is exclusively and exhaustedly subsumed) was made “all the easier by the biblical story of man being made in the image of god and having dominion over the animals.” A biblical story, then, is thought to have smoothed the passage from thinking of the human as a certain kind of animal in creation, to the human as something else altogether in light of his ability to reason. In Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida, Calarco (2008) discusses Levinas and the ethical relation to the other, who for Levinas is necessarily a human other. Calarco turns Levinas’s position on its head, drawing his own “neoreligious” conclusion where the encounter with the animal is “transcendent,” a “miracle,” but is quick to avoid this turn to religious language by affirming his resolve for a “complete shift in the terms of the debate” (59), as if he were echoing Levinas’s (2004, 47) own words: “enough of this theology!” He goes on to warn that we must adopt a hypercritical stance toward the “ontotheological tradition” we have inherited, “for it is this tradition that blocks the possibility of thinking about animals in a nonor other-than-anthropocentric manner” (Calarco 2008, 112). A theologically oriented tradition is not merely to blame, then, but is also a stumbling block for contemporary attempts to think about the animal. In the introduction to The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics and Politics, Clark (1999, 5) references a number of specific biblical passages10 to demonstrate “these commands, these tacit bargains” as implicit in owning animals and yet not treating them as mere things. His is a more positive account of the biblical legacy but remains in this case nonetheless elusive, never expanded upon in the main body of the argument.11 In Cavalieri’s (2009, 2) The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue, one of her “speakers” (the first essay of the book is a dialogue-shaped discussion) suggests we need to instate “distance from the revered legacy of our history, what I am referring to in particular is the idea that some points, or perspectives, of the past should be rejected as archaic.” The same speaker warns that although narrative form is something humans have always “craved” and “cherished” as modes of understanding self and world, we must ensure that “such narratives are not translated into normatively hierarchical frameworks,” as “they determine roles and questions of status” (5). This becomes more explicitly directed to the biblical tradition when she writes that according to “the most widespread” of these culturally and conceptually determining narratives, “human beings were made by God in his own image, while nonhuman beings are mere creations. The latter are only a preparatory work, while the former are the apex of creation, directly molded by God” (5−6). This reference is put forward with confidence, without recourse to a specific biblical Namely, Lev 19; 22; 23; 25; 26; Deut 22, 25; Ezek 34; Prov. Clark (2013) has dealt more explicitly with religion and animals elsewhere.

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text, context, or sustained analysis. The assumption is that we already know what she is talking about—the point speaks for itself. Cavalieri uses this point as a synecdoche for the history that has justified the systematic subjugation and suffering of animals: “such a story supports the normative implication that humans are superior beings, entitled to use nonhumans as they see fit” (6). What Cavalieri seemingly calls for is violence toward the so-called sacred, a fundamental purge or erasure of the biblical trace. Without further ado, she suggests, this particular conceptual corpse needs burying. A relic of the past, it still clutters our thinking of the animal and thus demands immediate iconoclastic action. Invoking the ethical dimension inscribed in the question of the animal—issues of “right and wrong,” as she puts it—this is a point of some urgency, lest we allow the biblical to run wild and cause all sorts of further havoc (2). Fellenz (2007, 31) picks up on the same point and sums up the blame in the following statement: “the traditional ethical models found in Western philosophy and theology have been premised on human uniqueness: the belief that as rational (perhaps ensouled) beings, humans have a putative value and destiny that surpass that of any other animal.” He writes about “the religious concept of animals as part of the human dominion” (2, emphasis original) and points out the necessary “proximity” between human and animal within religious sacrifice, which is also the prerequisite for scientific experiments on animals for human gain; it is a case of life and living in a way that corresponds (13). Whether this is a point that accords greater significance to animals in biblical accounts of sacrifice or not, the relation Fellenz sets up implicitly foregrounds biblical sacrifice of animal bodies as the origin of scientific experimentation on animals. This is an interesting point but one that surely needs validating through specific reference to biblical sacrifice narratives, rather than ploughing forth under the assumption that we all know what exactly takes place in such sacrificial structures. Fellenz also refers to biblical and classical Greek stories to convey the way in which the transformation of humans into animals is a frequent trope used to signify punishment (16). One of the foundations for assuming the ontological inferiority of animals is, according to Fellenz, “theological in nature,” embodied in the religious myth that “we humans are ensouled beings, created in the image of a God who made the world, including the animals, for our use” (34). He does present some of the ways in which Christian theologians have worked against this trend but stays clear of specific textual references to the Bible, and ultimately, the theological arguments are swept under the carpet. Saying “we need not rely on them, nor become entangled in other theological complexities” (36) is a sweeping motion reminiscent of Cavalieri’s (2009, 4) proposed disentanglement from the biblical. Of course, these are all philosophical texts on the moral and ontological status of animals. Why should they engage with biblical texts? Further, this is not to say they are necessarily wrong. The point is rather that in order to respond to the question of the animal as it relates to our cultural and religious inheritance, it is problematic to plot an uncritical notion of the Bible as the origin point, especially without revisiting these textual sites. To hold up the cultural inheritance of the Bible and its theologies without thinking more precisely about what is meant by the “theological,” “God,” “human,” and “animal” in these contexts is to propagate a myopic acceptance of this legacy as well as its wholesale rejection on terms that are all too opaque. Even if these contemporary philosophical references are merely the result of religion’s “prolonged stammerings” (Bataille 1989, 96) in the world today, the Bible nonetheless plays a significant part in both fundamental beginning and ensnaring tangle. It represents a dangerous, labyrinthine structure that serious philosophers would be better off avoiding, as if that messy business is a job for biblical scholars alone. If it were not for the fact that

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the above-mentioned philosophers are producing valuable and timely publications on the animal and that all point to the Bible as culpable, this troublesome biblical body of literature could feasibly be left for biblical scholars to dissect in the dark or for theologians to peruse in peace. Instead of attempting to erase the biblical trace violently, we would be better off turning toward that textual body, responding to it, going through its pockets anew, and reviewing the strange and fantastical, domestic and divine characters that inhabit its spaces. As Laura Hobgood-Oster (2014, 216) points out, to view such a tradition—she is specifically addressing the Christian tradition—as wholly negative is “mistaken or at least incomplete.”12 It is perhaps a matter of adopting what Yvonne Sherwood (2004b, 14) has called “slow motion biblical interpretation”: an interpretive practice with the biblical archive that is “caught up in a complex relationship of exultation-mourning, gratitude-disappointment, fidelity-betrayal,” “a mode of interpretation that, instead of dividing the world into those who accept or reject a given religious inheritance (in a large act of choice that seemingly exonerates us from the intricacies of inheritance thereafter), implicates us all in little acts of micro-choosing and micro-decision” (14). Important work has been done to challenge the trend of equating religion, particularly Judaism and Christianity, with anthropocentrism. Paul Waldau (2013) calls for inquiries about religion and animals that do not resort to generalization, noting Lynn White Jr.’s (1967, 1205) infamous thesis that “especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen.” Elijah Judah Schochet’s (1984) Animal Life in Jewish Tradition: Attitudes and Relationships and Robert M. Grant’s (1999) Early Christians and Animals are two significant resources for Judaism and Christianity and their relationships to animals. Ingvild Sælid Gilhus’s (2006) valuable Animals, Gods and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Ideas is a welcome contribution to the contextualization of the Judeo-Christian attitude to animals in the Greco-Roman world. Hobgood-Oster (2008) provides a wide-ranging reading of animals in the Christian tradition that have largely gone unnoticed in her Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition. The earliest example of a Christian theological response within animal studies has been Linzey’s work, such as Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, which investigates both Christian scripture and tradition to question whether this tradition is irredeemably speciesist (Linzey and Yamamoto 1998).13 In another publication, in collaboration with Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Linzey and Cohn-Sherbok (1997, 1) aim to give an account of “the positive resources available within the Jewish and Christian traditions for a celebration of our relations with animals.” While not uncritical, Linzey’s project has been oriented around a positive revaluation and redemption of the Bible and the Judeo-Christian. David L. Clough’s (2012) systematic theology on animals and his work with Celia Deane-Drummond (2009) and with Deane-Drummond and Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser (2013) have been particularly important for establishing the role of animals in the theology and religious studies fields. These works rigorously chart and challenge theological traditions with regard to the concerns of animal studies, take note of animal symbols and rites in religious practice, and grapple with ethical theories and practices. Charting a broader religious field, Lisa Kemmerer’s (2011) comprehensive In this article, Hobgood-Oster provides accounts of speaking animals in the Christian tradition as a response to the question of the supposedly Word-obsessed Christianity and its exclusive connection to humans and human language. 13 T h e introduction is named: “Is Christianity Irredeemably Speciesist?” Speciesist signifies when one species is deemed superior to another. See also Linzey 1976, 1987, and 1994. 12

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Animals and World Religions engages with animal activists in different religious traditions. Waldau and Kimberly Patton’s (2009) A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics is a further sign of more wide-ranging engagement with religion in relation to the concerns of animal studies. While there is more work done on animal studies in theology and religious studies so far, there is also notable scholarship arising more particularly with regard to the Bible. Studies such as Kenneth C. Way’s (2011) Donkeys in the Biblical World: Ceremony and Symbol, Tova L. Forti’s (2008) Animal Imagery in the Book of Proverbs, and Deborah O’Daniel Cantrell’s (2011) The Horsemen of Israel: Horses and Chariotry in Monarchic Israel (Ninth-Eighth Centuries B.C.E.) are helpful resources within the field of animals in the Bible, but as Ken Stone (2014, 290) points out, these are strictly historical-critical resources that, although useful, do not provide a critical engagement with, or connection to, the questions raised by animal studies today. Moore’s (2014a) Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology and Jennifer L. Koosed’s (2014a) The Bible and Posthumanism are important contributions that model close biblical engagement with a critical theoretical bent. Both volumes provide rich engagements with the theoretical stakes of animal studies and the ambiguities of religion and its scriptures. In the introduction to Divinanimality, Moore (2014a, 11) states that “if the animal-human distinction is being rethought and retheorized, then the animal-human-divine distinctions must be rethought, retheorized, and retheologized alongside it.” A significant tenet of Divinanimality is that there are considerable resources, in that most religious scriptures and much of theology predates “the Cartesian realignment of human-animal relations in terms absolutely oppositional and hierarchical” (11). As Koosed (2014b, 3) argues, the Bible “contains multiple moments of disruption, boundary crossing, and category confusion: animals speak, God becomes man, spirits haunt the living, and monsters confound at the end.” All the essays in The Bible and Posthumanism, as Koosed (2014b, 4) points out, demonstrate the complexity of biblical texts and traditions. It is imperative to build on this burgeoning scholarship, multiplying perspectives and critical attention to foster broader as well as more detailed discussions. What I add with my own study is a more sustained attention to themes of animality by charting a specific trajectory across the biblical corpus with regard to the killability (and edibility) of animals and notions of proper and improper sovereignty. The themes of killability and sovereignty are bound up with one another through the issue of human versus divine powers to give and take life. Are humans given a sovereign power to reign over animals, as seems to be the case in Gen 1:26, where humankind is given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth”?14 This dominion is by no means settled by this verse when it comes to the biblical texts that follow Genesis, or even within Genesis itself. Human sovereignty is frequently deemed improper, a misplaced hubris that forgets the vulnerability and mortality of humans. The challenge to such sovereignty causes splinters in the idea of animals as killable objects, subject to human sovereignty. When human sovereignty is destabilized, humans and animals are in many ways on a par under the only proper sovereign: God. The human/animal boundary thus frequently experiences slippages, as every living creature exists in the hands of the divine sovereign; all the living are vulnerable and mortal, human or nonhuman.

All biblical references are taken from the NRSV, unless stated otherwise.

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The Biblical Archive and Cultural Memory The Bible is referred to in the name of a particular textual, cultural-religious inheritance as memory and authority, and it is necessary to turn anew to this referent with the question of the animal in mind. It would be better to speak (as I already have) of “the biblical archive” in referring to the Bible, thus drawing in notions of multiplicity, preservation, power, and legacy more explicitly. Thinking critically about issues of multiplicity in the biblical inheritance, it is important to unmask the seemingly organic point of origin for which terms such as the Bible or the Judeo-Christian stand, as if the Bible was homogenous, congruent, and a monolithic corpus or that noticeable theological differentiations exist between Judaism and Christianity. I argue that the Bible is neither a pure origin for anthropocentrism nor a straightforward source for anthropocentric thinking. Indeed, the case can be made that individual texts in the biblical archive can be interpreted as fostering current understandings of human dominance, centrality, and superiority. At the same time, however, these same texts frequently radically problematize such an anthropocentric understanding in the relationality that conditions life with and as animals. Undoubtedly, the Bible has been influential in countless ways. Whether it is frequently read in detail is another question. In his influential Religion and Cultural Memory, Jan Assmann (2006) theorizes the ways in which individual memory is never wholly distinct from social memory. He explores how societal norms and practices emerge from such collective memory. In “the act of remembering we do not just descend into the depths of our own most intimate inner life, but we introduce an order and a structure into that internal life that are socially conditioned and that link us to the social world” (1–2). Individual memory—and its formation, structure, and order—is mediated through a particular context, culture, and society and is thus caught up in what he calls “collective memory.” Assman suggests that “the task of this memory, above all, is to transmit a collective identity. Society inscribes itself in this memory with all its norms and values and creates in the individual the authority that Freud called the superego and that has traditionally been called ‘conscience’” (6−7). This kind of memory is, he writes, “particularly susceptible to politicized forms of remembering” (7). We might see the above references to the Bible as a symptom of a collective memory of the Bible as anthropocentric. Particular pieces of its archive are remembered and reinforced socially through repetition of its supposed meaning. One such example would be the much referred to imago Dei in Genesis—that is, humans being made in God’s image—and the concurrent “memory” that this straightforwardly signifies human superiority. Such reinforced memory and its consequences might explain the anxiety felt in regard to the Bible as a cultural canon whose content is still remembered in today’s world, in more or less oblique ways. The fuzziness that accompanies any attempt to calculate how such memory functions or what it denotes merely exacerbates the anxiety, making such “memories” all the more elusive and uncontrollable, thus harder to erase or even to admit their presence as a dominant norm. Importantly, Assmann suggests that norms are to some extent naturalized by appearing to represent the individual beliefs of a person, as separate from particular cultural archives. Such beliefs are thus thought to be natural as either singular or universal (“common sense”) rather than culturally constructed and part of a larger fabric of influences and influxes. Cultural archives are of great importance, whether consciously acknowledged or not, as Assmann (2006, 7–8) points out: “both the collective and the individual turn to the archive of cultural traditions, the arsenal of symbolic forms, the ‘imaginary’ of myths and images, of the ‘great stories,’ sagas and legends,

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scenes and constellations that live or can be reactivated in the treasure stores of a people.” Cultural archives, then, are crucial for understanding both individual and collective forms of memory and how they continue to influence norms, values, and practices in the present and for the future. Assmann holds that there “is no understanding without memory, no existence without tradition” (27). Noting Heidegger’s and Derrida’s writings on archives, Assmann argues that the discussion emerges “as a form of memory that constitutes the present and makes the future possible through the medium of symbols . . . permeated by the political structures of power and domination” (27). This attention to the way political structures of power and domination affect the present and the futures that are possible concurrently is of vital importance for the question of the animal. Political structures and authoritative archives condition thinking and acting in the world today with regard to power (or the lack of it), but crucially, as Assmann implies, they also shape the future. In other words, if perceptions of animals today as killable things are shown to be linked to particular myths or cultural legacies, these perceptions might appear rather less natural or common sense. If, on the other hand, such understandings are reinforced by recourse to discursive strategies of myths and narratives as to the “natural” or “original” order of particular hierarchies, then the right to reign over animals might appear fully justified, and the idea that animals could be treated or thought of otherwise would remain unthinkable. In light of the blame apportioned to the Bible, it is imperative that this hybrid body of texts is examined with critical attention to the complexities and tensions that mark its varied topography. Exactly how this canon has influenced past and present views of animals is perhaps impossible to map out. But to trawl over some of its terrain today considering the questions posed in animal studies and attempt to identify in what ways the biblical archive could be seen to reinforce ideas of human superiority—and in what ways it might resist such ideas—is a task that this study attempts.

Following Jacques Derrida Derrida was arguably one of the most influential if not infamous thinkers of his time. The names Derrida and deconstruction have, as Sherwood’s (2004b, 5) assessment demonstrates, been frequently divided between religious mystification and secular demystification, both “encroaching totalitarianism and encroaching relativism.”15 Alternately critiqued for “impotent bookishness” and “totalizing power,” he “serves as a cipher for perilous regression (into childhood ‘play,’ or the occult world of Jewish mysticism), and also for dangerous acceleration beyond the borders of the humanities and the human and humane” (Sherwood 2004b, 5–6). From his early work in the 1960s and 1970s—with the seminal Writing and Difference ([1967b] 2001) and Of Grammatology ([1967a] 1998), through Glas ([1974] 1986), Dissemination ([1972] 1983), The Truth in Painting ([1978] 1987), Of Spirit ([1987] 1991), Specters of Marx ([1993] 2006), and Rogues (2005b), to mention only a few—to the two posthumously published volumes The Beast and the Sovereign (2009–2011), he has done nothing if not spark debate amongst critics and followers. Prolific and diverse in his interests, Derrida wrote on phenomenology, Marx, Plato, Freud, drugs, 9/11, the poetry of Paul Celan, the death penalty, Franz Kafka, democracy, the South African truth and reconciliation commission, Abraham and animals, as well as on the terms and neologisms he is

See also Sherwood and Hart 2004, for a discussion of the relationship between Derrida’s work and religion.

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so well known for, such as “écriture,” “différance,” the “khora,” and “deconstruction” (and this is not an exhaustive list). Perhaps what characterizes Derrida’s style of thinking the most is a sustained attention to texts—their details, marginalia, and tensions—marked by a deep respect for the legacies and traditions with which he engaged as well as a ceaseless capacity for imaginative, radical, and surprising interpretations. Peter Sedgwick (2001, 192) calls Derrida “amongst the most controversial of post-war European thinkers,” because “he is a thinker who has sought to challenge a number of what he argues to be deeply rooted presuppositions that dominate the practice of philosophical enquiry” (193). As Derrida-scholar Nicholas Royle (2009, ix) puts it: “He questions everything. He refuses to simplify what is not simple. He works at unsettling all dogma.” It is perhaps no wonder, then, that he has “consistently provoked anxiety, anger and frustration, as well as pleasure, exhilaration and awe” (xi). In his In Memory of Jacques Derrida, Royle (2009, xi) writes that Derrida “was the most original and inspiring writer and philosopher of our time. He made—and his writing still makes and will continue to make—earthquakes in thinking.” Earthquakes in thinking what? Or who? One answer to this is in thinking about the human and animal. Derrida analyzes issues at the heart of the two crises I referred to earlier, namely, the question of the subject and the question of the human as a sovereign figure in the world. His later work forms a significant contribution to the question of the animal. In the philosophical tradition associated with the crisis of the subject, Derrida is a significant figure, both indebted to, and critical of, thinkers such as Heidegger, Adorno, Levinas, and Foucault. Derrida (1995b, 268) argues that despite all the challenges to the understanding of the “subject,” the discourse on the subject “continues to link subjectivity with man.” Already in 1968, Derrida (1969, 35) addresses the question of “man” and suggests that the history of the concept of man has not been sufficiently interrogated, as if “man” were a sign without historical, cultural, and linguistic limits. A large part of Derrida’s later work engages with concepts of the human and man in the Western philosophical tradition, the question of the animal, and what a different subjectivity might look like—one that takes account of animal life, and not merely as inferior to human life. This can be most powerfully and succinctly found in the 1997 Cérisy lectures, posthumously published as The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008). Related to this work on the human subject and animals, he also dedicated many seminars toward the end of his life to concepts of sovereignty—the sovereignty of the human—and figures of beasts in philosophical, political, cultural, and religious canonical works. These are gathered in the two posthumously published volumes of The Beast and the Sovereign, transcribed from his final 2001 to 2003 seminars. In these seminars, Derrida (2009, 26) explored the often-paradoxical representations of the political human as superior to animality and political humanity as animality. He sets out to pose “the great questions of animal life (that of man, said by Aristotle to be a ‘political animal,’ and that of the ‘beasts’) and of the treatment, the subjection, of the ‘beast’ by ‘man’” (2009, editorial note). Michael B. Naas (2008, 63) points to this central concern of sovereignty in the last two decades of Derrida’s work as “the root of many of the philosophical concepts Derrida wished to reread and many of the contemporary ethical and political issues he wished to rethink.” The most prominent issues would have been religion, hospitality, democracy, and justice.16 These themes are all present in Derrida’s thinking of animality. In “Violence against Animals,” Derrida (2004, 62) proclaims that the “question of animality” is not merely one question among others. He explains how he has long considered it “decisive”: See, for instance, Rogues (2005b), The Gift of Death (1995c), Of Hospitality (2000), and On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001).

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While it is difficult and enigmatic in itself, it also represents the limit upon which all the great questions are formed and determined, as well as the concepts that attempt to delimit what is “proper to man,” the essence and future of humanity, ethics, politics, law, “human rights,” “crimes against humanity,” “genocide,” etc. (62–63)

Derrida (63n3) explicitly draws attention to the persistent interest he has taken in the question of the animal and the many references to it in his work. Situating himself like a Robinson Crusoe on an island unto himself, Derrida (2008, 62) claims he has always been exempt from what philosophy has called, with such imprecision, “the animal”: I am saying “they,” “what they call an animal,” in order to mark clearly the fact that I have always secretly exempted myself from that word, and to indicate that my whole history, the whole genealogy of my questions, in truth everything I am, follow, think, write, trace, erase even, seems to me to be born from that exceptionalism.

What Derrida contributes to animal studies, then, is a wide-ranging critique of a dominant line of thinkers in Western philosophy, particularly the continental philosophy tradition. He provides suggestions for how we might begin to follow such traditions differently. From “Aristotle to Lacan, and including Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas” (2008, 12, 27, 32, 54, 59, 89) these thinkers are “paradigmatic, dominant, and normative” (54) in regard to the philosophical understanding of the “human.” Derrida’s repeated references to this “Western philosophical tradition” intentionally situates him as following this tradition, participating in its legacies, but determinedly inscribing his own philosophical signature on this tradition in a powerful indictment of its philosophical treatment of animals. Derrida (2008, 54) further justifies their prominence in his work by arguing that they: constitute a general topology and even, in a somewhat new sense for this term, a worldwide anthropology, a way for today’s man to position himself in the face of what he calls “the animal” within what he calls “the world”—so many motifs (man, animal, and especially world) that I would like, as it were, to reproblematize.

It is not that this tradition is homogenous but rather that it has been “hegemonic” when it comes to human/animal distinctions, so that it is in fact a discourse “of hegemony, of mastery itself ” (2004, 63, emphasis original). In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida (2008) undertakes this reproblematization, focusing on the above-mentioned canonical figures. For The Beast and the Sovereign seminars, he expands his canon with a wide range of writers in volume 1: Jean de La Fontaine, Thomas Hobbes, Rousseau, Niccolò Machiavelli, Giorgio Agamben, Gustave Flaubert, Gilles Deleuze, Edmund Husserl, Celan, and D. H. Lawrence, as well as goes over Aristotle, Paul Valéry, Levinas, Lacan, and Heidegger again. Volume 2 focuses on interpreting Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. The figures Derrida examines are not put forward as an exhaustive archive of Western philosophy for rethinking the conceptualization of the human/man but do form an impressively expansive exploration and multifaceted critique of some of the key texts and thinkers for the Western world. Derrida’s (2008, 40) thesis is bold, with enormous implications for grappling with the most dominant thinkers in the history of Western philosophy:

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I’ll venture to say that never, on the part of any great philosopher from Plato to Heidegger, or anyone at all who takes on, as a philosophical question in and of itself, the question called that of the animal and of the limit between the animal and the human, have I noticed a protestation based on principle, and especially not a protestation that amounts to anything, against the general singular that is the animal.

He traces an agreement between philosophical sense and common sense “that allows one to speak blithely of the Animal in the general singular” and suggests that this “is perhaps one of the greatest and most symptomatic asinanities of those who call themselves humans” (41, emphasis original). Derrida stands seemingly solitary in the continental philosophy tradition in paying attention to animal issues despite, as Calarco (2007, 6) reminds us, this tradition priding itself on its engagement with concrete ethicopolitical subjects of thought. Singer echoes this in his affirmation that a philosophical impetus is necessary to bring about practical change in relation to animals but that continental philosophy has failed to provide one. What philosophical incentive to challenge the way nonhuman animals are treated, Singer (2004, xii) asks, has come from philosophers in the continental tradition, thinkers such as “Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, and Deleuze, or those who take the work of these thinkers as setting a framework for their own thought?” His answer is “as far as I can judge, none,” revealing perplexity as to “why such an extensive body of thought should have failed to grapple with the issue of how we treat animals” (xii). Singer asks what this failure signifies in the alleged attempts to question and critique prevailing assumptions and dominant institutions. At the same time, as I implied earlier, of course these thinkers have formed an important part of rethinking animality in terms of bringing questions of the subject, freedom, ethics, and the other to the fore. It would arguably be impossible to imagine animal studies today without this continental tradition. Derrida, however, is one such thinker who explicitly drew attention to such practical and philosophical issues and whom Singer fails to mention. Despite Derrida’s own insistence on the topic of animality, to which he dedicated his whole life, little sign of this can be found in the scholarship that poured out in the aftermath of his death. In their book Encountering Derrida: Legacies and Futures of Deconstruction, editors Allison Weiner and Simon Morgan Wortham (2007, 1) write that he leaves us behind with “a wealth of writings that touched upon nearly every aspect of the philosophical enterprise, publishing an enormous body of texts that crossed—and reinvented—a host of disciplinary fields.” But, perhaps because it predates the posthumous publication of The Animal That Therefore I Am, none of the contributors to this volume mention the question of the animal. Perhaps for similar reasons, Ian Balfour’s (2007) edited collection, Late Derrida, does not bring the animal issue to the fore. The same is the case for Madeleine Fagan, Ludovic Glorieux, Indira Hašimbegović, and Marie Suetsugu’s (2007) Derrida: Negotiating the Legacy. Royle’s (2009, 157–58) In Memory of Jacques Derrida touches briefly on Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am but does not leave the impression that this was a particularly central topic for Derrida. Calarco (2007, 1) bemoans the “dearth of writing on this theme by his followers and critics” and asserts that from “the very earliest to the latest texts, Derrida is keenly aware of and intent on problematizing the anthropocentric underpinnings and orientation of philosophy and associated discourses” (2).17 Attention to this aspect of Derrida’s work is growing, albeit in rather niche corners. A notable example is Leonard Lawlor’s (2007) This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida. In 2007, the Oxford Literary Review published a special issue on Derrida and animals, entitled Derridanimals and edited by Neil Badmington. See also Berger and Segarra 2011, Krell 2013, and Turner 2013. With the exception of Lawlor, these are situated at the fringes of animal studies with a somewhat idiosyncratic approach, focusing

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Naas’s (2003, xix, emphasis original) Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction looks at how Derrida’s work has prompted a rethinking of tradition, legacy, and inheritance in philosophy, writing of “the incredible power of the tradition, its way of recuperating the most heterogeneous and marginal elements, and its great fragility, its vulnerability to the very gestures of reception that make it—along with our history and our origins—possible in the first place.” While Naas touches on concerns that are close to the animal as the forgotten, foreclosed topic Derrida emphasizes in the Western philosophical tradition, he does not mention animality specifically. Naas continues to argue that one “begins by listening to the canon because the canon always gives us more than we imagine, more than we could have expected, because the canon always gives us, in its folds, something noncanonical, something that can never be simply included in the curriculum” (xxix). This more arguably could refer to the foreclosed animal subjects that Derrida follows and to which he responds, what he argues has been what philosophy forgets, namely, “the animal can look at me” (Derrida 2008, 11). In other words, the animal is not merely an object of study, of comparative interest or symbolic significance. It “has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other” (11). As Derrida says, “nothing will have given me more food for thinking” than the alterity of the animal (11). Greater attention to this aspect of Derrida’s thought is emerging, however, as can be seen from, for example, Aaron S. Gross’s (2014) The Question of the Animal and Religion, Judith Still’s (2015) Derrida and Other Animals, and Sarah Bezan and James Tink’s (2017) Seeing Animals after Derrida. Bezan and Tink (2017, x) posit that the environmental and ecological criticism that coincided in many ways with Derrida’s turn to the animal has been supported and developed by debates around the “anthropocene” as well as by the nonhuman turn in thought of new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented philosophy. Although much of this goes in different directions than Derrida, they reflect that “Derrida’s work has become part of a wider series of theoretical approaches to the animal and the environment since its inception” (Bezan and Tink 2017, x). As Gross (2014, 121) contends, Derrida “helps us to attend to animals differently but also to the knot in which the animal is bound to other core concepts,” without relegating animals as a stepping stone to more supposedly worthy subjects. “Derrida shows how we need to reconsider our own subjectivity to responsibly consider animals and how we must confront out own being-confronted-by animals—by individual animals in our lived-in world— to reconsider our own subjectivity” (121). What Derrida ultimately calls for in his work on animality is threefold: (1) greater vigilance in philosophical thought over the supposedly distinct differences between humans and animals; (2) compassion and an awakening to the animal other as a condition for ethics—an awakening that is linked to Derrida’s dream for an unconditional hospitality; and (3) responsibility in the face of a horizon of justice that will always be to some extent excessive, incalculable, and impossible but that nonetheless demands our interminable response with respect to the other as any other. While the term deconstruction is indiscreetly bandied about in all manner of contexts, usually in alliance with a vague sense of the postmodern project divorced from Derrida’s work, on the more on particular and sometimes eccentric human-animal encounters or specific concerns in Derrida’s work. Krell (2013), for instance, offers a summary and close reading of The Animal That Therefore I Am and The Beast and the Sovereign seminars, involving also a critical response with particular focus on Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s 1929 to 1930 lecture on world, finitude, and solitude. Turner (2013) draws on Hélène Cixous extensively and takes a somewhat idiosyncratic approach, with essays on insects, moles, worms, and sponges as well as lions, elephants, and wolves. It is less strictly tied to Derrida’s corpus per se, taking its point of departure from Derrida into other avenues.

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one hand, or used synonymously with his signature as a thinker, on the other, I am somewhat uneasy about its use, especially in light of the frequent misuse and misunderstandings that weigh it down.18 As a ghost that cannot be wholly purged, however, I would like to grapple with the idea of deconstruction specifically in relation to the so-called distinction(s) between what we call humans and what we call animals. This can be described by the figure of the threshold19: The threshold not only supposes this indivisible limit that every deconstruction begins by deconstructing (to deconstruct is to hold that no indivisibility, no atomicity, is secure), the classical figure of the threshold (to be deconstructed) not only supposes this indivisibility that is not to be found anywhere; it also supposes the solidity of a ground or a foundation, they too being deconstructible. (Derrida 2009, 309–10)

The word threshold (seuil), Derrida (2009, 310) explains, comes from the Latin solum, which means soil “or more precisely the foundation on which an architectural sill or the sole of one’s feet rest.” What this means, “and this is the gesture of deconstructive thinking,” is “that we don’t even consider the existence (whether natural or artificial) of any threshold to be secure, if by ‘threshold’ is meant either an indivisible frontier line or the solidity of a foundational ground” (310). However, to stop here would be to succumb to the abstraction into which so many explications of deconstruction fall. Deconstruction is not merely about acknowledging the instability of any threshold or limit between one concept/thing and another, or merely about breaking down such boundaries by pointing to their fragility, thus equating “deconstruction” (as it so often is) with its near-homonym “destruction.” This would be to open up what Derrida calls the abyss and remain content to cease thinking in the face of such a void. As Chrulew (2006, 18.3) notes, there is a perhaps uncharacteristic earnestness in Derrida’s thinking about animals that needs to be taken into account. For Derrida (2009, 333–34), what is called for is both “a greater vigilance as to our irrepressible desire for the threshold, a threshold that is a threshold, a single and solid threshold,” an openness to the fact that there may in fact be no threshold, and a recognition that “the abyss is not the bottom nor the bottomless depth” of a hidden base. “The abyss, if there is an abyss, is that there is more than one ground [sol], more than one solid, and more than one single threshold [plus d’un seul seuil]” (334, emphasis original). What the deconstructive task would consist of, then, is examining critically what threshold is upheld as natural, single, and seemingly indivisible, and what other thresholds might be unmasked or unmaskable in the critique of such a supposed central threshold. Where does a threshold lie? But further, what does it hold inside, and what (or who) outside? How is it constructed as a threshold? Who are the masters and inhabitants of the house, and who are strangers, foreigners, or even enemies lurking outside? Concepts of house, home, threshold, and its insiders/outsiders become hugely important to Derrida’s discourse on animality. It is, for him, part and parcel of a thinking of a hospitality that is unconditional and an ethics that is spatial and temporal: in a place, a specific context, at a threshold that is both shared and divisive, and with a singular other who is both potentially threatening and loving, never determined (or determinable) in advance as one or the other. Humans, Derrida (2008, 32) suggests, have given themselves this word animal, “as if they had received it as an inheritance” to construct a threshold; they have “given themselves the Perhaps what haunts deconstruction most visibly today is the banality associated with its vague alliance with a popculture postmodernism. 19 T h is is perhaps a play on Levinas (1969, 173): “the possibility for the home to open to the Other is as essential to the essence of the home as closed doors and windows.” 18

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word in order to corral a large number of living beings within a single concept,” the animal. Animals thus remain outside, on the other side of this threshold, as killable, edible, huntable, trappable, containable: as nonothers and nonneighbors, accepted in proximity as exceptions in the case of pets or as machines for human use. Of course, this is putting the point starkly, and Derrida does participate in a certain polemical trend that marks animal studies.20 Such polemics, however, are perhaps justified in light of the urgency of challenging the threshold that allows for intensified animal farming industries, genetic crossbreeding and manipulation, hormone treatment, experimentation, cloning, and artificial insemination all for the “putative well-being of man” (Derrida 2008, 25). Derrida calls the question of the animal an event and condemns the dissimulation that allows for a diversion from, or deferral of, confrontation with this event. “However one interprets it, whatever practical, technical, scientific, juridical, ethical, or political consequences one draws from it, no one can today deny this event—that is, the unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal” (25, emphasis original). This is a repression of sorts, a symptom that demands immediate attention and long-term treatment that no one can seriously deny any longer: “men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves; in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence, which some would compare to the worst cases of genocide” (26). As Gross points out (2014, 135), there is a structure that links genocide to violence against animals—namely, a sacrificial structure—as well as similarities in “the scale, coordination, the application of technology, the writing bodies, the willing perpetrators, the disavowals.” Derrida (2008, 28–29) speaks of a “war.” Gross (2014, 131) explains that Derrida’s reference to war should not simply be regarded as a polemical metaphor. The reference signals rather the “immense mobilization of resources, social (local, regional, national, global) planning, an intensified use of technologies, destruction of environments, and mass killing” that characterize warfare (131–32). “And just as war has become intensified in modernity—sword to gun, bomb to nuclear bomb—so has the war against animals” (132). The war against pity toward animals has also been waged, he argues, in the academy as much as within religious traditions (136). Critical attention to the complicity and participation in such a war is now an urgent matter (137). I have called Derrida’s response to the question of the animal an awakening to the animal other as a condition for ethics. Why? Peggy Kamuf (2010, 10) argues that “wakefulness, or alertness” are traits Derrida “consistently assigns a positive value.” She points out that this key part of his vocabulary is a testament to the legacy of modern philosophy, at least since the Enlightenment and perhaps especially with Kant and his call for vigilance.21 What she calls Kant’s “wake-up call to critical, non-dogmatic philosophy” has continued to resonate ever since, and she argues “nowhere in a more thought-provoking fashion than in Derrida’s writings of the last half century” (10). Wakefulness is “the very condition or possibility of critical reception and inheritance” (10). But wakefulness to what or whom? To the other, in an ethical relation that is a response and responsibility to this other, which Derrida proposes must also be the animal other. Before pursuing this further, it is necessary to add a preliminary note on the reference to ethics here. When Derrida refers to ethics in relation to animality, he is seemingly referring to two things. The first is the specific moral practices and laws that govern the interactions between humans and animals; the second is to the self-other relationship as an always already ethical relation. Simply put, ethical in this second sense is bound up, not with specific moral For a critique of some of the polemical, even extreme strands of animal studies as they relate more specifically to environmentalism, see Ferry 1995. 21 Kamuf (2010, 10) recalls Kant’s comment that it was reading David Hume that woke him from his “dogmatic slumber.” 20

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prescriptions, but with a state of responsibility to and for the other, to whom something of me is due. When I mention the awakening to the condition for ethics, then, I mean to the conditions under which this encounter takes place in determining this something in regard to whom the other is or can be. It is important to note that Derrida’s notion of an awakening to ethics is partly based on a critique of Heidegger and the authority of wakefulness that Derrida criticizes Heidegger for deeming a human power or property.22 It is, he writes, on the basis of questions of sleep and waking that Heidegger announces his typology of beings—stone, plant, animal, man (Derrida 2008, 149).23 Derrida emphatically does not follow Heidegger in this regard on positing a human straightforward, exclusive, and authoritative consciousness as wakefulness. The other important reference for Derrida’s awakening is its connection to his critique of Levinas and his ethics of the face of the other who is a determinedly human other.24 Derrida (2008, 106) questions Levinas’s ethics and suggests it remains a dormant ethics: “it is a matter of putting the animal outside of the ethical circuit.” And this, he writes, “from a thinker that is so ‘obsessed’ (I am purposely using Levinas’s word), so preoccupied by an obsession with the other and with his infinite alterity” (Derrida 2008, 107). Derrida retorts: If I am responsible for the other, and before the other, and in the place of the other, on behalf of the other, isn’t the animal more other still, more radically other, if I might put it that way, than the other in whom I recognize my brother, than the other in whom I identify my fellow or my neighbor? If I have a duty [devoir]—something owed before any debt, before any right—toward the other, wouldn’t it then also be toward the animal, which is still more other than the other human, my brother or my neighbor? In fact, no. It seems precisely that for Levinas the animot is not an other. (107, emphasis original)25

Derrida is attempting, in Calarco’s (2007, 4) words, to think “a thought of the same/other relation where the same is not simply a human self and where the other is not simply a human other.” In the notion of awakening, Derrida is thus indicting the philosophical tradition he criticizes with a myopic, docile, negligent attitude when it comes to the question of ethics in the face of animals. “So long as there is recognizability and fellow, ethics is dormant. It is sleeping a dogmatic slumber. So long as it remains human, among men, ethics remains dogmatic, narcissistic, not yet thinking. Not even thinking the human that it talks so much about” (Derrida 2009, 108). The unrecognizable is the awakening (108). Sedgwick (2001, 217) explains how:

Derrida is mainly engaging with Heidegger’s (2001) 1929 to 1930 lectures, published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Heidegger in turn draws on Aristotle for his discussion of wakefulness and sleeping. 24 Derrida retells Levinas’s story of the dog named Bobby in a concentration camp, whom he calls “the last Kantian dog in Nazi Germany.” Derrida (2008, 113–17) deals with this passage extensively and cites John Llewelyn’s question to Levinas at the 1986 Cérisy conference as to whether animals have a face. 25 Animot is a term Derrida coins in French to signify (in sound) animaux, animals in plural, rather than the animal in general singular, to mark the absurdity of what such a general singular animal could possibly mean. But it also refers to mot (“word”) and his emphasis on this word animal, the attention paid to what a word means, and what powers words can have for cramming such a vast multiplicity of living beings into this verbal enclosure as an opposition to humans. In Rogues, Derrida (2005b, 60, emphasis original) writes similarly: “pure ethics, if there is any, begins with the respectable dignity of the other as the absolute unlike, recognized as nonrecognizable, indeed as unrecognizable, beyond all knowledge, all cognition and all recognition: far from being the beginning of pure ethics, the neighbor as like or as resembling, as looking like, spells the end or the ruin of such an ethics, if there is any.” 22

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Philosophy, for Derrida, takes place in the world first and foremost as an ethical mode of thought: it concerns the relationship between thinkers (philosophers) and the limits of what they can think. Their duty is to pay attention to these limits. Paying attention to these limits, refusing to think in terms of an already secure future for philosophical thought, is the duty of philosophy itself and of those who practice it.

Having critiqued ideas of response and responsibility as properties thought to be exclusively human, Derrida is both calling for a more radical response and responsibility on the part of human animals in his call for an awakening to the animal other as a condition for ethics, but he is also at the same time questioning the autonomy and authority assumed to be inherent to such powers of wakeful response and responsibility. As he puts it, we must cast “doubt on all responsibility, all ethics, every decision” (Derrida 2008, 126). Such doubt, he says, “on responsibility, on decision, on one’s own being-ethical, seems to me to be—and is perhaps what should forever remain—the unrescindable essence of ethics, decision, and responsibility” (126). His awakening to ethics, then, is a relation that is always in question and always undecidable. Wakefulness can never be assured as a fully present consciousness; an authoritative, open-eyed seeing; or a wholly controlled knowing, immune from dreams, blindness, the unconscious, finitude, and limitations as well as forgetfulness of what or who also sees me. In fact, to be responsible or responsibly wakeful might be to recognize oneself still to be dreaming, to be still asleep. The self-consciousness of the wakeful human, Derrida emphasizes, is a relationship to the other whom I follow, who sees me, and to whom I respond. This provisional wakefulness is what, I argue, characterizes Derrida’s idea of the other as an animal other who goes before me— to whom I say, “after you”—and the other as a witness who sees me and who signifies a justice in abeyance, who founds my accountability as the essential possibility for ethics. As I go on to discuss, this otherness for Derrida is imagined in the nonhuman other of animal and divine. In order to be ethics at all, for Derrida, the relationship to the other must be grounded in two principles. One is what he calls the: immense question of pathos and the pathological, precisely, that is, of suffering, pity, and compassion; and the place that has to be accorded to the interpretation of this compassion, to the sharing of this suffering among the living, to the law, ethics, and politics that must be brought to bear upon this experience of compassion. (Derrida 2008, 26)

Derrida develops this question of pathos from an invocation of Bentham’s question of whether animals can suffer. The form of this question, which is about passivity rather than what laudable traits animals do or do not possess, “changes everything” (27). Compassion ought, as he says, to “awaken us to our responsibilities and our obligations vis-à-vis the living in general” (27, emphasis added). This is not an awakening to Heidegger’s “authority of wakefulness” (Derrida 2011, 185) but rather to the responsibility demanded toward the vulnerability of life, the always deconstructible limits of humans and animals alike, and a shared finitude in the face of mortality (Derrida 2008, 26). Wakefulness is attention as care and curiosity toward animal others rather than a consciousness deemed exclusively human. The second principle is developed in Derrida’s (2009, 241) interpretation of D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake” with the “scene of hospitality.” Here, the sovereignty presented in the poem is on the side of the snake, not the human who is petty with a learned propensity to violence and who thus attempts to kill the snake that shows up at the watering hole. Analyzing this poetic narrative, Derrida (2009, 243, emphasis added) writes that “Lawrence awakens to ethics, to the thought

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‘Thou shalt not kill,’ in a scene of hospitality” in a scene with a potentially murderous, threatening animal. Here lies Derrida’s critique of Levinas and Heidegger, in the recognition of the other who goes before me—the snake that is already there at the watering hole—who demands an “after you” from me, the proper ethical response to the other as any other. This is an animal who shares my world, who evokes humility at the heteronomy of this other and the possibility of hospitality. The question is, Derrida (2009, 244) suggests: “Does an ethics or a moral prescription obligate us only to those who are like us . . . or else does it obligate us with respect to anyone at all, any living being at all, and therefore with respect to the animal?” Derrida’s awakening to ethics is precisely the recognition of the animal as a neighbor, or fellow, not by claiming its sameness to humans but its otherness, and thus is a prime example of the challenge of the other of ethics, who demands my compassion, even in the face of danger or incalculability as to who the other is and what it might do. It is a matter of recognizing the other as first, coming before me, and thus admitting a certain powerlessness and divisibility in the “I” who always stands in relation, seen by the other, seeing the other (239). We are thus talking not about ethical principles themselves in regard to Derrida’s awakening to the animal other as a condition for ethics, but to what Calarco (2008, 108) describes as Derrida’s protoethics. It is not that this is without practice but rather that such a practice emerges out of the principles described in or by particular, concrete contexts. This is essentially “a matter of acting and making decisions in concrete circumstances, using as much knowledge as possible, and in view of a ‘maximum respect’ for animals” (115). One of the most incisive critiques of Derrida’s work on animality is Haraway’s (2007) When Species Meet. She suggests that when Derrida reflects on his cat in The Animal That Therefore I Am, the cat is quickly forgotten in favor of “his textual canon of Western philosophy and literature” (Haraway 2007, 20). He does not become curious about what the cat might be doing, feeling, or thinking, despite the fact that he insists that “this is a ‘real cat,’ not the figure of a cat, or of all cats” (Derrida 2008, 6). Haraway (2007, 21–22) argues that the question of animal suffering is not the decisive question, albeit an important one. How much more promise, she asks, is in the questions, Can animals play? Or work? And even, can I learn to play with this cat? Can I, the philosopher, respond to an invitation or recognize one when it is offered? What if work and play, and not just pity, open up when the possibility of mutual response, without names, is taken seriously as an everyday practice available to philosophy and to science? (22, emphasis original).

As my study, inspired by Derrida, is indeed about a textual canon, it might well be the case that real animals are sidelined in favor of the more textually textured wild animals, living things, four-footed creatures, reptiles, and birds of this ancient archive. Furthermore, at least in their textual incarnations, these creatures are not much given to play or work but rather to appearing in covenants, visions, pits, and battles. Derrida’s focus on notions of human sovereignty and on suffering and pity, then, might be well placed to grapple with the ancient beasts of Genesis, Daniel, Acts, and Revelation. Haraway’s critique is, however, an important one, and I return to it particularly in the conclusion of this book as a reflection on the significance of these biblical texts and their potential legacies.

Animality in the Bible My study concentrates on the following four texts: Gen 9, Acts 10, the book of Daniel, and Rev 17. I am not presenting them as representative of the Bible or as exhaustive of the theme

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Bible and animality. They are not the only or necessarily the most natural texts to choose with this question in mind.26 I chart a particular biblical trajectory by presenting a study that moves from Genesis to the Acts of the Apostles and from the book of Daniel to the book of Revelation. While I am not suggesting lines of connection, continuity, and rupture in any simplified manner with regard to the Christian biblical canon, I tease out the particular themes of killability and sovereignty as they relate to animality that I identify as central to Gen 9, Acts 10, Daniel, and Rev 17. Through close readings of each of these texts, I propose that it is possible to identify their particular details with regard to animality while simultaneously positing recurring themes as they are negotiated in the biblical corpus. I begin, then, with the scenes of Gen 9 and Acts 10, exploring how they grapple with the killability and edibility of animals and how they relate to the idea of the brother or fellow. In Genesis, this is particularly about who is and who is not killable and who is and who is not included in the covenant with God. For Acts 10, the idea of universal fellowship is entangled with which animals are and which animals are not allowed to be killed and eaten. Although the term animal might not be deployed in the original languages of Hebrew and Greek, the category of animality can arguably be seen as a key space where notions of self and other are worked out. From these discussions, I turn to notions of sovereignty in Daniel and Revelation. In these texts, the idea of human versus divine sovereignty is paramount, and for both texts, the political is depicted as animal. In these two chapters, then, I examine the way political and politicized depictions of animals sustain adverse conceptions of animality as well as shore up sympathy for, and solidarity with, animals as a shared state of finitude under the divine sovereign. Perceptions of who or what is killable and who or what is sovereign are key to the biblical terrain I map out. These two themes—killability and sovereignty—are ways of designating proper zones of power and proper zones of otherness; the one who is sovereign can kill (and eat) the one who is other. But what I show in these texts is that zones of sovereignty and otherness are problematized and problematic. None of the biblical texts I analyze uphold a conception of the human as stable and sovereign or of the animal as straightforwardly and simply killable. But the texts do simultaneously play out moments in which boundaries between human and animal, and between divine and animal, become sporadically set and strategically employed. Many biblical stories, as Koosed (2014b, 3) points out, “explore the boundaries of the human in ways that destabilize the very category of the human.” But engaging with texts in the Bible is not merely about the blurring of boundaries. Rather, such an engagement is about exploring particular manifestations of animal, human, and divine in their relationships, imagined boundaries and identities, interdependence, affection and animosity, and affinity and alienation. Calarco (2008, 240) states that Derrida’s work has “only scratched the surface of this project of deconstructing the history of the limitrophe27 discourse of the human-animal distinction.” His hope, then, is that scholarship will continue building on T h ere are two topics that are perhaps conspicuously absent in my discussion: the Genesis creation stories and the issue of sacrifice. Where attention is given to the Bible in relation to animality, it has mostly been given to these issues, whereas so many other aspects of the Bible have been overlooked. For the Genesis creation stories (Gen 1-2), see particularly Linzey and Cohn-Sherbok 1997, Habel and Wurst 2000, and Cunningham 2009. For the topic of sacrifice, see, e.g., Klawans 2009 and Sherwood 2014. 27 T he limitrophe refers to the particular limits drawn between humans and animals that are necessarily endless, in order to keep multiplying the powers of the human—throphe or throphy alluding both to growth, topic, and nourishment. As Moore (2014a, 5) explains, limitrophy is a strategy Derrida himself uses, not to efface the limit between humans and animals but to complicate and fold it, to thicken and divide it, multiplying it further in ways that demonstrate the strategies used against animals and those that reveal the impossibility of many such starkly drawn limits. 26

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Derrida’s thought across different institutions, contexts, texts, and discourses (Calarco 2008, 240). One such geography to be explored further is precisely the Bible, read after Derrida. Biblical texts are texts to “think with, to think about how we think and categorize, divide and decide” (Sherwood 2014, 251). I return, then, to the slow-motion reading I noted earlier, hoping to offer close readings of the biblical texts that take account of their tensions and disruptions, strangeness and symbolism, as well as their more literal and seemingly straightforward meanings. Perhaps in tension with the pace of such a reading, such a project cannot but hope to respond to the urgency and contemporaneity of Derrida’s question of the animal in regard to this ancient archive called Bible. Picking up on what Sherwood says of Derrida’s Bible, this straddling of the ancient and the urgent—the past and the present—involves responding to a further invitation set in motion by Derrida: namely, turning to an edition of the Bible that is not locked into the past as a wholly contextual study seeking out origins, intentions, and ancient meanings. Rather, as I demonstrate in this book, such an interpretive practice would entail picking up Derrida’s Bible as “an edition of uncertain date: in one sense ultra-contemporary, constantly thinking the biblical cum tempus, with time—that is with change, flux, interpretation, revision—and with the time(s)” (Sherwood 2004b, 4). After all, “every reading is not only anachronistic, but consists in bringing out anachrony, non-self-contemporaneity, dislocation in the taking-place of the text” (Derrida 2011, 87). Turning to the four biblical texts that inhabit different spaces of the biblical archive, then, I address their characters with curiosity as to how they might be read today, always already haunted by how they may or may not look back and let the ancient “speak” to the (post)modern as much as the (post)modern to the ancient.

Bibliography Adams, Carol J. 1990. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum. ——. 2004. The Pornography of Meat. London: Continuum. ——. 2018. Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals. London: Bloomsbury. [originally 1994] Adams, Carol J., and Josephine Donovan, eds. 1995. Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——. 2007. Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader. New York: University of Columbia Press. Adams, Carol J., and Marie M. Fortune. 1995. Violence against Women and Children: A Christian Theological Sourcebook. London: Continuum. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. (1944) 1997. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Vc. London: Verso Books. Assmann, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies. translated by Rodney Livingstone. cmP. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Badmington, Neil, ed. 2007. Derridanimals. OLR 29: v–vii. Balfour, Ian, ed. 2007. Late Derrida. Durham: Duke University Press. Bataille, Georges. 1989. Theory of Religion. New York: Zone Books. Beauchamp, Tom L., and R. G. Frey, eds. 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics. OH. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berger, Anne Emmanuelle, and Marta Segarra, eds. 2011. Demenageries: Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida. criticalst 35. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bezan, Sarah, and James Tink, eds. 2017. Seeing Animals after Derrida. etP. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

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Calarco, Matthew. 2007. “Thinking through animals: reflections on the ethical and Political stakes of the question of the animal in Derrida.” OLR 29:1–15. ——. 2008. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press. Calarco, Matthew, and Peter Atterton, eds. 2004a. Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought. London: Continuum. ——. 2004b. “Editors’ introduction: The animal question in continental Philosophy.” Pages xv–xx in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought. edited by Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton. London: Continuum. Cantrell, Deborah O’Daniel. 2011. The Horsemen of Israel: Horses and Chariotry in Monarchic Israel (Ninth–Eighth Centuries B.C.E.). Hacl 1. Winona lake, in: Eisenbrauns. Cavalieri, Paola, ed. 2009. The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue. New York: Columbia University Press. Cavell, Stanley, Cora Diamond, John mcdowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe. 2010. Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Chrulew, Matthew. 2006. “feline Divinanimality: Derrida and the Discourse of species in Genesis.” BCT 2.2:18.1–18.23. https://doi​.org/ 10.2104/bc060018. Cixous, Helene. 1998. “love of the Wolf.” Pages 84–99 in Stigmata: Escaping Texts. translated by Keith Cohen. rc. London: Routledge.. Clark, Stephen R. L. 1999. The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics. London: Routledge. ——. 2013. “‘Ask now the Beasts and They shall teach Thee.’” Pages 15–34 in Animals as Religious Subjects: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. edited by Celia Deane-Drummond, Rebecca ArtinianKaiser, and David l. Clough. T&Tct. London: T&T Clark. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury. ——. 2012. On Animals. Vol. 1 of Systematic Theology. T&Tct. London: T&T Clark. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. 2012. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects. Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books. Cunningham, David s. 2009. “The Way of all flesh: rethinking the Imago Dei.” Pages 100–117 in Creaturely Theology: On God, Humans and Other Animals. edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and David l. Clough. London: SCM. Deane-Drummond, Celia, and David l. Clough. 2009. Creaturely Theology: God, Humans and Other Animals. London: SCM. Deane-Drummond, Celia, Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser, and David l. Clough, eds. 2013. Animals as Religious Subjects: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. T&Tct. London: T&T Clark. DeGrazia, David. 1996. Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Demello, Margo. 2012. Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1967a) 1998. Of Grammatology. translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——. (1967b) 2001. Writing and Difference. translated by Alan Bass. rc. New York: Routledge. ——. 1969. “The ends of man.” PhilPR 30.1:31–57. ——. (1972) 1983. Dissemination. translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. (1974) 1986. Glas. translated by John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ——. (1978) 1987. The Truth in Painting. translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Ian Mcleod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. (1987) 1991. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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——. 1989. “Geschlecht ii: Heidegger’s Hand.” Pages 161–96 in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida. edited by John Sallis. translated by John P. Leavey Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. (1993) 2006. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. translated by Peggy Kamuf. rc. New York: Routledge. ——. 1995b. With Jean-luc Nancy. “ ‘eating Well,’ or the calculation of the subject.” Pages 255–87 in Points...: Interviews, 1974–1994. edited by Elisabeth Weber. translated by Peter Connor and Avital Ronell. Meridian. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ——. 1995c. The Gift of Death. translated by David Willis. rP. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2000. Of Hospitality. With anne Dufourmantelle. translated by Rachel BOWLBY. cmP. Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press. ——. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. translated by Mark Dooley. ta. New York: Routledge. ——. 2004. “Violence against animals.” Pages 62–75 in For What Tomorrow . . . : A Dialogue. With Elisabeth Roudinesco. translated by Jeff fort. cmP. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ——. 2005. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Meridian. Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press. ——. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. translated by David Wills. PcPhil. New York: Fordham University Press. ——. 2009–2011. The Beast and the Sovereign. edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. translated by Geoffrey Bennington. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Descartes, René. 1989. Discourse on Method and the Meditations. translated by John Veitch. GBP. Amherst, NY: PROMETHEUS. Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. 2011. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Oxford: Oxford university Press. Fagan, Madeleine, Ludovic Glorieux, Indira Hašimbegović, and Marie Suetsugu, eds. 2007. Derrida: Negotiating the Legacy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fellenz, Marc R. 2007. The Moral Menagerie: Philosophy and Animal Rights. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Ferry, Luc. 1995. The New Ecological Order. translated by Carol Volk. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Forti, Tova l. 2008. Animal Imagery in the Book of Proverbs. Vtsup 118. Leiden: Brill. Garner, Robert, ed. 1997. Animal Rights: The Changing Debate. New York: New York University Press. Gilhus, Ingvild Sælid. 2006. Animals, Gods and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Ideas. London: Routledge. Grant, Robert M. 1999. Early Christians and Animals. London: Routledge. ——. 2014. The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications. New York: Columbia University Press. Habel, Norman C., and Shirley Wurst, eds. 2000. The Earth Story in Genesis. The earth Bible 2. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic. Haraway, Donna J. 1990. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge. ——. 1991. “A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century.” Pages 149–81 in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. ——. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm. ——. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Heidegger, Martin. 1993. “letter on Humanism.” Pages 217–65 in Basic Writings. second revised and expanded edition. edited by David f. Krell. translated by Frank A. Capuzzi. rc. San Francisco: Harpersan-francisco. ——. 2001. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. translated by William Mcneill and Nicholas Walker. sct. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hird, Myra J. 2009. The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution after Science Studies. NEW york: Palgrave Macmillan. Hobgood-Oster, Laura. 2008. Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. ——. 2014. “and say the animal really responded: speaking animals in the History of christianity.” Pages 210–22 in Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology. edited by Stephen D. Moore. New York: Fordham University Press. Kamuf, Peggy. 2010. To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida. ft. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kemmerer, Lisa. 2011. Animals and World Religions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klawans, Jonathan. 2009. “Sacrifice in ancient israel: Pure Bodies, Domesticated animals, and the Divine shepherd.” Pages 65–80 in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics. edited by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Koosed, Jennifer l., ed. 2014a. The Bible and Posthumanism. semeiast 74. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. ——. 2014b. “Humanity at its limits.” Pages 3–12 in The Bible and Posthumanism. edited by Jennifer l. Koosed. semeiast 74. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Korsgaard, Christine M. 2009. “facing the animal you see in the mirror.” HRP 16:2–7. Krell, David F. 2013. Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida’s Final Seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign.” sct. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lawlor, Leonard. 2007. This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. translated by alphonso lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ——. 2004. “The name of the Dog, or natural rights.” Pages 47–50 in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought. edited by Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton. London: Continuum. Linzey, Andrew. 1976. Animal Rights: A Christian Assessment of Man’s Treatment of Animals. London: SCM. ——. 1987. Christianity and the Rights of Animals. London: SPCK. ——. 1994. Animal Theology. London: SCM. Linzey, Andrew, and Dan Cohn-Sherbok. 1997. After Noah: Animals and the Liberation of Theology. London: Mowbrays. Linzey, Andrew, and Dorothy Yamamoto, eds. 1998. Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics. London: SCM. Mansfield, Nick. 2000. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. New York: New York University Press. Midgley, Mary. 2004. The Myths We Live By. New York: Routledge. ——. ed. 2014a. Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology. New York: Fordham University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ——. 2008. “Thinking ecology: The mesh, the strange stranger and the Beautiful soul.” Pages 265–93 in vol. 6 of Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development. edited by Robin Mackay. Falmouth: Urbanomic. ——. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Naas, Michael B. 2003. Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction. cmP. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ——. 2008. Derrida from Now On. PcPhil. New York: Fordham University Press. Norwood, F. Bailey, and Jason l. Lusk. 2011. Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare. Oxford: Oxford university Press. Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. ePs. London: Routledge. Regan, Tom. 2004. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. Roof, Judith. 2003. “from Protista to Dna (and Back again): Freud’s Psychoanalysis of the singlecelled Organism.” Pages 101–20 in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. edited by Cary Wolfe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Royle, Nicholas, ed. 2009. In Memory of Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rudy, Kathy. 2011. Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schochet, Elijah Judah. 1984. Animal Life in Jewish Tradition: Attitudes and Relationships. New York: KTAV. Sedgwick, Peter. 2001. Descartes to Derrida: An Introduction to European Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Sheehan, James J., and Morton Sosna, eds. 1991. The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sherwood, Yvonne. 2004. “Introduction: Derrida’s Bible.” Pages 1–20 in Derrida’s Bible: Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida. edited by Yvonne Sherwood. rcc. New York: Macmillan. ——. 2014. “Cutting up life: sacrifice as a Device for clarifying—and tormenting—fundamental Distinctions between Human, animal, and Divine.” Pages 247–300 in The Bible and Posthumanism. edited by Jennifer l. Koosed. Semeiast 74. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Sherwood, Yvonne, and Kevin Hart, eds. 2004. Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments. London: Routledge. Singer, Peter. 2004. Preface. Pages xi–xiv in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought. edited by Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton. London: Continuum. Still, Judith. 2015. Derrida and Other Animals: The Boundaries of the Human. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stone, Ken. 2014. “The Dogs of exodus and the question of the animal.” Pages 36–50 in Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology. edited by Stephen D. Moore. New York: Fordham University Press. Turner, Lynn, ed. 2013. The Animal Question in Deconstruction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tyler, Tom. 2012. Ciferae: A Bestiary in Five Fingers. Post 19. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tyson, Joseph B. 1992. Images of Judaism in Luke-Acts. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Waldau, Paul. 2011. Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. 2013. Animal Studies: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waldau, Paul, and Kimberly Patton, eds. 2009. A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics. New York: Columbia University Press. Way, Kenneth c. 2011. Donkeys in the Biblical World: Ceremony and Symbol. Hacl 2. Winona lake, in: Eisenbrauns. Weiner, Allison, and Simon Morgan Wortham, eds. 2007. Encountering Derrida: Legacies and Futures of Deconstruction. cscP. London: Continuum. White, lynn, Jr. 1967. “The Historical roots of Our ecological crisis.” Sci 155:1203–7. Wolfe, Cary, ed. 2003. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——. 2009. “Humanist and Posthumanist antispeciesism.” Pages 45–58 in The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue. edited by Paola Cavalieri. New York: Columbia University Press.

20

From Affect to Exegesis Jennifer L. Koosed and Stephen D. Moore

It all began with a feeling, a term once thought to be the antithesis of the critical and the scholarly, not least the biblical-scholarly, a term affect theory has since imprinted with a complexity bordering on ineffability. How does one trace the precise contours of a feeling?1 The words before you germinated in a sterile space, a room in a convention center in San Francisco at the 2011 American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting. The steering committee of the Reading, Theory, and the Bible section was attempting to concoct a topic for the next year’s themed session. Ken Stone, feeling that its near absence thus far in biblical studies was a cause for lament, suggested affect theory.2 And through a typical process of contagion, two words became five presentations in Chicago the following year. There Stephen Moore contracted the bug; he heard the papers and carried his excitement with him into an editorial board meeting of Biblical Interpretation. A thematic issue of the journal was suggested and approved. It continued to gestate as Moore and Jennifer Koosed ran into each other and talked at receptions, in hotel lobbies, and later over email. And in the typical way, more conventionally accounted for in terms of a linearly construed history, duly witnessed and documented, the five presentations grew into the six articles now assembled here. The “affective turn” that has taken place in many fields since the mid-1990s3 is, in part, a corrective to the “linguistic turn” that was preeminently associated with poststructuralist theories of language and textuality, although it is not a corrective that is altogether oppositional. Rather, the affective turn explores and enacts other strategies for resisting dualism, especially the mind/ body split. As Patricia T. Clough explains, How indeed? As Seigworth and Gregg note, “[C]ritical discourses of the emotions (and histories of the emotions) . . . have progressively left behind the interiorized self or subjectivity (. . . how to think or feel in an era ‘post’-cogito?) to unfold regimes of expressivity that are tied much more to . . . diffusions of feeling/ passions—often including atmospheres of sociality, crowd behaviors, contagions of feeling, matters of belonging . . . and a range of postcolonial, hybridized, and migrant voices that forcefully question the privilege and stability of individualized actants possessing self-derived agency and solely private emotions within a scene or environment. How might emotion—taking on then decidedly effectual qualities—be reconsidered without requiring place-positions for subject and object as the first condition . . .?” (Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in Gregg and Seigworth [eds.], The Affect Theory Reader [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010], p. 8). 2 Erin Runions was the first, and at that time only, biblical scholar to have engaged affect theory, at least in publication. See her “From Disgust to Humor: Rahab’s Queer Affect,” Postscripts 4.1 (2008), pp. 41–69, reprinted in Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone (eds.), Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship (Semeia Studies, 67; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), pp. 45–74. 3 See, for example, Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (eds.), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2007); Simon Thompson and Paul Hoggett (eds.), Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies (New York: Continuum, 2012). 1

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[T]he turn to affect and emotion extended discussions about culture, subjectivity, identity, and bodies begun in critical theory and cultural criticism under the influence of poststructuralism and deconstruction. Affect and emotion, after all, point just as well as poststructuralism and deconstruction do to the subject’s discontinuity with itself, a discontinuity of the subject’s conscious experience with the non-intentionality of emotion and affect. However, the turn to affect did propose a substantive shift in that it returned critical theory and cultural criticism to bodily matter, which had been treated in terms of various constructionisms under the influence of poststructuralism and deconstruction. The turn to affect points instead to a dynamism immanent to bodily matter and matter generally . . .4

As a theory that probes the body and all that resists stereotypical or even subtle representation, and grapples with “muddy, unmediated relatedness” and “what so often passes beneath mention,”5 affect intersects with feminist and queer studies, psychology and psychobiology, philosophy and sociology, cultural theory and literary theory. In the humanities, affect theory has followed two main trajectories. The first is grounded in the psychobiological research of Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991), who, indeed, coined the term “affect theory” (and decades before it would acquire added layers of meaning from being contrasted with, and filtered through, poststructuralist theory). Beginning in 1962 with the first volume of Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Tomkins constructed a theory of affect that was biologically based.6 He delineated nine affects (for example, enjoyment-joy, distress-anguish, shamehumiliation), each generating its own drives and responses, each influencing consciousness and cognition in non-teleological and dynamic ways. Tomkins’s pre-poststructuralist work on affect assumes post-poststructuralist significance in the contemporary theoretical scene through its championing and channeling by queer theory doyenne Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. More precisely, Sedgwick’s “rediscovery” of Tomkins, undertaken in collaboration with Adam Frank, has been the principal catalyst for contemporary forms of affect theory that privilege psychobiology in the Tomkins mold.7 The second main trajectory of affect theory is grounded in the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995). Unlike Tomkins’s psychobiology, Deleuze’s philosophy developed in contiguity with structuralism and poststructuralism—but deliberately to the side of them: Unlike the classic structuralist and poststructuralist systems, Deleuze was principally interested Patricia T. Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies,” in Seigworth and Gregg (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader, pp. 206–207. As such, affect theory dovetails with, or participates in, the larger post-poststructuralist phenomenon known as “the new materialism” (see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost [eds.], New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010]; Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies [Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012]). As Ann Pellegrini and Jasbir Puar put it, “Affect may anchor claims about the materiality of bodies and physiological processes that are not contained or representable by language or cognition alone” (“Affect,” Social Text 27.3 [2009], pp. 35–38 [37]). 5 Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” p. 4. 6 Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Volume 1: The Positive Affects (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1962). 7 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (eds.), Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1995). Sedgwick and Frank’s introduction to the anthology, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins” (pp. 1–28), has been especially influential. Enormously influential, too, for the Tomkins trajectory of contemporary affect theory has been Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). For a work in early Christian studies that frequently draws on Tomkins’s affect theory, see Virginia Burrus, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 4

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in sensation and only secondarily in language. Like Spinoza, Bergson, or Whitehead, Deleuze was a philosopher of becoming, and the concept of affect played an integral role in his thought. “Affects are becomings,” he and Félix Guattari insisted.8 More precisely, Deleuzian affect is the ineffable, pre-processed sensory encounter with the world prior to ordered audible, visual, or tactile perception, prior to conscious cognition, prior to linguistic representation. As Felicity J. Colman notes, affect at its most expansive is a function of the Deleuzian project of attempting to comprehend “all of the incredible, wondrous, tragic, painful, and destructive configurations of things and bodies as temporally mediated, continuous events.”9 Affect is what impels “systems of knowledge, history, memory, and circuits of power.”10 And just as the Tomkins version of affect theory has been mediated and further elaborated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, so has the Deleuze version of affect theory been mediated and further elaborated by Brian Massumi.11 The Deleuzian trajectory of affect theory seems to be the most influential at present,12 but it should be noted that affect theory is not a two-party system. Certain important affect theorists, such as Sara Ahmed or Ann Cvetkovich, fit neatly into neither the Tompkins nor the Deleuze camp.13 What might any of this have to do with biblical exegesis or even with literary interpretation more generally? The question gestures to a widening rift between critical theory and biblical criticism—even, paradoxically, theory-driven biblical criticism. The field of biblical studies as a whole is one of the last bastions of close reading in the humanities. Close reading was the bread and butter of leading-edge literary studies from the 1930s through the 1980s, which is to say from the hegemony of the New Criticism through the heyday of deconstructive criticism, readerresponse criticism, and New Historicism. Reviewing the current literary studies scene, however, Jeffrey T. Nealon asks rhetorically, “[W]hen was the last time you heard a junior job candidate do an actual close reading of a poem?” and adds, “[O]ne could at this point begin multiplying antihermeneutic references”; his list begins, as it happens, with “critical theories invested in Deleuze and Guattari.”14 Nealon’s more measured appraisal of the situation runs as follows: The question of meaning is, and I think will remain, the bread and butter of classroom practice in literature departments; in particular, the undergraduate theory class will continue to function as an invaluable introduction to interpretive protocols for some time to come. On the other side of the podium, however, I think it’s a different story: while Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [French orig. 1980]), p. 256. 9 Felicity J. Colman, “Affect,” in Adrian Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2nd edn, 2010), p. 11. 10 Coleman, “Affect,” p. 12. For an attempt to rethink biblical hermeneutics in Deleuzian-Guattarian terms, see B. H. McLean, Biblical Interpretation and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 268–301. 11 Massumi’s initial key intervention was an article, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995), pp. 83–109, which later mushroomed into a book, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Postcontemporary Interventions; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 12 Deleuzian affect implicitly permeates Seigworth and Gregg’s introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, for instance, and explicitly permeates Clough’s The Affective Turn (see p. 1), while affect theorists as prominent as Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart work with concepts of affect that are essentially Deleuzian. See, for example, Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), and Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2007). 13 See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) and The Promise of Happiness (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2010), and Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Series Q; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) and Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2012). 14 Jeffrey T. Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 132. 8

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faculty research surrounding the mechanics and production of meaning (and/or its flip side, undecidability) experienced a boom during the postmodern big theory years, it’s almost impossible only a few years later to imagine a publishing future that consists of new and improved interpretations of Pynchon, Renaissance tragedies, or Melville. Contra much of the reactionary hope invested in the passing of big theory (“Finally, now we can go back to reading and appreciating literature, without all this jargon!”), I’d argue that the decisive conceptual difference separating the present from the era of big theory is not so much a loss of status for theoretical discourses (just look at any university press catalog and you’ll be quickly disabused of that notion), but the waning of literary interpretation itself as a viable research (which is to say, publishing) agenda.15

Contemporary affect theory exemplifies the situation that Nealon is describing.16 As such, what the contributors to this thematic issue of Biblical Interpretation are faced with—at least those interested in close reading/exegesis, and most are—is a challenge of creative adaptation. What might affect theory look like transmuted into affect criticism? The six articles that follow all present different aspects and adaptations of affect theory, some inspired by Tomkins or Sedgwick, some by Deleuze, others by Ahmed or Cvetkovich. The articles layer upon each other like messy folds of fabric, touching at different points. Jennifer Knust explores the curse of Canaan in Gen. 9:18–29, a perennial magnet for sexualized racism. She employs Sedgwick’s work on paranoia and paranoid reading to reframe this text of terror, its reception, and her own affective engagement with it. Jennifer L. Koosed refocuses emotion through Sara Ahmed’s critical lenses in the story of Moses’ descent from Mt. Sinai, homed and then veiled (Exod. 34:29–35). Here, affect also touches theories of the posthuman as Moses’ body crosses the boundaries between the human, the animal, and the divine. Amy C. Cottrill looks at the violence of Ehud and Jael in Judges 3–5, noting the visceral responses of contemporary readers to it. She draws on critical analyses of disgust and fear, including those of Ahmed, to reinterpret these tales of brutally violated bodies. Alexis G. Waller analyses the trauma-charged Gospel of Mark in tandem with the gender-queering Nag Hammadi poem, The Thunder: Perfect Mind. Waller’s article, more than any other in this set, demonstrates the intersections between affect and queer theory, drawing especially on Ann Cvetkovich. Maia Kotrosits and Stephen D. Moore both engage with Revelation, a book of intense and excessive sensations. Kotrosits focuses on Revelation’s lamb as a site of complex emotions, identifications, and negotiations with vulnerability, violence, and domination. Taking a leaf from Sedgwick’s book (the same leaf Knust earlier borrows), Kotrosits defamiliarizes recent ideological readings of Revelation, reframing them as instances of Sedgwickian “paranoia.” Moore provides an orienting introduction to affect theory, bookending the one offered in the present piece, before enlisting Ahmed to grapple with the themes of loathing and disgust in Revelation as they intersect with sex, gender, and empire and stick to the bodies of Jezebel and Babylon. Waller, Kotrosits, and Moore, like Cottrill, all attempt to articulate the ethical or political stakes in the abject bodies of their primary texts. Bodies, whether racially overwritten or resistant to definitive inscription, are also the concern of Knust and Koosed. Theories of affect are theories of embodiment. As will by now be apparent, however, affect theory does not yield a “method” in the standard biblical-scholarly sense of the term. There is not even a “single, generalizable theory of affect,” Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, p. 133. Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling, which includes interpretive engagements with the literature of Henry James and Charles Dickens (pp. 35–91), is one of the very few exceptions that prove the rule.

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as Seigworth and Gregg observe.17 Theories of affect are “as diverse and singularly delineated as their own highly particular encounters with bodies, affects, worlds.”18 And with texts, we would venture to add. Understandably unaware of how theory has tended to function in biblical studies,19 Seigworth and Gregg ask: “Isn’t theory—any theory with or without a capital T—supposed to work this way? Operating with a certain modest methodological vitality rather than impressing itself upon a wiggling world like a snap-on grid of shape-setting interpretability?”20 Into the wiggling worlds of the biblical texts—narrative worlds, socio-historical worlds, receptionhistorical worlds—these six affect-oriented articles descend. Whether they are equipped with snap-on grids of shape-setting interpretability or more delicate writ(h)ing instruments capable of matching the shape-shifting movements of these wiggling worlds and words, we leave the reader to judge.

Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” p. 3. Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” p. 4. Cf. Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), p. 31: “Theory, insofar as it has been assimilated at all in biblical studies, has been assimilated mainly as system and method. Theory has fueled the biblical-scholarly susceptibility to methodolatry and methodone addiction. Method is our madness.” 20 Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” p. 4. 17 18 19

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Citizens of Fallen Cities Ruins, Diaspora, and the Material Unconscious Maia Kotrosits

Psychoanalytic theories since Freud paint the psyche not only as strewn with objects, but as a site of ruin: an accumulation of remains. But these objects and remains are not passive or dead; they are revived again and again as they become the rich, conflicted materials out of which one builds one’s own self and vision of the world—a reality. While Freud more concertedly associated the psyche with ruins, this is the subtext for so many other descriptions of psychic processes: Klein’s infant must reckon with the destroyed pieces of her mother, the relics of her own rage, and piece them together anew; Lacan’s subject is imagined over and against the disassembled body, a body that is always only a glance away, on the other side of the looking glass, as it were. Attachment emerges alongside aggression. Loss recapitulates itself as reconstruction. What happens, however, when ruins are treated as more than useful metaphors for ordinary individual and internal psychic processes? What happens when these psychic processes are placed alongside literal, physical ruins? What new things might we see? In what follows, I describe Rome’s ruins not only as the results of sociopolitical processes but as signs and symptoms— externalizations—of less immediately visible processes of destruction. Rome built, of course, and built copiously: cities, roads, aqueducts, temples, libraries, baths.1 But what sleeps in the underground of that construction?

Roman Ruination There are few storylines more persistent than those of rise and fall: the promise of splendor, perhaps even a stretch of vitality, good fortune, success—and then, of course, things fall apart. Leaders plummet from grace, celebrities descend into addiction, economies crash, nations perish. But stories of rise and fall are heavy-handed narratives, ones whose work is less to describe any kind of historical reality than to moralize and bemoan.2 Too much fortune, too much success (or, perhaps, too much enjoyment of success), is a vice of the doomed: a parable of excess. The For a treatment of the extensive building projects that took place under the rule of Hadrian, for instance, see Mary Boatwright, Hadrian and the Cities of the Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 2 Mary R. Bachvarova, “The Destroyed City in Ancient ‘World History’’ from Agade to Troy,” “in The Fall of Cities in the Ancient Mediterranean: Commemoration in Literature, Folk-Song, and Liturgy, ed. Bachvarova, Dorota Dutsch, and Ann Suter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 38. 1

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fall of Rome is a favorite trope, one that appears with regularity in contemporary literature or popular news outlets, always with some theory about precisely why it fell. The primary error tends to look exactly like whatever the United States is also losing its grip on. Such theories implicitly suggest that if the Romans had just done things right, they would have achieved almost eternal rule, and so we might too. Americans seek but also fear the demise of American power. People in the ancient world(s) of the Near East and the Mediterranean also understood history as a series of cycles of swells and downfalls. That’s surely how we’ve inherited it. They saw humans subject to the capriciousness of the gods or the storminess of Fate, figures undone by their own corruption or bad judgment.3 Stories about the rise and fall of cities were not only a frequent literary convention of ancient life but, as Ann Suter observes, a convention that helped shape collectives through shared memory. This was mainly a dramatized and invented shared history, though, since archaeological evidence often doesn’t corroborate those laments or narratives of sudden, total, or irreversible collapse.4 Stories of rise and fall were also pedagogical, warning against improper rule or disloyalty to a god. Of course they were also reflections on impermanence, attempting to give meaning and sense to the fragility of life. There is a dimension of these tales of ruin, both ancient and contemporary, that is simply dramatized and universal existential grief. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity”—like a puff of air we, along with our achievements, disappear into the ether. And yet the standardization and the often universalized melancholy of the narrative camouflage and express something else: a real sense, an actual intuition, that something is falling, or has fallen, apart. The people telling these tales are experiencing breakdown. Ruination does attend the city, the temple, the kingdom, the nation, it turns out, but not as its inevitable future as much as its constitutive feature, and from the very start. Sociopolitical entities indeed build themselves through ruination, through processes of decay and degeneration,5 processes that are then naturalized or hidden from view. This is the kind of ruination that preoccupies me: not a dramatic decline or falling away from glory (except as tale), but a distinct and constant experience of sociopolitical life. Ruination is a means through which political ascendency and power are built. Sovereignty is fashioned in and from ruins. While narratives of rise and fall are common in ancient literature broadly, they take on special appeal in the Roman period. Stories of bygone peoples and places, of imperial resurrections of cities, of collectives emerging from the rubble signal something of a preoccupation with ruin, one modern people seem to share. As I’ll suggest here, they demonstrate the ways ruins are a kind of material social agent, the ways in which they are vital and active participants in social life. The Roman empire was quite explicit about connecting its own dominance with the destruction of other entities. But the fall of cities in narrative representations of Rome’s founding, especially in the early Roman period, betrayed some finer reflections, and some more delicate titrations. Just as Rome was beginning to prevail in the Mediterranean, and particularly as it was conquering Greece, reflections on the fall of Troy were also finding their way into Roman literature. The fabled Troy, the fall of which enabled Greek dominance, gets retold in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Seneca’s Troades, for example. In such retellings, there is an implicit gloating over the Greeks, implying that the Greeks, too, will someday be subject to the same fate to which

Ibid., 37. Ibid. The Exodus and the conquest of Canaan are one prominent biblical example. 5 Ann Laura Stoler, “‘The Rot Remains’’: From Ruins to Ruination,” in Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed. Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 1–38. 3 4

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they subjected the Trojans.6 But there is at the same time a sympathetic identification with Troy. It is not simply a claim of lineage between Rome and Troy, but a “displacement” and projection of Rome’s worries of its own fall onto its prototypes.7 Troy is Rome’s predecessor and model, as well as that which needs to be destroyed in order for Rome to become itself.8 Troy is a kind of eternal city: it does not fully fall because its progeny will found a city greater than those before or after.9 Its fall is even part of its immortality, part of what makes it so deeply memorable.10 But it is also a signal instance for contemplating the costs and complexities of war. The Aeneid ends with ambivalence regarding victory. Not only does the Trojan prince Aeneas hesitate to kill Turnus, doing so in a fit of rage rather than calculated or heroic justice, but Aeneas is the only member of his royal family to live, suggesting that the costs of war are both moral and distinctly personal.11 Seneca’s Troades, too, involves some painful queries about the price of military triumph. Seneca describes the way two Trojan children are killed in front of a Greek audience that is simultaneously moved by the beauty and sadness of the deaths and still committed to the killing. It is presumably meant to resonate with Roman audiences who also expressed a mix of longing admiration of and hardly mitigated aggression toward their captured rivals.12 The impact of the scene is, in Jo-Ann Shelton’s words, “to prompt the Roman audience to consider the detriment to Roman morality of the perverse demands that prisoners of war face torment and death with a courageous defiance”—even as that was what occasioned the Romans to fight them in the first place.13 To fall, to die beautifully, to be incorporated into Rome all involved grief and wounding, but also promised different forms of immortality. To survive, to overthrow, to dominate, though, likewise meant grief—an unvoiced acknowledgment that one’s own demise was only a matter of time, and thus a sympathetic attachment (one both too little and too late) to the ones who perish in order for Rome to live. We can echo and assume the ancient literature’s naturalization of the “life cycle” of empires as simply the obvious course of history, or we can ask more difficult and historically specific questions. Individuals are, after all, threaded into an ecology in which the life and sustenance of some are inextricably tied to the deprivation and deaths of others. Precarity and vulnerability, while universal dimensions of life, are deeply political. It is an ecology in which forms of violence and protection, sustenance and neglect, are strategic uses of power. Your safety might be my intensified vulnerability, my livelihood might mean your peril, and that relationship is neither incidental nor unmediated.

Jo-Ann Shelton, “The Fall of Troy in Seneca’s Troades,” in Bachvarova, Dutsch, and Suter, Fall of Cities in the Ancient Mediterranean, 203. Alison Keith, “City Lament in Augustan Epic: Antitypes of Rome from Troy to Alba Longa,” “in Bachvarova, Dutsch, and Suter, Fall of Cities in the Ancient Mediterranean, 179–80. 8 Ibid., 180. 9 See ibid. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15.440–45. 10 Shelton, “Fall of Troy in Senecas Troades,” 189. 11 Keith, “City Lament in Augustan Epic.” Virgil, Aeneid 12.887–952. 12 See for instance Hal Taussig, “Melancholy, Colonialism, and Complicity: Complicating Counter-Imperial Readings of Aphrodisias’ Sebasteion,” in Aliou Cissé Niang and Carolyn Osiek, eds., Text, Image, and Christians in the Graeco-Roman World: A Festschrift in Honor of David Lee Balch (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012); Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Maia Kotrosits, “Seeing Is Feeling: Revelation’s Enthroned Lamb and Ancient Visual Affects,” Biblical Interpretation 22, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 473–502. 13 Shelton, “Fall of Troy in Seneca’s Troades,”” 209. 6

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Attempts to characterize the Roman Mediterranean, in both the field of classics and in early Christian studies, have circled around whether the Roman empire’s relative longevity and success were a mark of its stability and robust structural machinery, or whether it was always on some level precarious—not just unwieldy, but seething with fear, frustration, and anxiety. Were things impressively sound or were they falling apart? Thinking about ruination and the inherent destructiveness of sociopolitical life, however, leads to the answer that they are in some sense both. Whatever structural stability, whatever durability any sociopolitical entity achieves is not possible without divestments large and small. Strong structure implies profound breakdown. Perhaps more importantly, the social body feels that. But the social body also feels that in complicated, oblique, and hardly predictable ways. To put it more bluntly, if there is simply no kind of sociopolitical belonging that doesn’t involve, even demand, destruction, how does this ecology and the destruction out of which political entities are built wear on their inhabitants themselves? How does the knowledge that protectedness goes hand in hand with violence express itself symptomatically or experientially? What are people doing with that knowledge? How can we better account for the social productivity of destruction? Where and in which ways is the ruin wrought by nation- or empirebuilding unnervingly prolific?

Babylon’s Fall Sovereignty and civic or social belonging—particularly diasporic belonging—materialized in and through ruins in antiquity. The Revelation to John offers a condensed and dramatic illustration of the ways in which aspirations of sovereignty, felt senses of disintegration, and the paradoxes of belonging often coalesce. In a pinnacle scene in Revelation, the Whore of Babylon, the archvillain in the book and a representation for Rome, is dramatically vanquished. Strangely, it is also the first time the Whore of Babylon appears, at least named as such. In fact, Babylon’s introduction in chapter 16 begins not with her clownish majesty, but first with her judgment: “God remembered great Babylon and gave her the wine-cup of the fury of his wrath” (16:19), and a few verses later, “Come, I will show you the judgment of the Great Whore who is seated on many waters” (17:1). Babylon is always already fallen. To invoke Babylon is to invoke ruin and destruction. Babylon is of course the entity that destroyed Solomon’s temple, which is one of the more obvious reasons Revelation, written in the decades after Rome destroys the second Jerusalem temple, evokes it here to speak about Rome. Babylon, by the first century, is also an empire that has seen its day. So calling up “Babylon” as a figure both immortalizes it as the epitome of empire and represents the current imperial menace and its allure as on their way out. Revelation is a narrative of rise and fall: it sees the destruction of Rome (and the world) as the pretext for the descent from heaven of a new, perfected Jerusalem that will be ruled by God and house God’s faithful. While it is typically and nearly exclusively understood as a Christian text with Christian ideological or social interests, several scholars have highlighted the ethnic and diasporic investments of Revelation.14 The text doesn’t ever refer to Christians, and the term Christian isn’t in circulation in the late first century, the moment when Revelation is likely See especially John W. Marshall, Parables of War: Reading John’s Jewish Apocalypse (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier, 2001), and Jacqueline Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement (New York: Palgrave, 2016).

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written. So there’s no reason not to take the predominance of Israel or Judea as ethnos or people as a sign of the text’s main point of reference. Indeed this is a story of a blood-ritual cleansing of the impurities brought on by foreign rulers and cooperation with them. A story in which a population figured as a multiplication of the twelve tribes of Israel is liberated and given a new kingdom to replace the recently crushed one, a kingdom ruled exclusively by Israel’s god, could hardly be seen another way. Revelation seems to be a pretty straightforward tale of comeuppance. It imagines Judean dominance in place of Roman dominance, Yahweh’s destructiveness in place of Rome’s: a subjected population’s longing for self-determination and revenge. Scholarship has for decades read this book as a response to the extremity of Roman violence, specifically the bloody and spectacular events enacted in amphitheaters across the empire, and the Roman-Judean war of the 60s CE that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple.15 It is, however, far from clear what Revelation’s author would have actually seen, writing from Asia Minor (presentday Turkey) decades after the war and in a region in which amphitheaters, at least at that time, were few and far between.16 As I’ll discuss in more detail in chapter 4, concrete knowledge of or interaction with Roman officials in the provinces cannot be taken for granted. Locals in these areas sometimes gathered their knowledge of the powers-that-be from the impressive construction projects for which Rome was so famous, and a kind of fantastical elaboration of visual propaganda, of which there was much in Asia Minor.17 The visual propaganda expressed Roman power in sometimes graphic and exorbitant terms—emperors stood as gods over the subdued bodies of those they conquered.18 And yet few provincials would ever in their lifetimes catch so much as a glimpse of an actual Roman authority figure; perhaps at best they might encounter a local elite proxy for Roman power. So it is not a coincidence then that Revelation matches so precisely these representations. Neither is it a coincidence that Revelation’s triumphal final vision is an extravagant (re) construction project, a new Jerusalem. The illustrious architecture combined with rumors of the war, stories of historical Roman seizures of territory, and vivid depictions of raw power through the images of emperors were perhaps all the author knew of Roman rule. Thus Revelation’s fantasy of dominance, whether Rome’s or its own, is drawn up in the very fantastical terms the Roman empire provided. As a function of Rome’s own stark self-representations, Revelation is not reflective of the way Roman administration and power operated on the ground across the empire generally. But in the face of Rome’s reconfigurations of belonging—its incorporation of locals into Roman procedures and structures, at the same times as local cultures shifted, combined, and lost pieces of their histories—Revelation’s fantasies of power, of destruction and reconstruction, offer a magnification of what was perhaps a more long-term, and less immediately visible, but no less damaging colonial insidiousness. In other words, this hyperbolic fantasy of Roman power gives shape to psycho-social corrosion and injury that seek a ready language for their articulation. As it perhaps does for readers now. Revelation not only demonstrates that sovereignty had a deep hold on the ancient imagination. It also reflects the ultimate inextricability of colonial powers and the populations they rule, as See Christopher Frilingos, Spectacles of Empire: Monsters, Martyrs, and the Book of Revelation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 16 For maps of locations of amphitheaters, see S. R. F. Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (New York: Cambridge, 1985). 17 Ibid. 18 For the ways images of Rome’s conquered nations resonate against Revelation’s own gendered and starkly binary imaginations of power, see Lynn Huber, Thinking and Seeing with Women in Revelation (New York: T & T Clark, 2013). 15

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ruins make the constituencies of one entity hard or even impossible to separate from the other. Rome presented its power as extreme and alluring, and Revelation makes implicit reference to its own sense of empire’s allure.19 Babylon is, after all, a whore—nothing if not a gendered and sexualized figuration of those twin colonial experiences of magnetism and revulsion. The whore of Babylon and her own destruction in the text impart violent, consumptive desire, and shame for having ever wanted her. Babylon as Rome implies ruin on several levels. “She” causes ruin and is ruined—in a sexually humiliated fashion. But Babylon as a figuration seems to have fragmentation and decay plaguing it on other, less straightforward levels. For instance, the tower of Babel story in Genesis 11, a comment on the Babylonian empire’s power and technological prowess, embeds social dissolution in Babel/Babylon’s very project. The city and impressive tower are built in order to prevent scattering, to solidify unity amongst the people, but God punishes humanity, confusing their language and scattering them across the world. The building project is thwarted by Yahweh even before it can be completed—“they stopped building the city”—pointing to foiled potential, a fall before Babel got to enjoy its rise. The scattering that Yahweh performs, though, is ambiguous. This may be a story of Yahweh’s judgment on Babylon, a critique of Babylon as “mere babble.”20 But the story seems to be a diasporic origin story at the same time, since Babylon represents Israel’s own diffusion and scattering. This concurrent identification and disidentification with Babylon and moralizing on Babylon’s achievements and glory are, as Erin Runions has so strikingly demonstrated, part of the biblical discourse of Babylon: Even within the revenge fantasy against Babylon in the book of Jeremiah, there is an implicit identification between Babylon and Judah, representing an ambiguity between them. In the middle of the oracles against Babylon, we find a short poem that seems to speak positively of Babylon as God’s weapon (51:20–23). . . . Conversely, a negative identification between Judah and Babylon occurs, as Hill notices, when the oracles against Babylon mimic the language of the earlier oracles against Judah.21

Likewise, in second Isaiah, Babylon explicitly and blasphemously takes up the language of God, suggesting not only (as the story of Babel does) that Babylon’s power pales in comparison to God’s, but that Babylon is a cheap imitation of God.22 Second Isaiah’s figuration of Babylon as a queenly but humiliated woman is likely where Revelation draws its inspiration for Babylon as whore, though Revelation admittedly extends the analogy considerably.23 Even more uncomfortable than identification and disidentification between Israel or Judea and Babylon or Rome are a tension and collusion between Yahweh and Babylon/Rome. In Jeremiah, Babylon is both a metaphor for exile and landlessness and a representation of “the See for instance Stephen Moore, “‘The World Empire Has Become the Empire of Our Lord and His Messiah’: Representing Empire in Revelation,” Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006), 97–121; Kotrosits, “Seeing Is Feeling.” 20 Runions, Babylon Complex, 13. Runions indeed points out that the text negotiates (and leaves somewhat unresolved) the powers of both God and Babylonian technology/ progress. 21 Ibid., 15. 22 Cf. Isaiah 47:1, 47:8: “Come down, sit on the ground, virgin daughter of Babylon! Enter the darkness, daughter of the Chaldeans, because you shall no longer be called tender and delicate.... Now hear these things, delicate woman, who sits securely, who says in her heart, ‘I am, and there is no other.’ 23 Jennifer Glancy and Stephen D. Moore, “The Empress and the Brothel Slave,” in Untold Tales From the Book of Revelation: Sex, Gender, Empire and Ecology, ed. Moore (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), 103–24. 19

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possibility of a future for Judah.”24 Babylon’s violence, while interrupting Judah’s sovereignty, ironically strengthens and enables it as a collective. The explanation for Babylon’s conquest is that God “uses” Babylon to punish his people, largely for cultural accommodation—a theme steadily repeated throughout Israel’s history. That instrumentalization not only manages to negotiate questions of God’s power in a time of helplessness, but suggests that God uses Babylon as a disciplinary mechanism to show how thoroughly Israel belongs to God. In other words, “God’s people” are most definitively God’s people when given over to another power. God’s judgment of “his” people, while uncomfortable for its victim blaming, thus imagines a disciplinary power outside of the current, overarching political one (a theme to which I’ll return in later chapters, as well). It is a redescription of a destructive (imperial) act that coalesces a people, and the collusion between God and Babylon is at once an acknowledgment of and rhetorical and imaginative response to the hair-raising ambiguity of colonial life. Of course God’s judgment and anger are not only the imagined source-behind-the-source of the temple’s destruction but also the engine behind visions of Babylon’s ruin. God “restores” his people through defeat of Babylon, and these visions portray Babylon as “the antagonist against which to claim transcendent sovereignty and authority.”25 In Revelation this dependence of Israel’s sovereignty on empire’s defeat is especially conspicuous, since the swallowing up of Babylon/ Rome is tied so closely to the new Jerusalem’s descent from the heavens, a vision that ends with the lamb and its followers taking up the divine throne. The new Jerusalem is a city immune from ruin,26 and is thus imagined in contrast to both the real Jerusalem and Babylon. The new Jerusalem is not just imagined in contrast to the real Jerusalem and Babylon, though; it is figured out of the ruins of both Jerusalem and Babylon— ruins that, it turns out, are pretty difficult to differentiate. Chapter 11, for instance, begins with reference to the destruction of Jerusalem: Then I was given a measuring rod like a staff, and I was told, “Come and measure the temple of God and the altar and those who worship there, but do not measure the court outside the temple; leave that out, for it is given over to the nations, and they will trample over the holy city for forty-two months.” (Revelation 11:1–2)

Revelation goes on to describe the “two witnesses” who will prophesy in sackcloth, promising fiery destruction to anyone who dares harm them (vv. 4–5). After their prophecy, however, the beast will come up and “make war on them and conquer them and kill them, and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that is prophetically called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified” (vv. 7–8). After the two prophets are raised, one tenth of the city is destroyed in an earthquake (v. 13). Is this latter part of the passage talking about Jerusalem, Rome, or both?27 In the first part of chapter 11, Jerusalem is called “the holy city,” and this city in verse 8 is called “the great city,” Runions, Babylon Complex, 13. She is quoting Jonah Hill. Runions, Babylon Complex, 36. 26 Notice that the new Jerusalem has spectacular, highly decorated walls and gates (cf. chap. 21), but the gates “will never be shut by day” and “there will be no night there (21:25), because “nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood” (v. 27). 27 Interpretations of this passage depend heavily on the presumably Christian character of Revelation at large. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, noting that malting allegorical sense of this section is difficult at best, sees the great city and the holy city as symbolic of Jerusalem and the Christian community, respectively. Revelation: Vision of a Just World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 78. Adela Yarbro Collins earlier suggested that the two cities are conflated into Jerusalem, and that God’s wrath on the city is for the rejection of Jesus, leading 24 25

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terms that are not mutually exclusive but also seem to be distinguishing. If it would then seem that the “great city” that is “called Sodom and Egypt” references Rome, that reference is interrupted by the reference to the place “where also their Lord was crucified.” That would be closer to Jerusalem (at least according to gospel tradition). “Sodom and Egypt” is itself an incoherent referent. While Sodom and Egypt, like Babylon, are both used to figure cultural otherness and sexual/cultural impurity, both also represent diasporically complicated elements of Israel’s history. Egypt is the oppressive imperial presence through and against which an “original” Israel articulates itself, even as it is clear that “Egyptianness” is also constitutive of Israelite belonging from the get-go (most notably in the Egyptian lineage and name of Moses). Sodom also figures as a too-close-for-comfort contaminating force in Israel’s history. Not only is it the home of choice for Lot, morally dubious kin of Abraham (cf. Genesis 13:12) and the immoral city from which he is narrowly saved (cf. Genesis 19:1–29). But as if testifying to the ambiguity and contagion of Sodom and its destructiveness and destruction, Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt for simply, and perhaps sympathetically, looking back as it burns (Genesis 25:26).28 Sodom is also thus like Babylon in its virtual synonymity with destruction, and its position as the foreign place that one might make one’s home, and that one must come out of to be saved from iniquity and God’s judgment of it. This confusion of cities certainly matches the open-ended referentiality of Revelation at large,29 but it is particularly significant, even moving, from a postcolonial or diaspora perspective. The question of which city, or whose city, is being ruined is evoked by Jerusalem itself, since from economic, political, and even cultural standpoints, it was somewhat typical for the ancient Mediterranean: Jerusalem becomes Rome in chapter 11 because Jerusalem was in effect a Roman city.30 The associative drift from Jerusalem to Rome expresses not just ambivalence about Jerusalem as a (complicated) place but, implicitly, a question of which is one’s “home” city. I don’t mean “home” city in any literal sense of trying to place Revelation or its writer in a particular location. Rather, consonant with diaspora theories, I mean that Rome and Jerusalem are “home” cities in that they are emblematic cities that are figures for constituencies and kinds of belonging. “Babylon” in fact specifically evokes the question of the ambiguities of home, since there is such a wide set of attitudes and affective associations with it in Hebrew literature, and there was at

her to conclude that Revelation is a Christian text that has a largely strained (albeit formative) relationship to Israel (or “Judaism,” for Collins). Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 84–86. John Marshall argues against both Collins and Schüssler Fiorenza and suggests that the phrase “where also their Lord was crucified” should be taken not as a literal geographical referent but simply as a reference to the fact that Jesus was crucified by the Romans. Parables of War, 170–73. 28 Cf. Kent Brintnall’s striking elaboration of this image in the beginning of his essay “Who Weeps for the Sodomite?” which gives a history of pro-LGBT readings of the passage and the stakes of such interpretations: “With the possible exception of Lot and his daughters, it seems virtually no one in the history of the West has obeyed the injunction not to look back on the fiery devastation rained upon the Cities of the Plain. While gendered injustice appears to play a role in the punishment meted out against Lot’s wife, when one begins to rack up the shame, terror, anger, and hate experienced by those who have tried to discern—or think that they understand—what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah, and to whom, and why, it may be that no one who has looked back has been left unscathed. ... The smoldering rubble cautions all who survived the initial blast to be wary lest sodomitic vice—whatever that might be—once again catch heaven’s attention.” Ruin is a kind of contagion that one can’t turn away from, and yet in which one fears being implicated. “Who Weeps for the Sodomite?” in Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 145–60. 29 See Eugene Boring, Revelation: Interpretation: A Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1989), 35–60, and Huber, Thinking and Seeing with Women in Revelation, 1–9. 30 See especially Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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least the sense that plenty of those exiled to Babylon didn’t want to leave when they finally had the chance.31 The visions of Babylon’s fall suggest that the ruin of Jerusalem and the ruin of “Babylon” are implicated in each other. In fact, if Babel tells us anything, as both diaspora origin story and story of Babylon’s untimely fall, a signal of God’s power and God’s defensive vulnerability, it tells us that ruin and ruination themselves represent strange materials and moments through which constituencies are at once born and confused, and in which the presumed lines between life and death, power and vulnerability, are corroded. The Judean and Roman historian Josephus, writing and responding to roughly the same long moment in Judea’s history as Revelation, has his own reading of the Tower of Babel story, one that also mixes referents. Josephus, a Judean general who helped lead the revolts that catalyzed the Roman-Judean war, instrumentalizes the story as an allegory to disparage the very revolts in which he took part, suggesting that hubris was what led to the downfall and scattering at both Babel and Jerusalem.32 Josephus thus reads the Babel story in line with so many other tales of rise and fall: as a moral tale about excess. But what is surprising is the very fact that Babel is Jerusalem in this reading, not Rome. Rome is of course the more obvious equation to make with Babel—and Josephus surely knows that that equation circulates in Judean conversation and literature. But his mix-up is telling, and resonant with his larger position: captured by the Romans toward the end of the war, only to write both an account of the war and a history of Israel in Flavian Rome, Josephus is nothing if not illustrative of the doubleness of colonial and diasporic belongings. His allegiances are notoriously foggy and hard to parse: If he’s writing from Rome, can his account of the war be trusted? And how compromised is he as an ambassador of tradition?33 These questions are loaded ones, and ones that register anxieties about cultural authenticity and ideological purity. Of course his account can be trusted, but less as an account of events or the “truth” of tradition (whatever that is) than as a source among others for how Judean collective self-understanding worked itself out in relationship to Rome in this period. Rome had a long and complicated relationship with Israel, long before the conquest by Pompey in 63 BCE, and one that involved various forms of collusion and cooperation, as well as conquest. 1 Maccabees, for instance, describes the Roman Senate briefly helping secure Judean political independence from the Seleucids in the second century BCE.34 Whatever the political actualities were, there is at least the notion that Rome once had a less antagonistic place in Judea’s aspirations for sovereignty See Runions, Babylon Complex, 10–19. Of course, Babylonia continued to be home to a vibrant Jewish/Judean population long after the exile, eventually generating a strong rabbinic community and the Babylonian Talmud. Cf. Jacob Neusner’s five-volume History of the Jews in Babylonia, 1965–70. Likewise, Babylonian Jews were hardly sequestered away from Jerusalem: one of Herod’s high priest appointees, Hananel, was a Babylonian, much to the dismay of those with Hasmonean loyalties, for instance. This was probably not exceptional: Herod’s larger program of incorporating people associated with Israel but living outside of Judea into the political life of Judea must have included Babylonians. It is interesting to ask what such evocations of Babylon, and Babylon’s fall, might have meant in the context of these more geographical and material considerations of firstcentury diasporic dynamics. On Babylon and Jewish diaspora in late antiquity, see Daniel Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland; The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 32 See Antiquities 1:109–21. Runions, Babylon Complex, 46–49. Josephus also recovers the story to stake out some particular positions on governance, as Runions argues. 33 For a summary of some key scholarly positions on Josephus’s foggy allegiances, and a nicely observed portrait of Josephus’s specific negotiation with cultural memory and Roman systems of benefaction, see Seth Schwartz, Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 80–109. 34 See Tessa Rajak, The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome: Studies in Cultural and Social Interaction (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 81–98. 31

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than it did later on. Indeed, in this story, Rome enables Judean political sovereignty—not long before it then claims Judea as a province. It seems, however, that these are not contradictions, and that Judean aspirations for sovereignty in this period are constantly being figured through Rome, rather than despite it. In Antiquities, for instance, Josephus suggests that the Greek term Ioudaioi (referencing the inhabitants of Judah) is coined after the return from the Babylonian exile, despite the fact that the term doesn’t seem to exist until the first century BCE and does not have much traction until at least a century later.35 For Josephus, though, it is importantly after exile and return, after the destruction that Babylon inflicts, not before, that Ioudaioi (best rendered “Judeans”) become a people or nation (ethnos). Josephus’s descriptions of the war are associatively close to the language and drama of Revelation, with virtual rivers of blood, mountains of fire, and heaping piles of bodies.36 Likewise one can find resonance between Josephus’s emphasis on the destructive articulation of the Judean god’s sovereignty and that of Revelation. But the long-running (and implicit) comparison between Babylon and Rome here in Josephus confirms, as does Revelation, that imperial ruination is not antithetical to Judean expressions of belonging; it engenders them.

Feeling Wrecked Ruins and ruined places are not just leftover scraps. They are manifestations of social and ecological processes, ones that often become naturalized in the material of ruins themselves. Evidence of imperial or colonial (and in the present, capitalist) muscle, ruins often seem to be obvious in their meaning, and this obviousness gets taken up by diasporic (or other) populations that claim them. Ruins become evidence of a shared past that precedes that destruction, even while that shared past is always being reinvented. Whether physical or metaphorical, ruins are nothing if not socially useful: fetishized, romanticized, renarrated, or reclaimed, they provide endless fodder for collective self-reflection.37 But ruins can’t be bent at will—not completely, anyway. In their stubborn persistence and framing of landscapes, ruins are active material participants, too.38 Physical ruins often refuse to move or be moved, making resettlement impossible, demanding that they be incorporated into new buildings, or that construction projects work around them, for instance. They often get renarrated exactly because they can’t be buried or cleared away. In that way, they physicalize the unyielding heaviness or obstinacy of the past, and in doing so, dynamically shape the ongoing present. While the Roman Mediterranean was not measurably more chaotic than previous periods, and while the vibrancy and independence of the vaunted Greek city (polis) was both overstated and

Antiquities 11.173; See Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Rajak, Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome, 138. 36 Judean Wars, book 6, chap. 5. 37 T h e recent critical work on ruins, while paying attention largely to ruins of the past two centuries (the Amazon, the Congo, and post-Holocaust Germany, Detroit or the postindustrial United States at large), illustrates how ruins are fetishized, romanticized, and refigured. See Stoler, Imperial Debris; Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, eds., Ruins of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Gaston Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. One exception to the generally modern interests in these volumes on ruins is an essay by Julia Hell, “Imperial Ruin Gazers, or Why Did Scipio Weep?,” in Ruins of Modernity, 169–92, in which she compares ancient and modern ruin gazers. 38 See Stoler’s introduction, “ ‘The Rot Remains’: From Ruins to Ruination,” in Imperial Debris, 1–35. 35

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hardly dissolved,39 some Greek writers in particular seemed preoccupied with a sense that things had deteriorated—they were fascinated by ruins. Ruins indeed become an important site for the articulation of Greek self-understanding after Roman conquest. Take, for instance, Pausanias and pseudo-Longinus, two Greek writers of the Roman imperial period who, respectively, tour the architecture and literature of Greece’s past. James Porter has described the way ruins function in Pausanias and Longinus as fragments through which longings for wholeness can be expressed and satisfied, or at least satisfied imaginatively. Pausanias and Longinus, like their contemporaries, prefer to skip over artifacts from the more complicated Hellenistic period, focusing on those from the vaunted classical Greece. The effect, Porter suggests is the imaginary wholeness of a Greece that is made to contrast sharply with the ruined condition of the monuments presented. Pausanias dwells upon monuments that are in fragments. Longinus serves up an antique past that is itself in fragments, and deliberately so, in the form of quotations torn from their original seats and contexts. The invitation to readers is that they restore the ruins in their minds.40

This “restoration” is one in which Pausanias participates and which creates an idealized notion of Greece and Greek belonging. Pausanias has recourse to both the brief period of Greece’s political sovereignty and a much more expansive idea of “Greekness” and the Greek people.41 According to Porter, Pausanias, fully part of the set of trends and sensibilities traditionally housed under the term “second sophistic,” is among other writers who “embrace and exploit the uncertainties of their [Greek] identity.” They do so by fashioning their own identity in the midst of the generalized anxiety about belonging in the social flux of the Roman Mediterranean.42 Ruins in the ancient Mediterranean are plentiful, and not only do they foreground the destructiveness of imperial life, but that ubiquitous rubble becomes the very material through which one’s distinctness is claimed and elaborated. Porter draws attention to a particular passage in Pausanias on Megalopolis that offers a glimpse into what fallen cities evoked for those who considered them. In that passage, Pausanias laments how Megalopolis, “viewed with the highest hopes by the Greeks, now lies mostly in ruins, shorn of all its beauty and ancient prosperity” (8.33.1).43 Pausanias compares it to other great cities that likewise have fallen from their glory—Nineveh, Mycenae, and, notably, Babylon—describing them as now small, desolate, and modest. He waxes on the inevitability of change, God’s will, the workings of Fortune, and how “transient and frail are the affairs of man” (8.33.4).44 Pausanias’s marveling at contingency, and his articulation of a relationship between the ruined and the magnificent, point to the way ruins impart a sense of the sublime, that which is “wondrous and miraculous, the out-sized and the venerable, and above all what lies beyond reach in the present.”45 Ruins are tangible objects that produce a sense of a numinous absence, something outside of ordinary comprehension, but something felt; seeing and not being able See Philip A. Harland, “The Dedining Polis? Religious Rivalries in Ancient Civic Context,” in Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity, ed. Leif E. Vaage. (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006). 40 James Porter, “Ideals and Ruins: Pausanias, Longinus, and the Second Sophistic,” in Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, ed. Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry, and Jaś Elsner (New York: Oxford, 2001), 67. 41 Ibid., 68–69. 42 Ibid., 90. 43 Ibid., 67. 44 Ibid., 67. 45 Ibid., 71–72. 39

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to see are complementary partners in producing a sense of the sublime. So the fragmentary, metonymic nature of ruins is part of what makes them sublime—they are the trace of something incomprehensible.46 For Pausanias, his travel and participation in the rituals of ancient Greece through the broken pieces that continue on into his present are what produce the elevated fantasy of a numinous entity, an entity to which he emphatically claims belonging. The generality embedded in Megalopolis’s very name (Greek for “great city”), and the philosophizing on the similar, inevitable fates of other cities—often metonyms for empires— casts a distanced “this too shall pass” glance on the places themselves. There is tension then between these cities’ exceptional grandeur and their ordinary ephemerality. Notably, Pausanias is less impressed with the grandeur of the cities than with the wonders of Fortune and her capriciousness.47 Nonetheless, ruins point both to the magnificence of the city and to its precariousness—indeed, the more magnificent the city, the more precarious its position for Pausanias, as if he is performing his own moralizing reading of the tower of Babel story. Pausanias finds himself enamored most with Greece in its relatively short moment of political sovereignty.48 Yet his use of ruins to elaborate that vision suggests that the project of sovereignty is always plagued by the inescapable life cycles of political entities. Ruins are the erosion of the exceptionalism on which political sovereignty is so often predicated, the divine sanction of political dominance troubled by the volatility of divine will. The tension between exceptionalism and unexceptional ephemerality resides in Revelation’s own implicit recourse to ruins. The new Jerusalem is a literal restoration of the old Jerusalem in much the same way Pausanias’s Greece is dreamt through its remains—it is a perfection of the old city, gathering in all those followers of the lamb and those who are faithful to God. When we read Revelation as a work of fantasizing and mourning Judea’s destruction (both actual and figurative) and negotiating diasporic belonging in its wake (rather than, say, as a text about any specifically Christian persecution, social conflicts, or negotiation of empire), it seems Revelation’s new Jerusalem is like Pausanias’s Greece. Each is a strategically inaccessible place, a sublime place, that not only gets figured in and through ruins but carries important diasporic social traction. Contra Pausanias, though, who wonders at the strange workings of fate and divine will and restores Greece through memory (thus doing his diasporic work in the register of the past),49 Revelation imagines the physical restoration of Jerusalem as the restoration of God’s will, doing its diasporic work in the register of the future. Greek and Roman self-understandings were mutually constituting, even while they were antagonistic. The Roman-funded revival of Greek philosophy and literature and its coincidence with the most robust moment in the life of the Roman empire is only one example, if a prominent one. The power of Rome to restore cultural identity out of ruins in particular, however, appears in the speeches of the second-century Greek orator Aelius Aristides. His orations on Smyrna, which include extravagant praise for the city’s beauty and prosperity, a lament to Zeus for its fall after an earthquake, and a plea to the emperor Marcus Aurelius to restore the city, illustrate the arc in which a civic or political entity is immortalized in and through its destruction. In his letter to Marcus Aurelius, Aristides appeals to the healing and restorative capacities of the emperor, Runions, borrowing from the work of Charles Gaines, also discusses the sublime, and offers a queerly sublime ethics of reading Babylon and Christ. Babylon Complex, 213–45. 47 Porter, “Ideals and Ruins” 74. As Porter writes, “at the heart of the account itself is the fundamental shock of contingency... that is itself elevated to sublime status” (75). 48 Ibid., 68–69. 49 See Susan E. Alcock’s work on Pausanias, among others who imagine Greek pasts, and the relationship between architecture, memory/forgetting, and belonging/identity. Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments, and Memories (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 46

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who restored cities in Italy “which long ago were sick” (Smyrnaean Oration [SO]19.10), going on to say that “the restoration of the whole city belongs to you, to whom the gods have given such great resources” (SO 19.13). In Aristides’ palinode, which recounts the promised revival of Smyrna, the revitalizing capacity of Rome is more pronounced: But now all that pertains to a mournful tune and to unpleasing dress and whose praise originates from grief has gone away. The continent wears white; Greece assembles to see a happy plot; the city, as if in a play, has changed its age and once more is rejuvenated, being both old and new, as is the tale of the phoenix which is resurrected from itself. (SO 20.19)

Rome’s restoration of Smyrna will enable a return to the past, it seems, as Aristides writes, “O blessed are the older men who will reach that day in which they will see Smyrna with her old beauty. Blessed the boys who will suffer no loss, but will behold their country such as it was when their parents dwelled in it” (SO 20.22). Smyrna’s restoration, too, echoes the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem in Revelation, and not just in the ways in which its residents might come “home” again. Smyrna was, after all, “by its nature . . . the very model of a city” according to Aristides: “I think, if an image of some city had to appear in heaven . . . this city’s image would have prevailed to appear” (SO 17.8). Aristides describes Smyrna as both idealized and anthropomorphized, regularly taking on the figuration of a highly adorned and beautiful woman. “Its name is completely appropriate to this city and to no other. For it is a ‘bosom’ in its gentleness, utility, beauty and form” (SO 17.2). Like the figuration of Babylon as whore, or the new Jerusalem as bride, Smyrna’s female form is part of a larger discourse in which cities were depicted as somatic and, obviously, gendered. Likewise, in his lament for Smyrna’s fall, Aristides figures the city as the body of the people who belong to it: “Such is the head which you have taken from our people; such is the eye which you have plucked out!” (SO 17.8). Thus ruined cities aren’t just emblematic or constructive of constituencies; they also seem to reflect or express the somatic experiences of those constituencies.50 In other words, the ruined city is not just the ruination of architecture, not just the sign of the decimation of an entity or the crushing of its aspirations of self-determination. As a figure, the city in ruins expressed in a dramatic way the subjective experience of degradation and breakdown in its people. In fact, ruins are where the monumental meets the personal, and where what we might call “social architecture” is literal, concrete, and distinctly material. Aimé Césaire, the twentiethcentury politician and poet from French colonial Martinique, captures this convergence of monumental and personal, this literal materialization of social forces, in his poem “Solid”:51 While ancient laments for fallen cities often appear to be waxing about human mortality in general, the personification of cities (overlapping with the personification of nations) in ancient literature and visual representation points to the ways individuals, collectives, and their associated political geographies implied each other. This was also obviously a gendered enterprise: the depiction of Rome’s conquered nations, or at least those nations that loomed large in Rome’s imagination, as ethnically stereotyped female figures, often in subjugated poses, is one striking example. See Davina Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), and Huber, Thinking and Seeing with Women in Revelation, 34–55. Although it is also clear that female personifications of a people/place did not always denote subjugation, the gendered dimensions of these representations demonstrate just how deeply individuals, collectives, and geographies were entangled. 51 Originally appearing in the 1948 edition of his book Solar Throat Slashed, “Solid” and thirty other poems were deleted from later editions until 1994, and many presume that this was because of the specifically local and 50

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Goddamn it they have secured the universe and everything weighs—everything—the gravity’s plumb line having settled on the facile foundation of solidity—the uranium veins the gardens’ statues perverse amours the street that only feigns being fluid not to mention the river with its pace more sluggish than my feet no exception for the sun which stopped its clouds now forever fixed. “Ten-shun!” it is by the way the order that resounds constantly from one end to the other of this strange army of despair. The world became fixed. The stone is fixed. The universal false move is fixed and tell me about your crazy girl manners encircled by the world that encircles a river in which each human couple is ordered to dip twice and whence moreover the bona fide bovine of debacle with its ranch of crosiers and roots will never emerge. I am a stone covered with ruins. I am an island hooded with guano. I am a pyramid erected by an immemorially disappeared dynasty an elephant herd a mosquito sting a small town aggrandized by crime unless it be by the Pacific War or the Atlantic Charter. There are people claiming that they could rebuild a man from his mere smile. That is why I make sure not to leave my teeth impressions on the putty of the air. Face of man you will not budge you are caught in the ferocious graphs of my wrinkles.

Césaire describes the colonized landscape and its inhabitants (which imply one another) as “fixed,” strewn with shit and wreckage, and colonialism as hardening or deadening even that which seems dynamic or alive—the sun, the river, the road.52 The solidity of the colonized world is juxtaposed with the ghostly, with the ephemeral and disappeared. Not only does the firstperson speaker in the poem become “a stone covered with ruins . . . an island hooded with guano . . . a pyramid erected by an immemorially disappeared dynasty,” but the speaker refuses to be “rebuilt”: to rebuild or be rebuilt perhaps would not only undo the testimony of colonial damage, but also further the colonial edifice of unshakability. While Pausanius occupies a different position relative to colonial power, Césaire’s recognition that one feels like crumbled stone makes more understandable Pausanias’s writing and investment in ruins, especially his deadened tone (interpreted as neutral description), which is only occasionally cut by a philosophical wistfulness.53 This affiliation between ruined entities and the somatic experiences of their constituencies appears periodically and sometimes quite pointedly in Judean literature of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. In the book of Daniel, for instance (another book evoking Babylon, in fact), Israelite figures’ repeated survival of physical danger and destruction (the fiery furnace, the den of lions) parallels the indestructible, incorruptible kingdom that their god promises. More political character of these poems. Césaire Aimé, Solar Throat Slashed: the unexpurgated 1948 edition, ed. A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011). 52 More recently, Audre Lorde’s poem “Coal” merges the exploitation of the natural world with the exploitation of black subjects in the register of coal mining. She writes, “Is the total black, being spoken / From the earth’s inside. / There are many kinds of open. / How a diamond comes into a knot of flame / How a sound comes into a work, coloured / By who pays what for speaking.” Kathryn Yusoff quotes this poem in a large discussion of the “inhumanities” and a call for rewriting the notion of the Anthropocene (the geological age dominated by humans), centralizing the history of racialized slavery. Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 84. 53 As Jaś Elsner also points out, “Pausanias’ choice of structure—apparently so simple and unreflective—has the virtue of naturalizing, through the relentless ‘and next we come to this place’ quality of the travel book, his texts’ subtle reflection on Greece as other... and simultaneously as self in the Greek-speaking pilgrim’s confrontation with all that is most essential and most sacred about the Greek tradition.” Elsner, “Structuring ‘Greece’: Pausanias’s Periegesis as a Literary Construct,” in Alcock, Cherry, and Elsner, Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, 5. Elsner connects this naturalization through structure to contemporary readings of Pausanias that simply reconstruct places in a literal or material way from his texts, rather than understanding his work as specifically literary and ideological.

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specifically one finds in this book repeated themes of decline, destruction, indestructibility, sovereignty, and restoration or rising. In one storyline in chapter 2, Daniel, an Israelite in exile in Babylon, saves himself from death by knowing and interpreting King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon’s dream-a dream about the decline and fall of various kingdoms. In Daniel’s reading of the dream, the kingdoms that replace one another are symbolized by a statue composed of metals declining in value (gold, silver, bronze, and iron mixed with clay)—and Nebuchadnezzar himself is the gold head of the statue. The dream culminates, however, with a kingdom (i.e., Israel) that will not fall. Indeed, it is a kingdom that “will not be corrupted” and will “crush and abolish those kingdoms and it will stand forever” (Daniel 2:44). In the next chapter, when Nebuchadnezzar insists that everyone bow down to and worship the gold statue he has built (one not unlike that in his dream) or be thrown into the furnace, three Judean men refuse. Nebuchadnezzar, seeing Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego emerge unscathed from the furnace, comments, “Lo, I see four men unbound and walking in the fire, and no ruin [phthora] has come to them” (3:92). In the following chapter, we find Daniel interpreting another dream Nebuchadnezzar has of his own downfall—this time symbolized by a tree cut down. As Nebuchadnezzar hears his fate delivered by Daniel, the text jumps to a year later, in which Nebuchadnezzar is pictured strolling on the walls and through the towers, saying proudly to himself, “This is the great Babylon, which I have built by the might of my power, and it will be called my royal house” (4:27). But then a voice from heaven tells him he will lose his power by sunrise. Immediately, he is exiled from civilization and is treated like an animal, being fed like oxen and growing his hair and nails long like a bird (4:33). Posing questions about power and what lasts, and noticing that sovereignty has its ironies, the text both implicitly and directly associates ruin and restoration along geopolitical, material, and personal or subjective lines. Ruins seem to reveal not just the slipperiness of sovereignty but a related uncertainty about what it is to be human. Interestingly, the book of Daniel’s narrative trajectory is one in which faith in God is continually rewarded with avoidance of destruction of varying sorts, and wisdom and savvy with positions of power under foreign kings.54 It is an improbable and idealized picture of diasporic negotiation, in which the diasporic subject manages to ascend to the heart of colonial administrations while they themselves stay steadfast and culturally intact, even as kings lose their minds.55 No threat is more harrowing than God, it turns out, who produces real ruination, often of cosmic proportions, compared with the inconsequential dangers imposed by foreign authorities. Indeed, Daniel’s faith is never in question in the book of Daniel. The text prefers to focus on the faithfulness or unfaithfulness of foreign rulers, most compellingly through Nebuchadnezzar’s haunting dreams, his idol worship, and his frightened concession about the sovereignty of the “most high” god. Anxiety about destruction circulates around Babylon and T h is trajectory is not particular to Daniel, and something like it—in which the protagonist is endangered, escapes death or imprisonment, and then is given recognition or power—occurs in the stories of Joseph and Esther, for example. See John J. Collins, Daniel, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 192, as well as George W. E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). 55 W. Lee Humphrey has suggested that Daniel, like the book of Esther, affirms that “at one and the same time the Jew can remain loyal to his heritage and God and yet live a creative, rewarding, and fulfilled life precisely within a foreign setting.” “A Lifestyle for Diaspora: A Study of the Tales of Esther and Daniel,” Journal of Biblical Literature 92 (1973): 223. Humphreys also suggests that the book of Daniel forces the reader to “stretch his [sic] credulity to the breaking point” to accept that the figure who remains loyal to God and still ascends through foreign administrations in the first part of the book then condemns those powers as oppressive and against God’s plan in the second part of the book (223). Aside from the source questions that attend the book of Daniel, this does point to a larger disjuncture and idealization in the book in which foreign power and loyalty to Israel are completely and fairly easily reconcilable. 54

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its rulers, perhaps out of sympathetic attachment to and identification with them. The result is a displacement of worries about colonial ruination onto the colonial figures themselves.56 As a text, Daniel thus charts a narrow path in which colonial ruin and the felt dangers of the ruinous God are imagined, against the odds, as avoidable. For Revelation on the other hand, even while it alludes heavily to Daniel, the possibility of ruination is never fully displaced from its aspirations, and is so more thoroughly unsettling. The untouchable new Jerusalem, that utopian ideal of sovereignty that is seemingly immune from destruction, still carries the hints of ruin within it: by the end, the lamb standing as if slaughtered, that graphic reference to violence and dehumanizing victimhood, resides in the center of the divine throne. Revelation’s own dramatic bid for (imagined) political viability in the new Jerusalem thus contains an implicit acknowledgment of the vulnerability at the heart of its project.57 The lamb, standing as if slaughtered, is not just a symbol for violence and victimhood in a general way. The lamb also carries specific associations with the destroyed temple—less because of any associations with sacrifice than because Revelation states that in the new Jerusalem, there is no temple, “for its temple is Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev. 21:22).58 Revelation is not the only text of this period to associate Jesus and the temple, however. The Letter to the Hebrews makes of Jesus both high priest and the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, even suggesting that his flesh is the temple curtain (Heb. 10:20), making Jesus’s vulnerability and fleshiness a constitutive, material part of the indestructible heavenly temple. Just as distinctly, the Gospel of John has Jesus claim that he will resurrect the destroyed temple in three days, but as if all hope for the physical temple seemed useless or silly, the text clarifies that he was “speaking of the temple of his body” (John 2:21).59 In the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the gospels and seemingly written in the immediate aftermath of the Roman-Judean war, the associations between Jesus’s body and the temple appear differently. At the scene of Jesus’s crucifixion, Jesus’s humiliating torture and death are dramatized as or alongside the destruction of the temple in the war. He calls out that God has abandoned him, is mocked for his helplessness, and just as he breathes his last breath and cries out, the temple curtain is torn in two. Earlier in the story, the gospel makes the association of Jesus’s body with or as the temple, or at least needs to account for that association, but retracts it by calling it “false testimony.” In fact, it is through the change of heart of these foreign rulers, their sudden loyalty to Israel’s god, that the nations are able to come to Yahweh, fulfilling earlier Hebrew scriptural visions (most distinctly in second Isaiah). Cf., e.g., Daniel 4:34, 6:25–27. It is also worth noting that restoration at the end of the book in chapter 12 means not just restoration of a kingdom or a collective, but a kind of personal/subjective restoration through “resurrection,” described as becoming like stars. 57 See Kotrosits, “Seeing Is Feeling.” 58 As Loren Johns has shown, Revelation’s use of arnion does not match the Septuagint’s preferred term for a burnt offering (amnos), and lambs were not the most popular sacrificial animals. Thus, Revelation’s use of lamb evokes the more general sense of vulnerability that amnos accumulates in Septuagint uses of the term. Loren L. Johns, The Lamb Christology of the Apocalypse of John (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). While there is no temple in the new Jerusalem, there is a heavenly temple in Revelation (cf. 11:19, 14:15, 15:5–6). Presumably there is no temple in the new Jerusalem because the new Jerusalem is already thoroughly free from impurity, making a cultic system of purification extraneous, but according to that logic there would be no need for a temple in heaven, either. 59 T h e history of interpretation is heavy with supersessionist readings of this association that assume that Jesus equals Christianity and the temple equals Judaism. But rather than any kind of supersessionism or replacement theology, or even any kind of grand theological statement at all, it seems the association of Jesus’s violent death with the ruined temple simply expresses the ongoing colonial effects of debilitation and decomposition. These effects, by the way, don’t get transcended as much as they catalyze dreams of sovereignty and projects of belonging—both figured as “restoration.” 56

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Some stood up and gave false testimony against him, saying, “We heard him say, T will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.” But even on this point their testimony did not agree. (Mark 14:57–59)

As we will see in chapter 5, the question of testimony and truth is a significant theme in Mark. But later in the story, Jesus is taunted with these same words, which he ostensibly did not speak, while on the cross: “Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!’ ” (15:29–30). While the text of Mark shies away from calling Jesus’s body “another temple,” or a rebuilt temple, it does not see an association between Jesus’s body and the temple itself as problematic. It would seem then that the Gospel of Mark’s initial retraction around the association of Jesus with the temple is simply about the association of Jesus’s resurrection with the temple. The text rather presses the point that the association of Jesus’s body with the temple is that both are in ruins.60 For the Gospel of Mark, not incidentally, both Jesus and the temple were always already fallen, given that both are predicted (at least in the narrative) regularly and in advance of their occurrence. The “little apocalypse” in Mark 13, which I discuss more in the next chapter, in fact offers something of a phenomenology of ruin, since its ex eventu character means to describe what things feel like now, in Mark’s present. Even apart from the “little apocalypse” of chapter 13, the Gospel of Mark depicts an entire landscape of ruin in its attention to the destitute, hungry, injured, near-dead, stigmatized, and condemned.61 The story of the Gerasene demoniac, a possessed man consigned to live in the tombs, has been most explored for its colonial resonances,62 and is as evocative as the crucifixion scene in its associations between colonial experiences of deadness and physical structures. However, the stories of the Gerasene demoniac and of Jesus’s crucifixion are only where the larger understanding of colonization as ruination, as at once destructuring and objectifying, makes itself most overt.63 While different in their specific aims and historical conditions, the Gospel of John, Revelation, and the Letter to the Hebrews are all embarking on diasporic restoration projects, apparent recuperations of sovereignty through ruins. For the Gospel of Mark, on the other hand, the project of sovereignty—understood both as an imagination of personal self-determination and as collective political autonomy—is itself still in ruins, though, importantly, contingent affiliations

Pressing the question of ruins in Mark further, it seems that the empty tomb scene is strongly reminiscent of the “numinous absence” in Pausanias’s ruins, as well. 61 See Maia Kotrosits and Hal Taussig, Re-reading the Gospel of Mark amidst Pain and Loss (New York: Palgrave, 2011), and Alexis Waller, “Violent Spectacles and Public Feelings; Trauma and Affect in the Gospel of Mark and the Thunder: Perfect Mind,” Biblical Interpretation 22, nos. 4–5 (2014): 450–72. 62 Reading the story of the Gerasene demoniac politically is practically commonplace these days, and the cue was largely taken from Ched Myers’s work, which uses that pericope as an interpretive key for the rest of the gospel. Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988). 63 My reading of the Gospel of Mark in this book’s various chapters is indebted to the sensitive critique of my earlier work on the Gospel of Mark (Re-reading the Gospel of Mark, with Taussig, 2011) by Tat-siong Benny Liew, who rightfully noticed that my/our treatment of the Gospel of Mark relative to trauma was not attentive enough to the many and deep colonial resonances of the book. Tat-siong Benny Liew, “Haunting Silence: Trauma, Failed Orality, and Mark’s Messianic Secret,” in Liew and Runions, Psychoanalytic Mediations between Marxist and Postcolonial Readings of the Bible, 99–128. I’ve also been helped by Liew’s diasporic reflections on the gospels, though my approach to diaspora and “early Christian” literature is decidedly more along historicist lines. See for instance Liew, “Tyranny, Boundary and Might: Colonial Mimicry in Mark’s Gospel,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 77 (1999): 7–31. 60

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and moments of vitality are still possible.64 As we shall see over the course of this book, the Gospel of Mark is a dark forest of diasporic themes. But each of these texts testifies to the stony, deadening effects and breakdowns of colonial captivity.65 Christ as seemingly mortally wounded animal and heavenly temple, as destroyed structure that is also surprisingly vital, chronicles ruination as a process that renders material remnants lively, even sublime, and figures people as “remains,” decaying part-objects.

Disjoints in the Social Body and the Material Unconscious The ruined Jesus might also be seen as having diasporic resonances especially given how closely his crucified and resurrected body is tied to collectivity, and not just in Revelation’s lamb that leads the faithful to occupy the throne of the new Jerusalem.66 In Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, in which the wholeness and coherence of the social body, which meets “in Christ,” are a primary concern, ruination is both what funds and what threatens a sense of belonging in the Corinthian gatherings. Especially in the Corinthian correspondence we see Paul longing for not just social wholeness, but a very particular kind of social wholeness. He repeatedly attempts to smooth over the frictions and rough edges of community life. He evokes the language of concord in an apparently anxious address to disagreements in the community.67 He conjures the image of the perfectly functioning, intact body as metaphor for idealized collectivity.68 His language around women and gender in the Corinthian correspondence largely maintains gendered hierarchies, and he consistently polices, or at least attempts to police, propriety.69 He’s worried about sex, illness, and eating—the most carnal of experiences, of course, but also and not incidentally ones that erode senses of boundedness or physical intactness.70 He’s worried about how the community is seen from the outside, and whether they will be legible to others: “If the whole gathering comes together, and all speak in tongues, and an unbeliever or outsider comes in, will they not say you are out of your minds?” (1 Cor. 14:23). Paul notes in 1 Cor. 14 that he himself can and does speak in tongues, but that those who are speaking in tongues should speak one at a time and have an

T h ough sovereignty is deeply questioned in the Gospel of Mark, healing and some kind of tentative salvation are still possible. In the tradition of Greco-Roman noble death, one is saved in the Gospel of Mark by emulating Jesus—staying faithful even to the point of death, and enduring to the end (e.g., Mark 8:34–35, 13:13). 65 Addressing especially Revelation, Mark, and Daniel as diasporic musings on and through imperial ruin raises larger possibilities for considering “apocalyptic” literature as something other than a distinct category, discrete theology, or comprehensive worldview. What we call “apocalyptic” scenes might have more interpretive purchase as part of a discourse on ruins/ruination, sovereignty, and diaspora. 66 Christ as simultaneously disciplined (non)citizen of Rome and conduit for diasporic belonging in fact parallels Sikh martyrs and Sikh diasporic aspirations for sovereignty as portrayed by Brian Keith Axel. See Kotrosits, Rethinking Early Christian Identity, 117–45, where I discuss this parallel at more length. 67 Dale Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Margaret Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1991). 68 1 Cor. 12:12–17. 69 On women and men and “appropriate” roles/behaviors, see 1 Cor. 5:13, 6:19–10 (sexual immorality); 1 Cor. 7:1–16 (marriage); 1 Cor. 7:25–39 (unmarried); 1 Cor. 7:17–20 (circumcision); 1 Cor. 11:1–16 (head coverings). 70 On order at the meal gatherings, see 1 Cor. 5: 11 (no meal with sexually immoral people); 1 Cor. 8:4–13 (idol meat not theologically correct); 1 Cor. 10:19 (idol meat is partner with devil); 1 Cor. 10:27–28 (idol meat is fine when hosted by pagans); 1 Cor. 11:17–34 (on divisions and disagreements). 64

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interpreter.71 Shameful exhibition worries Paul in 1 Cor. 4:9: “For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to mortals” (1 Cor. 4:9). And of course in 1 Cor. 11, “Any man who prays or prophesies with something on his head disgraces his head, but any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head—it is one and the same thing as having her head shaved, for if a woman is not covered, let her cut off her hair.” The Corinthians, for their part, seem to be a little less worried, even seem to be occasionally experimenting and playing with the boundaries of inside/outside, experimenting with vulnerability and power, even and especially along gendered lines.72 While much of Paul’s language can be chalked up to standard ancient rhetoric and more specifically rhetoric surrounding ancient association gatherings in general, it nonetheless naturalizes hierarchical social relations, not to mention tightly delineated boundaries. But the landscape in which Paul and the Corinthians are preoccupied with the boundaries of the social body causes them to reverberate not with an assured security, but rather with tenuous and idealized fantasies of collective completeness—ones that nonetheless have social traction. Indeed, the recent (or at least presidential) renewed obsession with wall-building in the United States, while part of a whole set of assertively anti-immigration, white nationalist, and masculinist policies and rhetorics, perhaps offers us a bit of an angle on Corinthians. Physical walls become important to collectives precisely at the moments in which national sovereignty is under distinct pressure, if not rapidly disintegrating.73 Likewise, the carefully monitored boundaries of the social body—meaning both the social collective and the social construction of the individual body—have to do with wanting to “reclaim” a kind of sovereignty, one largely fantasized and unavailable, as a diasporic collective.74 The portrait that has been painted of the correspondence and the landscape of Corinth is one in which questions of collectivity and belonging are at the fore.75 First-century Corinth It is not necessarily obvious what “speaking in tongues” means, and Paul’s clear stance against it means that his own descriptions should not be taken for granted. It is, at least, a kind of “insider” language: something that can be interpreted, but would not be immediately available to outsiders. 72 Maia Kotrosits, “The Rhetoric of Intimate Spaces: Affect and Performance in the Corinthian Correspondence,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 62, nos. 3–4 (2011): 134–51. 73 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 74 T h ough his reading departs a bit from my own, I’m again prompted by Benny Liew’s colonial and diasporic reading of Paul, the Corinthians, and social bodies in “Melancholia in Diaspora: Reading Paul’s Psychopolitical Operatives in 1 Corinthians,” in his book What Is Asian American Hermeneutics?: Reading the New Testament (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008). Liew argues that Paul is not out for some kind of nostalgic diasporic purity and that he is rather angling for a “new communal belonging.” I don’t quite disagree, but Liew’s emphasis on the inclusion of the “gentiles” in this new communal belonging feels almost recuperative to me, and I want to stick more closely with the potential implications of what Liew sees as the broken and resurrected body of Jesus as the transfer point for collectivity. And I certainly follow Liew (106–7) in his larger suggestion that Paul is navigating both an acknowledgment and a refusal of diasporic loss. 75 See Martin, Corinthian Body, which draws together discourses of disease etiology, gender, and homonoia/ concord, among other things, to describe the Corinthian gatherings. The work of the Greco-Roman meals seminar, including Richard Ascough, Hal Taussig, Angela Standhartinger, Matthias Klinghardt, and Carly Daniel-Hughes, among others, demonstrated that Pauline gatherings took place on the symposial model, just like all other associations. The association meals were a comfortable and predictable venue where status, identity, and relationships were negotiated along both hierarchical and more idealized communal lines. Hal Taussig, for instance, describes these meals as working as both heterotopic (in the Foucauldian sense) and utopian spaces at once. That is, they operate as a space that seems to reflect on social order, “perfect” it, and experiment with it, all at the same time. This dynamic at all symposial meals as seen in a lot of the handbooks of Plutarch, for instance, gives us some very clear and precise contexts for the tensions between social stratification and more egalitarian values in the Corinthian correspondence. More recently, Anna Miller has noticed the way democratic discourse informs the Corinthian correspondence and thus connects questions of gender and speaking in the social body 71

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was indeed a large and complex urban center for Panhellenic culture, and with a highly mobile population, including migrant populations, military personnel, and members of the merchant class.76 Corinth was certainly then characterized by various kinds of uproot and social fragmentation in its immediate and more long-term context, a center of cultural interaction and exchange. It was a city whose grandeur and appeal, as well as its perhaps inherent variety and disarray, are indebted to Roman ruination and colonization since it was destroyed by the Romans in the second century BCE and rebuilt in the first century BCE as a Roman colony. Although Corinth was emblematic of Greek identity at large in the Roman era, its Greekness was reclaimed, colonially reconstituted, rather than continuous. The Asklepios sanctuary on the outskirts of Corinth was renovated at the founding of Roman Corinth in 44 BCE, though very little survives from the Roman period of the cult—there is an inscription, and there are some second- and third-century coins attesting to the life of the cult.77 Bronwen Wickkiser, in her work on this sanctuary, asks why specifically this cult of a healing god would have been appealing to a Roman colony of freedmen: the cult of Asklepios had a lot of “cultural baggage,” in that it was both important to Greek cultural imagination and history, and imported by the Romans.78 The story of Asklepios arriving in Rome by boat in the form a snake to heal the third-century plague was a staple of first-century BCE Roman literature. So Wickkiser asks, “Which Asklepios did the colonists establish?”79 Was it an attempt to reinstate Asklepios of Greek Corinth, or import the (more) Roman god Aesculapius? This is not an either/or question, of course, since again, the revivification of classical Greek elements was itself a Roman colonial project. More interesting though, Asklepios was the son of Apollo, one of the divine patrons of Julius Caesar and Augustus, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses parallels the Apollo/Asklepios relationship to that of Julius Caesar and Augustus.80 As Wickkiser notes, “In the wake of Actium, the medical skills of Asklepios would have served as the perfect metaphor for Augustus’ skills at healing a state torn apart by civil war.”81 This is another instance of the ways in which the life-giving and restoring capacities of the god echo or are otherwise tied to the restoration and resuscitation of the social body, and in particular, perhaps, the restoration of Corinth. I’m struck by the image of the votive dedications that are often found in archaeological excavations near Asklepios sanctuaries: the terracotta casts of hands, feet, arms, breasts, heads, fingers that were hung or placed in the sanctuary, out of either hope or gratitude for healing. These terracotta dedications were indeed found in Corinth, though they are dated earlier than the Roman period. However, the image of these body parts, these eyes and limbs and bellies and heads, injured, sick, and collected, buried under the ground at the edges of Corinth as people were walking around, perhaps has a kind of social and psychological poetry about it. It resonates with the collection of people, the mixed and fragmented population, of Corinth at large. It is the

to specific delineations of citizenship. Miller, Corinthian Democracy: Democratic Discourse in First Corinthians (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 76 Cavan Concannon has demonstrated how the history of Corinth under the Romans inflects constructions of collectivity—or to use his language, the discourse of ethnicity—for the Corinthians. When You Were Gentiles: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). On social stratification in Corinth, see Steven Friesen, Sarah James, and Daniel Showalter, eds., Corinth in Contrast: Studies in Inequality (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 77 Bronwen L. Wickkiser, “Asklepios in Greek and Roman Corinth,” in Corinth in Context: Comparative Studies on Religion and Society, ed. Steve Friesen, Daniel N. Showalter, and James Walters (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 37–66. 78 Ibid., 59. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., 59–60. See Metamorphoses 15.622–870. 81 Wickkiser, “Asklepios in Greek and Roman Corinth,” 60.

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subtext buried underneath the Corinthian correspondence’s body talk, especially (but not only) chapter 12 (“For the body is one and has many members.”) In his book The Practice of Diaspora, Brent Hayes Edwards offers a generous description of the social and literary processes that gave birth to Black internationalism in the early twentieth century. He points to the politics of translation in creating links between Black intellectuals, especially in New York and Paris, and the ways differences are negotiated and bridged in the production of Black transnationalist (later termed “diaspora”) movements. One really significant dimension of this is the bridging of inflections of Blackness as it appears in different languages and different class constituencies—Negro in English, Negre and then Noir in French, and then hommes de couleur. Edwards is interested how collectivity was articulated (and he uses the word “articulated” strategically) without essentialist and nationalist formations. How were the divides between these terms, which signified sometimes very different things, bridged? He borrows from Stuart Hall’s use of the word “articulation,” which refers not only to giving expression to something, but to a “joint,” a place in the body where things connect, and thus to how things might connect while maintaining “difference within unity.”82 The joint is, he notes, a point of both connection and separation. He thus also draws from the meanings of the French word décalage, which might be translated as “gap, discrepancy, time-lag, or interval.”83 His project takes inspiration from Black internationalism of the 1920s and ’30s to “rethink the workings of race” through décalage, that is, through disjoint, the points of “misunderstanding, bad faith, and unhappy translation” that constitute a “necessary haunting” of the social body.84 That is, the points of décalage or disjoint, where things don’t properly meet up, prevent the social body from naturalizing itself readily. As interpreters of Corinthians have long noted, there are indeed “disjoints” in the letters, ones that Paul both responds to and seems to illustrate. “Now I appeal to you,” he begins the letter, “by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and there be no divisions among you” (1:10). Paul’s responses themselves titrate between his own divisive rhetoric and his attempts to hold things together. Indeed Paul responds not only to questions of marriage and sexuality (1 Cor. 7), of what to eat (1 Cor. 8–10), of to whom they “belong” (1 Cor. 11–17), and of how to act in the gatherings, but to differences in opinion on resurrection (1 Cor. 15), as well. The Corinthians seem to have understood resurrection as a felt vitality in the present as opposed to Paul’s deferred promise of a new kind of body after death and the defeat of worldly powers.85 Paul’s collapse into anxiety, into hierarchy, into hard lines, and into a future resurrection rather than a present one presents problems for certain ethical and politicized interpretations of the letters. It is also par for the diasporic course, as the ground beneath his feet is not just shifting and unsteady, but full of the vestiges of the fragmentation of other peoples, the fractured figures and forms of bygone eras. Paul worries there is not enough to hold the Corinthians together; he craves wholeness, a resurrected body untouched by death and disease. That is, he craves a kind of sovereignty, and he tacitly acknowledges that can’t possibly happen in the world as he knows it. In Second Corinthians, Paul’s imagination of the body is more fragile, more piecemeal. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 11. 83 Ibid., 13. 84 Ibid., 13–15. 85 As Antoinette Clark Wire has argued, The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul’s Rhetoric (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 175–76. Paul, too, seems periodically to feel this new vitality and participate with the Corinthians in their experimentation with the boundaries of the body. But of course we also have Paul’s worries about being embarrassed or ashamed, and his worries about gender legibility (veiling, speaking, who’s “the head”). 82

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In chapter 5 it is a flimsy tent compared with God’s sturdier building (v. 1). But also in Second Corinthians, Christ’s power to recreate, to render the body new, is claimed emphatically. As if conjuring the terracotta votives at the sanctuary for Asklepios in his mind, in Second Corinthians Paul likewise writes, “But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Cor. 4:7).86 That Paul merges here, however briefly or subtly, with clay objects beneath his feet resonates in a material key with the psychodynamics that Benny Liew has observed relative to Paul in the Corinthian exchange: “The diasporic Paul is not just a subject of loss of melancholia who mourns his various losses without end, he himself is also a lost object of Greco-Roman imperialism.”87 Wholeness nearly always brings with it the fear of puncture, the xenophobic anxiety of wounding from outside. But there is connection in disjoint, in failures to translate properly. The aesthetics (if not quite the ideology) of the cult of Asklepios might be taken as a diasporic counterpoint to Paul, especially in its resonances with Edwards’s understanding of décalage. This could point toward some explanations of the success of the cult in this period: Asklepios is the son of a life-giving and death-dealing god whose main form of restoration (itself a disquieting notion) was gathering broken parts together. These devotees form a social body that knows that the connections between members is one built from pain, not coherent, but still vital, and a testament to the ambivalence of the ties that bind. “We are afflicted in every way,” Paul writes, “but not crushed; perplexed but not driven to despair; persecuted but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed, always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:7–10). The ruined Jesus as a magnet for diasporic self-understanding and sociality suggests that forms of collectivity gather around figures not just incidentally or out of their expediency, but because of their expressive power, their experiential resonance: Christ is a figure for colonial wreckage and the possibilities that attend it. Collectives often emerge out of rubble, not because they “survive” or because they triumph over destruction. Collectives emerge out of rubble because the very foundations of social life are built with the materials of what’s past—and “what’s past” is already eroded at least by time, if not by other means. New cities are constructed awkwardly over old ones, the cornerstone of one building becoming the marginalia of another, or vice versa. People inhabit the very places laid waste by themselves or others. They do so preoccupied, often without knowing, by what’s underground. Collectives are not “anchored” in the past, in other words. They are rearranging its debris, and arranging themselves in the process.

T h is verse then teeters between the literal and the metaphorical or supraliteral, a tension that characterizes the Corinthian letters and shaped so much of the later history of Christian interpretation, as Margaret M. Mitchell has demonstrated. Indeed, the second-century Christian writer Origen of Alexandria quotes this verse in Second Corinthians to support a spiritualized reading (On the Principles 4.1.7). See Mitchell, Paul the Corinthians, and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), especially 50–57. This rhetorical tension—or ambiguity—between literal/material and beyond-the-material might also be understood as a negotiation of “what’s real.” 87 Liew, “Melancholia in Diaspora,” 105 86

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Seven Stations of Affect Religion, Affect, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ Robert Paul Seesengood

Opening Titles That, if not specifically how, myth and ritual inform one another is a disciplinary truism (see Csapo 2005: 132–80). Ritual actualizes myth; myth explicates and motivates ritual. Together ritual and myth reorganize and recreate the world. S. Brent Plate argues film acts similarly: “Films create worlds. They . . . actively reshape elements of the lived world and twist them in new ways that are projected onscreen and given over to an audience” (2008: 1). Conversely, he says, “Myths and rituals operate like films: they utilise techniques of framing, thus including some themes, objects and events while excluding others; and they serve to focus the adherent’s attention in ways that invite humans in to the ritualised world in order to become participants” (2008: 7; see also Wright 2008: 5 and Lyden 2007: 416–20). In addition to film’s role in cosmogony and mythopoesis, film, like religion, is affecting. Affect-critical approaches to film focus on viewer response, but under-attend form and close reading. Here I would like to explore the potential inherent in the turn to affect as a form in Eugenie Brinkema’s 2015 The Forms of the Affects. I will augment her work by closer attention to embodiment (the viewing eye is an embodied eye; affect is embodied meaning). I will apply this theoretical conversation to a critique of the scourging of Jesus in Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ. Inspired by the traditional “seven sayings” of Jesus from the cross and the seven stations of the Via Dolorosa (a subset of the fourteen stations of the cross linking ritual and myth), I organize this chapter as seven vignettes, a series of mini-reflections on religion, theory, film, affect, and the Bible, all united around the theory-work of Eugenie Brinkema and The Passion of the Christ, all interconnected with affect. The argument that (I hope) emerges: The Passion of the Christ aptly demonstrates how film, religion, and Bible function most effectively in their affects—and these affects arise from their form.

First Station: Affect and the Embodied Mind Humanities scholarship is turning toward affect and away from complex, theory-driven critique via examination of how art and literature elicit, compel, or create emotion or affect. Affect critique draws not only from historical (Spinoza) and contemporary (Deleuze) continental philosophy,

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but also from the neurosciences, psychology, sociology, and cultural and media studies (see Sedgwick 2003; Ahmed 2004; Gregg and Seigworth 2010). An established approach in film studies (Brinkema 2015), affect criticism is an emerging concern in biblical studies (see Kotrosits 2015; 2016; Koosed and Moore 2014). The turn toward affect is a turn from a radical, Cartesian duality between body and mind privileging rationality and cognition over sensation and feeling. It is a desire to resist both over-theorizing in critique and superficial a-critical engagement. “Affect theory” is critical attention to feeling, arguing that how a work makes its reader/ viewer feel, and the cognition and tactility of feeling itself, are legitimate critical interests. In film critique, affect is analysis of how viewers engage with a film via dialogue, acting, music, setting, lighting, and more. The culmination of the experience of viewing is, affect would assert, not “beneath” the intellectual responses we later form to describe or process the experience. I intend “affect” in both its aesthetic and philosophical sense. In literature reviews, affect scholarship is understood to originate among twentieth-century sociologists and neurobiologists exploring precognitive, automatic responses to stimuli such as fear, disgust, or sexual arousal.1 These emotional reactions/responses occur, and are embodied, prior to awareness or cognition. Affect effects body and mind. In the humanities, some scholarship (after Deleuze) looks at the “in-betweeness” of thinking, thinking that both transcends and precedes consciousness; affect is the construction of “meaning” before determining meaning, the sensing of reality before awareness. In other critiques (after Ahmed and Sedgwick), affect is critical engagement of the embodiment of cognition and the way films or texts engage our feelings as an integral part of meaning.

Second Station: Affect, Religion, and Film Greg Seigworth’s “Wearing the World Like a Debt Garment” (2016), a complex, completely affectual, Deleuzian reading of M. T. Anderson’s Feed, dwells on both flesh and fabric, reminding readers of Mark C. Taylor and his glorification (qua Derrida) of surfaces, fashion, and the ephemeral. Seigworth and Taylor remind us that superficiality is a form of substance, that “skin deep” can be fathomless. “In the end, it all comes down to a question of skin. And bones. The question of skin and bones is the question of hiding and seeking. And the question of hiding and seeking is the question of detection” (Taylor 1997: 11). Skin, like debt, mediates, limits, and conceals. It is also a vehicle for religious expression and subjectivity. It is surprising in its layered depths, its fragile penetrability, and its work-a-day durability. It is the binding of the self, wrapped around a firm spine, giving weight to animated pages within. The mortification of the flesh by religious ascetics attempts transcendence of materiality into immateriality. The body is (self) destroyed. The ascetic “insists these rituals are not painful and claims that the pleasure they bring is actually transcendent. Something unforeseen begins to take place: the body become the vehicle for passing beyond the body” (Taylor 1997: 133). Affect, in particular Deleuzian affect, replicates this sort of religious experience. Religion, particularly approaches to religion rooted in the soil of Durkheim, Geertz, and Eliade, is always-already affectual giving expression to the prerational and the proprioceptive.2 Whether we see religion as the recognition and response to “the sacred” (Durkheim, Eliade), as proto-scientific manipulation of spirit forces (Tyler, Stark), or as a systematic creation of reality T h e term originates in Tompkins (1962). See also Sedgwick (2003), Koosed and Moore (2014). Laruen Berlan’s term as employed by Seigworth (2016: 13).

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(Tillich, Geertz), religion is fundamentally a method of both organizing/articulating a-rational ideas and, in the articulation, motivating response. Religion is also, like affect, fundamentally embodied, a “network of bodily practices” (Schaefer 2015: 7). “Affect theory is a necessary tool for mapping religion, not just because it adds to our inventory of descriptive tools, but because affect constitutes the links between bodies and power” (Schaefer 2015: 9). Religion and affect both organize the precognitive and a-rational and are embodied cognition; they transmit directly, body-to-body, feeling-to-feeling. “Affects have their own capacity to articulate bodies to systems of power—what [can be called] compulsion” (Schaefer 2015: 95). The word “religion,” etymologically, in an argument as old as Cicero, has roots in either the Latin religare—to tie or bind—or relegere—to reread (Hoyt 1912). Religion is the ultimate system of debt and binding, superficial ties become folds, a strange and cosmic phylactery. Religion creates social interdependence by indebtedness conferred through text and ritual. In every ritual, myth, or sacred text there is that moment of becoming, of interstitiality, between the past and the present, the awareness and quiet perception of antiquity and community, a contiguous narrative made up of the stitching of successive aorists. Affect is, of course, integral to film. Consider, for example, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s absurdist, surreal 1929 Un Chien Andalou. The movie has no dialogue, little structure, and no coherent plot. It is a series of mostly disconnected scenes showing various interactions between its only characters: Simone Mareuil and Pierre Batcheff. In the movie’s iconic scene, Batcheff holds open the left eye of Mareuil and appears to slice her eye open with a straight razor. We see Batcheff standing behind a seated Mareuil, draw back his right arm, then a sudden cut to a razor slicing through an eye (the eye of a dead pig, but the viewer does not know this). As we watch the intraocular fluid pop out, it is impossible to avoid embodied reaction. The sliced eye produces instantaneous, embodied disgust: blink, flinch, look away. This reaction, this embodied, preconscious reaction, is affect. It offers, in its affect, a strikingly complex commentary on the watching-but-not-watching of film, on how the knowledge that we are looking at something unreal, a photograph made by special effects, can still disturb. The affect links film and embodied viewer, creating an instantaneous, transcendent affectual reality.

Third Station: Rituals and Gatherings; Passion Plays and Public Morals The Passion of the Christ is a cinematic passion play. The history of modern theater and, to a degree, modern film has its roots in medieval passion plays (see Twycross 2006). In the Middle Ages, classical theater was deemed pagan and other theater was condemned for perpetuating immorality and sex. Theater was also immensely popular among the masses and difficult to control. By the Middle Ages, theater was confined to the churchyard and to religious themes. Paramount among them were the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. The passion play was born. For a people largely illiterate, passion plays were instruction in the biblical narrative. But passion plays were generally popular also because they offered a sanctioned place for bawdy scenes and violence; in some cases they became fully carnivalesque (Twycross 2006: 347–52). Passion plays augmented the Bible with popular tradition, adding to (harmonized) gospel accounts of Jesus’s last days set-pieces of comical and sinister Jews, dancing devils, leering Judases, and Sanhedrin villainy and pomp. Plays would pause their narrative for romps or minimorality plays from Jesus’s life, surrounding Judas’s temptation and fate, Peter’s denial of Jesus,

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and other biblical and moral scenes. Plays focused action, often graphically, upon Jesus scourged and stricken with rods and thorns and upon Jesus’s travails on step-by-bloody-step of the Via Dolorosa. Pilate’s wife, Veronica, and others enact the viewer’s grief in her proto-conversion; blood (often pigs’ blood) and the stench of sulfur nauseated and delighted audiences, as did clockwork, mechanical special effects (Twycross 2006: 360). Mel Gibson’s 2004 Passion of the Christ incorporates all these elements. It has been widely noted that the script is an adaptation of Catherine Emmerich’s The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Brentano [1833] 1904).3 Gibson, however, has repeatedly insisted upon his film’s reliance on the Bible. He does strive for verisimilitude in costumes, and its screenplay is in ancient Aramaic, Latin, and Greek. Gibson’s combination of biblical language and Catholic ritual endorses both modern evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant privileging of biblical literalness and Catholic (pre-Vatican II) tradition. The Passion of the Christ has a structural frame of an arrested, beaten, and then staggering Jesus who bleeds through every set-station of the cross. Gibson frequently uses mini-scenes (via character memories) to tell lessons from Jesus’s life. A weeping Claudia gives Mary linens for Jesus’s blood and binding; Veronica meets a stumbling Jesus on the road to Calvary. The Jewish Sanhedrin are hooknosed, wild-eyed, elaborately robed, stereotypically Jewish-looking villains. The Romans and Jewish royals live in pomp and pageantry. Satan and his demons slither intermittently through the film. The intersections of Bible, film, and passion plays neither originate nor culminate in Gibson. Among the earliest examples of narrative cinema is the 1898 Passion Play at Oberammergau, which was followed by several silent “life of Jesus” and passion play films in the early silent film era (Reinhartz 2009: 214–16). Film and theater have a similar narrative of perceived deviance and attempted suppression (see Mitchell and Plate 2007: 7–42). As cinema matured, scripts and images pushed the boundaries of public mores. Many religious authorities attempted to impose “morality” restrictions and codes. The industry “voluntarily” adopted a system of content rating. Filmmakers such as Cecil DeMille filmed biblical stories as morality narratives. Doing so, particularly when one wrapped the activity in rhetoric of “most biblical” and “highly edifying,” resulted in public acclaim despite graphic sexuality and violence. Gibson encountered significant prerelease opposition for his movie’s violence and portrayal of Jews, but produced the most watched, rated-R movie in American history (Miramax 2004: xi, 127–45). Using the same technique as DeMille, Gibson released his film on Ash Wednesday. Marketing materials were sent to churches and Christian organizations, encouraging them to take groups of viewers—youth groups, Bible study groups, prayer groups—to view the movie during Lent. Miramax developed and distributed viewer guides for small group discussion and also produced scholarly volumes for academics who wanted to teach through-or-with the movie (Miramax 2004). Christian groups made viewing the film a communal and liturgical act, rendering its graphic violence “safe” (perhaps necessary).

Fourth Station: Toward a Critical, Affective Film Theory The humanities’ affective turn was largely heralded by film theory, where affect is a response to overreliance upon structuralism, formalism, or screen critique. In the oft-cited description of Steven For surveys of Jesus movies, see Walsh (2003), Staley and Walsh (2007), Tatum (2013), and Malone (2012). On Gibson’s film, see also Miramax (2004).

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Shaviro (1993; see also 2004), affect-influenced film theory is moving from psychobiological and social understandings of viewer response into “visceral, affective responses to film, in sharp contrast to most critics’ exclusive concern with issues of form, meaning, and ideology” (Shaviro 1993: 10; emphasis added). Affect criticism expands wooden Lacanian psychoanalytic approaches to spectatorship where spectators resonate with empathy for characters (particularly protagonists). Shaviro argues emotion is the after-effect of affect. Affect in its Deleuzian sense is a transfer of will and of consciousness via mechanisms and forms that produce that a/effect. Following Shaviro, Eugenie Brinkema expands current affect-oriented film theory via appeal to, and very close analysis of, form; she retheorizes close reading as affective reading. Her 2015 book offers a trenchant critique of issues of film, affect, and form and how these intersect with horror, grief, gender, and violence. “The affective turn in film and media studies has produced repeated versions of the reification of the passions; films produce something in the audience, or, sometimes, in the theorist, or sometimes, in the theorist alone” (Brinkema 2015: 31; her emphasis). Yet, as Brinkema notes, the affect-corrective to film studies has, at times, overdrawn its own assumptions and constructed a superficial approach where affect is found only on the skin and only in the viewer. She notes that, for some affect-critics, to probe too deeply beneath surface structures is to mar with scars and excisions of autopsy, to obliterate the site by excavation, but “reading for form does not involve a retreat from other theoretical, political and ethical commitments” (2015: 39). Brinkema argues affect is not superficial, but that the surface is (in a Foucaultian sense) a “fold,” the exterior made complex by the discovery of its attachment to an interior. To discover form is to discover affect. Much like formalism cautioned against the “intentional fallacy” in literature, Brinkema argues attention to form avoids an “affective fallacy,” the assertion that (a viewer’s own) emotional response simply is and is beyond critique. Brinkema argues affect is only, can only be, a form of form. Affect is inherent and emergent. She advocates for a “radical formalism” that, for film criticism and literature, “would take the vital measure of theory for form and take the measure of form for affectivity” (2015: 37; her emphasis). Brinkema’s desire to locate affect in form may seem to underplay embodiment (2015: 40–41). She recognizes this weakness, acknowledging her argument relies upon a methodology (affect critique), which has, as its core assumption, embodiment. If one places the whole of affect within the form (and, furthermore, a form that requires close reading) one eliminates (or reduces) the impulsivity (compulsivity) of affect. Affect depends upon sensation; sensation requires embodiment. Brinkema’s tentative solution is to argue embodiment itself is a form of form, that “Body itself is a kind of form” (2015: 40). Brinkema is certainly correct to note that affect arises from form and that there is an absolute imperative to close reading and analysis. She is correct, as well, to return to a sense of “affect” that resonates with Deleuze (and, in turn, Deleuze’s readings of Foucault and Spinoza) and neurobiology, where affect is motivating or eliciting force, a transferring of energy and discovery, an intermediary between text-image and reader-viewer. The viewer is participant with/in/and viewing and the making of meaning. The meaning of affect in film (perhaps unique to viewing over reading) is that interstitial, preconscious moment of the transfer itself: the jolt at a sudden sound, the wince at the sight of blood, the aroused crossing of the legs, a transfer which eludes (or elides) because it precedes (or evades) conscious cognition. She is also very correct that “we may well be at the beginning of what will be called the twenty-first-century ‘return to form’ in the humanities” (2015: 39). Like theory and subjectivity, body and affect must somehow be correlated to the shift toward form. Affect links viewer and film; affect links religion and film; religion links mythology and ritual; surfaces link, via the fold, to depths; affect links cognition

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and embodiment. Like rituals, movies are the affective embodiments of narrative and sign. All flow in succession to create meaning.

Fifth Station: Seeing Is Believing: The Embodied, Affective Eye Film is photography, complex structures and interplays between absence and presence, darkness and light. As Plato notes, the gazing at shadows has a real e/affect. Film is an Eleusinian mystery; things shown, spoken, and seen coalesce into “meaning.” In many ways, film criticism can be rightly called the explication of the obvious. It is the explanation of a photograph (to be exact, a series of photographs changed at twenty-four frames a second). Photographs are the result of blocking light. What we see is the residue of light passing through a negative, the absence of substance. We see the residue, very precisely, of nothing. A “photograph” is a writing, an inscription, in/of/ by light. A photograph is a text composed in light. A motion picture is a series of photographs, a series of light-essays in need of interpretation. When these mini-texts flash by, a series of photographs are given coherence and continuity by our brains. Our optic nerves are stimulated by the flashing lights. Our brains are awash with stimuli to the occipital and temporal cortices (identifying shape; noting—creating—velocities and trajectories of items in motion), Heschl’s gyrus (the brain’s auditory region), and Wenicke’s area (language processing). Our brains become active in the limbic areas (emotion), the fusiform gyrus (facial recognition) as if we are seeing something “real.” But none of this motion or narrative exists. Cinema is a mental construct. Movies, as movies, only exist in our minds. Motion, not to mention narrative coherence (and “meaning”), arises from sequential, referential reading and interpretation by an embodied, active viewer. To watch a film is to be a reader who knits together a series of discrete, intact, ultimately separable “texts” into a coherent, meaningful whole. Every movie is an instance of Barthian intertextuality. Roland Barthes’s final work, Camera Lucida (1981), is a profoundly moving study on the death of Barthes’s mother and the feelings her loss awakened within him (discussed at length in Brinkema 2015: 76–112). Throughout, Barthes discusses photographs, photographic technology, and ponders their relationship to reality, nostalgia, and memory. The photograph permanently captures a single present. There is no past in a photograph, only its residue; photographs are allusions to time. Photographs resonate with the present, they hint at their own referentiality but do not possess any, and they may become artifacts of the past even though they have none. These senses of meaning are constructs, Barthes argues; photographs possess memory, meaning, and affective power only to those who know what they are seeing. Except that they do not. Certainly, affective engagement with context or memory can enliven a photograph, but some photographs will possess a visceral, vital affect regardless of context. A photo, even if fully abstract, can produce delight, fear, sadness, or disgust. Certainly, a photograph’s ability to produce some types of affect—in particular nostalgia— needs a knowing viewer. But there is an inherent, persistent affect in the form of the photograph, itself. Turing to cinema: photographs as photographs are given context, and, so, meaning is applied to their affect. Photographs are still aorist. They still, independently, have no context or continuity, yet their sequential progression produces, by both conscious and unconscious cognition of the viewer, a sense of history and continuity, a narrative, a past, and a possible future. They will, in sequence, proceed toward a larger narrative or sequence, even though film,

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like dream, fundamentally violates “real” possibilities of perspective and time. Movies produce affect via their forms as this process of discovery, but also by analytic cognition. Neurobiologically, the mechanisms for perception, about 45 percent of the brainwave activity for someone watching a movie, are uniform, but the part of the brain that responds to (interprets) this process, centers for emotion and higher cognition, the other 55 percent, vary widely. What we see is the same, but varies in its appropriation. That difference is the “reader”— her experience (memory, knowledge, nostalgia) producing and responding to affect (disgust, fear, arousal, anger). We both do and do not see the same movie, even as movies both do and do not exist outside our minds.

Sixth Station: Cutting Jesus Jesus is whipped. In Mark (and Matthew), Pilate has Jesus scourged in preparation of crucifixion (Mk 15:15; Mt. 27:26). The scene is easy to miss; it is a single aorist participle (“after scourging him”) at the beginning of a sentence with a more ominous and show-stopping finale (“they led him out to be crucified”). In Luke, there is no scourging of Jesus; Pilate offers to have Jesus scourged (23:22) but the crowds demand crucifixion. In Jn 18:1-3, Pilate has Jesus scourged mid-trial (presumably to placate the crowd); afterward, Jesus returns for a second interview and condemnation. John’s treatment is longer than that of the Synoptic Gospels—a full sentence of seven words. Jesus’s scourging is not a central part, in terms of narrative space, in the gospel passions. In The Passion of the Christ, the scourging takes over thirteen minutes, more than10 percent of the movie. Jesus is beaten with rods first. He does not cry out. Driven to his knees, at the end, he stands back up. The guards, seeing this defiance, begin again using a “cat-of-ninetails” to better tear flesh. This time Jesus is driven to the ground. We see his (bloody) hands still chained to a post, see two soldiers mercilessly whipping him, see blood spatter, but his body is gone; only Jesus’s bloody, clinching hands remain in the shot. The beating is so violent and extensive that the soldiers tire. Their initial leering, strutting, taunting expressions become sideeyes, bent forward, hands on knees, out of breath. “How can he keep going on like this?” we see them ask through glances and exchanges. The crowd members look away. So, often, does the camera; taking cues from the way the gospels struggle with the terror inherent in crucifixion, Gibson, himself, cannot avoid the occasional wincing blink (see Goodacre 2004). Jesus’s mother must walk away, a single tear staining her face (the whipping’s cadence still heard; the beating occasionally glimpsed over her shoulder in racking focus). Jesus’s back is beaten raw; the order is given to turn him over for yet a third round of whipping. Satan moves in-and-among the crowds and soldiers—first alone, then stroking a grotesque baby. The scene builds anxiety and anticipation. It opens with soldiers roughly stripping then lashing Jesus to a post; the weaponry is brought out and arrayed on a table. Jesus is forced to bend forward, stripped, his buttocks distended toward the soldiers who stand behind him, a posture of male-rape. Jesus is beaten to the ground, left lying prone. He is rolled over to be whipped on his chest, stomach, and genitals. Jesus’s virgin flesh is torn and opened. It is moistened, wet with blood. Blood spatters soldiers, the crowds, and runs down Jesus’s side(s). Jesus gasps. He moans. He closes his eyes and rubs his head against the pillar. He does not scream. He does not beg. He does not curse or plead. He endures. As the scene opens, he prays to God, “My heart is ready”; during the scene, his mother opines that Jesus’s powers could end it, but he will not. Jesus’s body is forced, opened, torn, and consumed. We see the soldiers act. We see Jesus’s face in response. We see the spattering blood, the shaken body of Jesus. We hear the breathless soldiers grunt. We

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hear Jesus’s stifled cries and gasps. We hear the labored breathing of both beaten and beating. The scene continues until a Roman commander intervenes, sickened by the violence—unwilling to watch what Gibson, and apparently we, were willing to see. Later when Jesus reappears before Pilate, his beaten state clearly unnerves (unmans?) a disgusted Pilate. As Jesus’s beaten body is taken from the scourging place, the pillar where Jesus was tied stands, shot from above, a divine perspective. The entire area is soaked with pooled and spattered blood, a void left where Jesus’s body had been. Claudia has given linens to a bewildered Mary; she uses them to soak up the blood, a mother’s desire to keep any memento of her son. Jesus’s endurance empowers him in ways that draw from a long tradition in martyr literature, where the martyr’s noble suffering unmans and demoralizes his torturers (see Moore and Anderson 1998). As Jesus lies on his back, he sees a blood-spattered Roman sandal and recalls washing his disciples’ feet. The effect of this central scene lies in its affect(s). It produces, in turn: disgust, horror, sadness, awe. It unites weakness (in submission to pain) and power (in the endurance of it). This scene is visceral, a carving up and out of the body of Jesus. It “mans” Jesus, showing both his humanity but also his extra-human resolve. The psycho-sexual element of this scene is appropriate. Jesus is engaging in the ultimate BDSM moment (see Moore 1996: 76–129). Jesus is submitting to pain out of love, his body hurt for the love of another. He is defiantly submissive, dominantly passive. The scene is grossly affective. Viewers wince, squirm, ache as the scene progresses; it humiliates, disturbs and angers, terrifies.

Seventh Station: Feeling Terrible: The Passion and/as Horror Is The Passion of the Christ a horror movie?4 It certainly opens that way. Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane is accompanied by a leering Satan. The music, the lighting, the mood of the scene is horror. Jesus’s flagellation and crucifixion drip with blood and gore. Judas’s demise is a montage of madness and horror. Horror vacillates between excitement (at times quasi-sexual) and disgust. Horror discloses even as it obliterates superficiality: bodies are ripped open, and the reality (of evil) is exposed and foregrounded. Horror requires bodies: the fearful eye, the rigid hand, the open mouth, torn flesh, blood, but also discovery and reflection. Horror, as a genre, has affective forms of both the disembodied and unseen, the fearful abyss beneath the surface or skin. Ultimately the affect of horror is the Freudian unheimlich, and the membranes between the unheimlich and the sacred are precariously thin. Bruce Kawin notes the ritual setting of the horror movie, a ritual descent beneath the surface, into the underworld glimpsed within a darkened room (2012: 360–61). Criticism of horror movies, in terms of affect, often focuses upon two principal aspects: disgust and powerlessness, both seen in the body’s dismemberment (Brinkema 2015: 152– 81). Freud’s famous essay associates the unheimlich with the embodied sensation of not only repulsiveness, but also disgust and (unwanted) discovery. Crude, consumptive, embodied actions (expectoration, regurgitation, defecation, urination, mastication, flatulence, gestation—things within bodies now bursting out) are the antithesis of reason and thought; disgust is triggered by (what are considered) baser forms of embodiment: viscera, foul odors, excrement, blood. When Freud mounts this argument, he is capitulating to a millennia-old conceit: cognition, reason, and intellect are higher and more noble than bodily drives, processes, or affect. For affirmative answers, see McGeough’s chapter in this book, and Walsh (2008).

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Often seen as the antithesis of aesthetics (as well as of reason), horror and disgust have influenced gospel criticism (see Moore 1996; 2001: 173–99) and also film studies exploring horror and pornography.5 Mikita Brottman argues that horror and disgust arise most acutely not just from images associated with refuse, but particularly with consumption, rending, and dismemberment (and exposure) of bodies (1997). As bodies are torn and fragmented, particularly human bodies, we are aroused to disgust and repulsion. Horror, as a film genre, exploits this primal reaction, often blurring it into highly sexualized images and violence. Violence becomes a cipher for possession and control (or its loss). As Brottman points out, there is an inherent element of consumption and of being consumed (or torn), of implicit cannibalism in horror. We are reacting to a fear of bringing impurities into our bodies, even as we fear being torn and eaten. The affect of horror is a fear of both eating and being eaten, a fear of both being torn and becoming cannibal. Horror lacerates barriers between concealment and exposure, interior and exterior, skin and depth. Mary Ann Beavis has carefully reviewed the role of Bible in horror films (2016), mapping the role of Bible in these films in transitioning the viewer from skepticism to “piety” (her term). Bible functions to both explain and legitimate (and, sometimes, defeat) the forces of evil. In Gibson, Bible is horror. The flaying of Jesus’s flesh in the scourging scene is (with some, but not much, argument) the bloodiest scene in Gibson’s film. The entire scene—the characters, the set, the props, the mise-en-scène—is spattered with Jesus’s blood. To see the rending of flesh and the shedding of Jesus’s blood, however, is also to be reminded of Christianity’s central ritual enactment of myth: the final supper or communion. Jesus identifies the bread with his own body “broken (torn) for you,” the cup becomes his blood shed on behalf of others, a ritual the film alludes to as Jesus remembers washing Peter’s feet during his scourging. The flagellation of Jesus is disgusting because of its focus upon blood. Its affect is heightened because it becomes a moment of communion as well. It is terrible in its centralization of a character writhing in pain, it is unnerving in its celebration of brutality and savagery. But what produces the central horror is its function as the actualization of Jesus’s words. His body is broken and fragmented. His blood is sprayed over the onscreen audience as if it were blood spattered on an altar in consecration, water scattered upon a believer in baptism. The scene’s deeply embedded affect of disgust produces a disgusted, nauseated viewer, a viewer whose own affect causes them to turn away and “reject” Jesus. It forces the viewer to enact the movie’s central ideology even as it depicts the most central, sacred moment: the tearing of Jesus’s body, the breaking of Jesus for the sake of humanity and human sin, the scattering and washing in the blood of Jesus.

Final Credits In The Passion of the Christ the dis-embodiment of the divine body—effected via the slow, disgusting dis-enfleshment, de-carnational beating of Jesus—is deeply, pervasively affectual. Fragmentation and dis-embodiment writhe beneath and through the genre of horror with its fear of mastication and being consumed (predation), fear of losing control over self and body, fear of forced cannibalization. Religion and horror are genres more integrated than not. Harvey Whitehouse notes the inter-engagement of religion, ritual, and fear (2008: 268–70; see the discussion in Schaefer 2015: 53–54). Fear functions, Whitehouse argues, as ritual’s principal Pomerance (2004), Carroll (1990), and Freeland (2000). See also Adams and Yates (1997) for an early work fusing literature on the ugly and disgusting and religious discourse.

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affect (a “holy fear”), particularly in rituals of consecration, atonement, and ordination. Religious affect, in particular, trades in various forms of fear (the “awe and tremor” of Durkheim’s sacred). “Religious affects are not cosmetic: they are the material substance of power, enticing bodies into political regimes. ‘Fear’, Ahmed shows, ‘does something’” (Schaefer 2015: 55; quoting Sarah Ahmed, 126; her emphasis). Viewer reception of The Passion of the Christ was polarizing. Advocates reported quickened faith and renewed devotion to Jesus. Critics were appalled by the violence and cast as antiChristian. Gibson’s portrayals of Jews were charged with anti-Semitism. Academic biblical scholarship was, and remains, very frustrated. In many ways, this reaction both misses, and is, the point of the movie; The Passion of the Christ, like religion itself, is affectual. Affect is also central to the power of religious ritual and activity. Religion is a way of re-ordering and restraining thoughts or experiences that are irrational (or a-rational). It folds in the superficial into new depth in its folding of the affectual response into the cognitive. Religion and film cohere, as Plate suggests, because they use common elements of narrative, semiotics, and ritual to create a new imaginary “world” (2008), but also because all these elements agree to create affect. Gibson’s use of violence links the affect of violence, and horror, to the devotion of Jesus. The Passion of the Christ folds a great deal of violence (and sublimated sexuality) beneath a pious surface. Jesus’s body is beautiful, important to creating the horror to come. We watch this body beaten and systematically broken over the next two hours. The film’s affect lies largely in watching beauty ruined (for love), and the emotions that this violence produces drip and pool to form the texture of the movie’s affectual turn.

Works cited Adams, James Luther, and Wilson Yates, eds. (1997), The Grotesque in Art & Literature: Theological Reflections, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Ahmed, Sara (2004), The Cultural Poetics of Emotion, New York: Routledge. Barthes, Roland (1981), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Wang and Hill. Beavis, Mary Ann (2016), “From Skepticism to Piety: The Bible and Horror Films,” in Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch (ed.), The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and Its Reception in Film, 2 Vols., 1: 223–35, Handbooks of the Bible and its Reception, 2, Berlin and Boston: DeGruyter. Brentano, Clemens ([1833] 1904), The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ: From the Meditations of Anne Catherine Emmerich, New York: Benziger Brothers. Available online: http:// catholicplanet​.com​/ebooks​/Dolorous​-Passion​.pdf (accessed December 15, 2016). Brinkema, Eugenie (2015), The Forms of the Affects, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brottman, Mikita (1997), Offensive Films: Toward an Anthropology of Cinéma Vomitif, Westport: Greenwood. Carroll, Noël (1990), The Philosophy of Horror, New York: Routledge. Csapo, Eric (2005), Theories of Mythology, Ancient Culture 1, Oxford: Blackwell. Freeland, Cynthia (2000), The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror, Boulder: Westview. Freud, Sigmund (1919), “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”), trans. Alix Strachey. Available online: www​.mit​.edu​/allenmc​/www​/freud1​.pdf (accessed January 13, 2017). Goodacre, Mark (2004), “The Power of The Passion: Reacting and Over-Reacting to Gibson’s Artistic Vision,” in Kathleen E. Corley and Robert Webb (eds.), Jesus and Mel Gibson’s The

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Passion of the Christ: The Film, the Gospels and the Claims of History, 28–44, New York: Continuum. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. (2010), The Affect Studies Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Hoyt, Sarah F. (1912), “The Etymology of Religion,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 32 (2): 126–29. Kawin, Bruce F. (2012), “Children of the Light,” in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Studies IV, 360–81, Austin: University of Texas Press. Koosed, Jennifer L., and Stephen D. Moore, eds. (2014), Affect Theory and the Bible [Special Issue], Biblical Interpretation 22 (4–5). Kotrosits, Maia (2015), Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence and Belonging, Minneapolis: Fortress. Kotrosits, Maia (2016), “How Things Feel: Biblical Studies, Affect Theory, and the (Im) Personal,” Brill Research Perspectives in Biblical Interpretation, 1 (1): 1–53. Lyden, John C. (2007), “Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals,” in Jolyon Mitchell and Brent Plate (eds.), The Religion and Film Reader, 416–20, New York: Routledge. Malone, Peter (2012), Screen Jesus: Portrayals of Christ in Television and Film, Toronto: Scarecrow. Miramax (2004), Perspectives on The Passion of the Christ: Religious Thinkers and Writers Explore the Issues Raised by the Controversial Movie, New York: Miramax. Mitchell, Jolyon, and S. Brent Plate, eds. (2007), The Religion and Film Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Moore, Stephen D. (1996), God’s Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible, New York: Routledge. Moore, Stephen D. (2001), God’s Beauty Parlor And Other Queer Spaces in and Around the Bible, Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Moore, Stephen D., and Janice Capel Anderson (1998), “Taking it Like a Man: Masculinity in 4 Maccabees,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 117 (2): 249–73. Plate, S. Brent (2008), Religion and Film: Cinema and the Recreation of the World, Short Cuts, London: Wallflower. Pomerance, Murray, ed. (2004), Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen, Albany: State University of New York Press. Reinhartz, Adele (2009), “Jesus Movies,” in William L. Blizek (ed.), Continuum Companion to Religion and Film, 211–21, New York: Continuum. Schaefer, Donovan (2015), Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power, Durham: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Seigworth, Gregory J. (2016), “Wearing the World Like a Debt Garment: Interface, Affect and Gesture,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 16 (4): 15–31. Shaviro, Steven (1993), The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shaviro, Steven (2004), Post-Cinematic Affect, Winchester, NY: Zero. Staley, Jeffrey L., and Richard Walsh (2007), Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination: A Handbook to Jesus on DVD, Louisville: Westminster. Tatum, W. Barnes (2013), Jesus at the Movies: A Guide to the First Hundred Years, 3rd ed., Salem: Polebridge. Taylor, Mark C. (1997), Hiding, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tompkins, Silvan (1962), Affect, Language, Consciousness, New York: Springer. Twycross, Meg (2006), “The Theater,” in John F. A. Sawyer (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Bible and Culture, 338–62, Oxford: Blackwell. Walsh, Richard (2003), Reading the Gospels in the Dark: Portrayals of Jesus in Film, New York: Trinity International Press.

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Walsh, Richard (2008), “The Passion as Horror Film: St. Mel of the Cross,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 20 (2008). Available online: https://www​.questia​.com/ libra​ry/jo​urnal​/1G1-​19683​ 2889/​the-p​assio​n-as-​horro​r-fil​m-st-​mel-o​f-the​-cros​s (accessed January 3, 2017). Whitehouse, Harvey (2008), “Terror,” in John Corrigan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook on Religion and Emotion, 259–75, New York: Oxford. Wright, Melanie J. (2008), Religion and Film: An Introduction, New York: I. B. Taurus.

23

Introduction to Critical Race Theory Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic

Think of events that can occur in an ordinary day. A child raises her hand repeatedly in a fourth grade class; the teacher either recognizes her or does not. A shopper hands a cashier a five dollar bill to pay for a small item; the clerk either smiles, makes small talk, and deposits change in the shopper’s hand or does not. A woman goes to a new car lot ready to buy; salespeople stand about talking to each other or all converge trying to help her. A jogger in a park gives a brief acknowledgment to an approaching walker; the walker returns the greeting or walks by silently. You are a white person—the child, the shopper, the jogger. The responses are all from white people and are all negative. Are you annoyed? Do you, for even a moment, think that maybe you are receiving this treatment because of your race? Or might you think that all these people are having a bad day? Next suppose that the responses are all from persons of color. Are you thrown off guard? Angry? Depressed? You are a person of color and these same things happen to you and the actors are all white. What is the first thing that comes to your mind? Do you immediately think that you might be treated in these ways because you are not white? If so, how do you feel? Angry? Downcast? Do you let it roll off your back? And if the responses come from fellow persons of color, then what do you think? Suppose the person of color is from a group other than your own? Sometimes actions like these are mere rudeness or indifference. The merchant is in a hurry; the walker, lost in thought. But at other times, race seems to play a part. When it does, social scientists call the event a “microaggression,” by which they mean one of those many sudden, stunning, or dispiriting transactions that mar the days of women and folks of color. Like water dripping on sandstone, they can be thought of as small acts of racism, consciously or unconsciously perpetrated, welling up from the assumptions about racial matters most of us absorb from the cultural heritage in which we come of age in the United States. These assumptions, in turn, continue to inform our public civic institutions—government, schools, churches—and our private, personal, and corporate lives. Sometimes the acts are not micro at all. Imagine that the woman or minority standing alone and ignored at the car sales lot eventually attracts the attention of a salesperson. They negotiate, and she buys a car. Later she learns that she paid almost a thousand dollars more than what the average white male pays for that same car. (See Ian Ayres, Fair Driving, 104 Harv. L. Rev. 817 [1991])

A. What Is Critical Race Theory? The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement

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considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. Although CRT began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, controversies over curriculum and history, and IQ and achievement testing. Political scientists ponder voting strategies coined by critical race theorists. Ethnic studies courses often include a unit on critical race theory, and American studies departments teach material on critical white studies developed by CRT writers. Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension. It not only tries to understand our social situation, but to change it; it sets out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies, but to transform it for the better.

B. Early Origins Critical race theory sprang up in the mid-1970s, as a number of lawyers, activists, and legal scholars across the country realized, more or less simultaneously, that the heady advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled and, in many respects, were being rolled back. Realizing that new theories and strategies were needed to combat the subtler forms of racism that were gaining ground, early writers such as Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado (coauthor of this primer) put their minds to the task. They were soon joined by others, and the group held its first conference at a convent outside Madison, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1989. Further conferences and meetings took place. Some were closed working sessions at which the group threshed out internal problems and struggled to clarify central issues, while others were public, multi-day affairs with panels, plenary sessions, keynote speakers, and a broad representation of students, activists, and scholars from a wide variety of disciplines.

C. Relationship to Other Movements As the reader will see, critical race theory builds on the insights of two previous movements, critical legal studies and radical feminism, to both of which it owes a large debt. It also draws from certain European philosophers and theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci and Jacques Derrida, as well as from the American radical tradition exemplified by such figures as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Power and Chicano movements of the sixties and early seventies. From critical legal studies, the group borrowed the idea of legal indeterminacy—the idea that not every legal case has one correct outcome. Instead, one can decide most cases either way, by emphasizing one line of authority over another, or interpreting one fact differently from the way one’s adversary does. It also incorporated the critique of triumphalist history, and the insight that favorable precedent, like Brown v. Board of Education, tends to deteriorate over time, cut back by narrow lower-court interpretation and administrative foot dragging and delay. The group also built on feminism’s

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insights into the relationship between power and the construction of social roles, as well as the unseen, largely invisible collection of patterns and habits that make up patriarchy and other types of domination. From conventional civil rights thought, the movement took a concern for redressing historic wrongs, as well as the insistence that legal and social theory have practical consequences. CRT also shared with it a sympathetic understanding of notions of nationalism and group empowerment.

D. Principal Figures Derrick Bell, professor of law at New York University, is the movement’s intellectual father figure. Still active today, Bell teaches, writes occasional law review articles and memoir-type books, delivers speeches, and keeps a number of case-books current. The late Alan Freeman, who taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo law school, wrote a number of foundational articles, including a pathbreaking piece that documented how the U.S. Supreme Court’s race jurisprudence, even when seemingly liberal in thrust, nevertheless legitimized racism. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Harris, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams are major figures, as well. Leading Asian scholars include Neil Gotanda, Eric Yamamoto, and Matsuda. The top Indian critical scholar is Robert Williams; the best-known Latinos/as, Richard Delgado, Kevin Johnson, Margaret Montoya, Juan Perea, and Francisco Valdes. The reader will find their ideas discussed frequently throughout this primer.

E. Spin-off Movements Recently, critical race theory has splintered. Although the new subgroups, which include an emerging Asian American jurisprudence, a forceful Latino-critical (LatCrit) contingent, and a feisty queer-crit interest group, continue to maintain relatively good relations under the umbrella of critical race theory, meeting together at periodic conferences and gatherings, each has developed its own body of literature and set of priorities. For example, Latino and Asian scholars study immigration theory and policy, as well as language rights and discrimination based on accent or national origin. A small group of Indian scholars addresses indigenous people’s rights, sovereignty, and land claims.

F. Basic Tenets of Critical Race Theory What do critical race theorists believe? Probably not every member would subscribe to every tenet set out in this book, but many would agree on the following propositions. First, that racism is ordinary, not aberrational—“normal science,” the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country. Second, most would agree that our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material. The first feature, ordinariness, means that racism is difficult to cure or address. Colorblind, or “formal,” conceptions of equality, expressed in rules that insist only on treatment that is the same across the board, can thus remedy only the most blatant forms of discrimination, such as mortgage redlining or the refusal to hire a black Ph.D. rather than a white high school dropout, that do stand out and attract our attention. The second feature, sometimes called

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“interest convergence” or material determinism, adds a further dimension. Because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class people (psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it. Consider, for example, Derrick Bell’s shocking proposal (discussed in a later chapter) that Brown v. Board of Education—considered a great triumph of civil rights litigation—may have resulted more from the self-interest of elite whites than a desire to help blacks. A third theme of critical race theory, the “social construction” thesis, holds that race and races are products of social thought and relations. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient. People with common origins share certain physical traits, of course, such as skin color, physique, and hair texture. But these constitute only an extremely small portion of their genetic endowment, are dwarfed by that which we have in common, and have little or nothing to do with distinctly human, higher-order traits, such as personality, intelligence, and moral behavior. That society frequently chooses to ignore these scientific facts, creates races, and endows them with pseudo-permanent characteristics is of great interest to critical race theory. Another, somewhat more recent, development concerns differential racialization and its many consequences. Critical writers in law, as well as social science, have drawn attention to the ways the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market. At one period, for example, society may have had little use for blacks, but much need for Mexican or Japanese agricultural workers. At another time, the Japanese, including citizens of long standing, may have been in intense disfavor and removed to war relocation camps, while society cultivated other groups of color for jobs in war industry or as cannon fodder on the front. Popular images and stereotypes of various minority groups shift over time, as well. In one era, a group of color may be depicted as happy-go-lucky, simpleminded, and content to serve white folks. A little later, when conditions change, that very same group may appear in cartoons, movies, and other cultural scripts as menacing, brutish, and out of control, requiring close monitoring and repression. Closely related to differential racialization—the idea that each race has its own origins and ever-evolving history—is the notion of intersectionality and anti-essentialism. No person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity. A white feminist may be Jewish, or working-class, or a single mother. An African American activist may be gay or lesbian. A Latino may be a Democrat, a Republican, or even a black—perhaps because that person’s family hails from the Caribbean. An Asian may be a recently arrived Hmong of rural background and unfamiliar with mercantile life, or a fourth-generation Chinese with a father who is a university professor and a mother who operates a business. Everyone has potentially conflicting, overlapping identities, loyalties, and allegiances. A final element concerns the notion of a unique voice of color. Coexisting in somewhat uneasy tension with anti-essentialism, the voice-of-color thesis holds that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, Indian, Asian, and Latino/as writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know. Minority status, in other words, brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism. The “legal storytelling” movement urges black and brown writers to recount their experiences with racism and the legal system and to apply their own unique perspectives to assess law’s master narratives. This topic, too, is taken up later in this book.

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G. How Much Racism Is There in the World? Many modern-day readers believe that racism is declining or that class today is more important than race. And it is certainly true that lynching and other shocking expressions of racism are less frequent than in the past. Moreover, many Euro-Americans consider themselves to have black, Latino/a, or Asian friends. Still, by every social indicator, racism continues to blight the lives of people of color, including holders of high-echelon jobs, even judges. I concede that I am black. I do not apologize for that obvious fact. I take rational pride in my heritage, just as most other ethnics take pride in theirs. However, that one is black does not mean . . . that he is anti-white. . . . As do most blacks, I believe that the corridors of history in this country have been lined with countless instances of racial injustice. . . . Thus a threshold question which might be inferred from defendants’ petition is: Since blacks (like most other thoughtful Americans) are aware of the “sordid chapter in American history” of racial injustice, shouldn’t black judges be disqualified per se from adjudicating cases involving claims of racial discrimination? Federal Judge Leon Higginbotham, in refusing to disqualify himself from hearing a case, Commonwealth v. Local Union 542, International Union of Operating Engineers, 388 F. Supp. 155 (E.D. Pa. 1974).

Studies show that blacks and Latinos who seek loans, apartments, or jobs are much more apt than similarly qualified whites to be rejected, often for vague or spurious reasons. The prison population is largely black and brown; chief executive officers, surgeons, and university presidents are almost all white. Poverty, however, has a black or brown face: black families have, on the average, about one-tenth of the assets of their white counterparts. They pay more for many products and services, including cars. People of color lead shorter lives, receive worse medical care, complete fewer years of school, and occupy more menial jobs than do whites. A recent United Nations report showed that African Americans in the United States would make up the twenty-seventh ranked nation in the world on a combined index of social well-being; Latinos would rank thirty-third. Why all this is so and the relationship between racism and economic oppression—between race and class—are topics of great interest to critical race theory and covered later.

Bibliography Brooks, Roy L. & Mary Jo Newborn, Critical Race Theory and Classical-Liberal Civil Rights Scholarship: A Distinction without a Difference, 82 Cal. L. Rev. 787 (1994). Calmore, John O., Critical Race Theory, Archie Shepp, and Fire Music: Securing an Authentic Intellectual Life in a Multicultural World, 65 S. Cal. L. Rev. 2129 (1992). Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic eds., 2d ed. 2000). Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller & Kendall Thomas eds., 1995). Haney López, Ian F., The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice, 29 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 1 (1994). Harris, Angela P., Foreword: The Jurisprudence of Reconstruction, 82 Cal. L. Rev. 741 (1994). Hayman, Robert L., Jr., The Color of Tradition: Critical Race Theory and Postmodern Constitutional Traditionalism, 30 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 57 (1995).

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Omi, Michael & Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (2d ed. 1994). Race and Races: Cases and Resources for a Diverse America (Juan Perea, Richard Delgado, Angela Harris, & Stephanie Wildman eds., 2000). Special Issue on Critical Race Theory, 11 Int’l J. Qual. Stud. Ed. 1 (1998).Symposium: Critical Race Theory, 82 Cal. L. Rev. 741 (1994).

24

Freedom Is No Fear The New Testament and a Theology of Policing Esau McCaulley

... I’ll tell you what freedom is. Freedom is no fear. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?

Nina Simone Genesis 18:25

BY THE TIME I WAS SIXTEEN, I had no doubt that football would be my path to college.1 The letters and phone calls from college coaches had just begun, but my school had a rich tradition of sending its better athletes to university. All I had to do was perform on the field and stay out of trouble. At this point in high school, I had developed a sufficient buffer between myself and the violence of my neighborhood. I knew how to navigate the parties and neighborhoods of Northwest Huntsville. People knew me, not as a criminal, but as someone it wasn’t wise to bother. My grades were good enough to make getting into college a foregone conclusion.2 Therefore, when I speak of trouble I did not have in mind my own behavior. I was afraid of running into problems with the police—that I might find myself in an encounter that spun out of control. Why did I have this fear? I grew up in the aftermath of the Rodney King incident, which, in the era before cell phone videos, was an unheard of piece of evidence that confirmed Black fears. Rodney King had led the police on a high speed chase through Los Angeles. Eventually the police got him to stop, and after he exited the car, he was savagely beaten by four officers. The entire country saw that video and the pictures of King’s bruised body. But King’s beating did not create the fear. Most of us had our own stories, which might not have been as dramatic, but which still left lasting impressions. Driving while Black was not a problem that we imagined.3 By my junior year, then, I was wary. To prevent any problems, I developed a ritual whenever I went out with my friends. I volunteered to drive because I did not smoke or drink. Before getting I was wrong; such is the exuberance of youth. I was not a stellar student, but stellar wasn’t required of football players. T h e best short article can be found here: Christopher Ingraham, “You Really Can Get Pulled Over for Driving While Black, Federal Statistics Show,” Washington Post, September 9, 2014, www​.washingtonpost​.com​/news​/ wonk​/wp​/2014​/09​/09​/you​-really​-can​-get​-pulled​-over​-for​-driving​-while​-black​-federal​-statistics​-show.

1 2 3

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into my car, I made sure that none of us had anything illegal. No drugs, alcohol, or weapons entered my vehicle. As much as it depended on me, I had accounted for everything. We all traveled clean, and I drove. This seemed like a safe path through my last years of high school and into university. One night we had plans to go to the mall and later a party in the same part of town. As you can imagine, the main road leading to the mall was well travelled by many a teen on a Friday night. We decided to stop at a gas station on that road and fill up before continuing on with the night’s festivities. While at the station, we saw some of our friends who were heading in the same direction. We told them about the party and encouraged them to meet us there. After I finished filling up the tank, I got ready to leave. Then I noticed that a Black SUV had pulled up quite close to my car. I thought that was odd. He would get his gas soon enough. Then another SUV drove up to my left and another parked in front of my car. I thought I was being car jacked, but who would car jack someone less than a mile from the mall at a well-lit gas station? The mystery was solved when the officers came filing out of the SUV. They told us to put our hands where they could see them. I remember my friend saying that he wasn’t putting his hands anywhere. Right then my future flashed before my eyes. Had all my planning been for naught? Would my dreams unravel at the local Stop & Shop in exchange for a bag of chips and a few gallons of fuel? I told my friend to be quiet and do as the officer said. We complied. Then they told us to get out of the car. We complied. I asked the officer what was going on. Why had we been detained? He said that this gas station was a known drug spot and that he had seen us conducting a drug deal. I couldn’t help but think that was also a well-known place to acquire gas. But what could we do? He asked for all our licenses. Those that had them gave them up without protest. The officers then proceeded to check us and the car for anything illegal. I felt powerless and angry. The whole thing lasted less than twenty minutes. They found nothing. I expected some apology for what had just happened to us, some further explanation of what we had done other than being young and Black and at a gas station. Instead, they gave us back our licenses and told us we were free to go. After it was over, I no longer had any desire to go to the mall. Instead, I took everyone home and called it a night. The next morning, I couldn’t help but reflect on how close I came to losing it all: the football scholarship, the path out of poverty, the chance to help my family. I had been briefly terrorized. I wish that I could say that this was the only or the most egregious thing that happened to me. By my count, I have been stopped somewhere between seven and ten times on the road or for existing in public spaces for no crime other than being Black. These words may make it seem as if I dislike police officers. I do not. I have known many good police officers. I recognize the dangers that they face and the difficulties inherent in the vocation they choose. But a difficult job does not absolve one of criticism; it puts the criticism in a wider framework. That wider framework must also include, if we are going to be complete, the history of the police’s interaction with people of color in this country. If the difficulty of the job provides context, so does the historic legal enforcement of racial discrimination and the terror visited on Black bodies. We must tell the whole story, as difficult as that telling might be. Therefore, the question of how the police treats its citizens is a pressing issue in the lives of Black people. Surprisingly, despite the ongoing concerns of African Americans, this subject has seen very little reflection in the standard works on New Testament ethics.4 Is the guild correct? Is See, for example, the otherwise excellent works of Richard A. Burridge, Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007) and Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).

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the issue of the state’s treatment of its citizens a subject foreign to the New Testament such that Black folk looking to these texts will find little succor? The New Testament provides the beginning of a Christian theology of policing in two places, which we will consider in turn. First, I will examine the much maligned and misunderstood Romans 13:1–7. I will argue that scholars neglect the overlapping role of soldier and police officer in ancient Rome.5 This neglect has led them to ignore the fact that Paul’s words on the sword, and their link to the will and limits of the state, bear directly on the question of how the state polices its residents. Therefore, Romans 13:1–7 is a foundational passage for constructing a New Testament theology of policing. After establishing its importance, I will argue that Romans 13:1–7 has a lot more going on than advocating for a passive populace that pays its taxes and defers to those in power. I will maintain that Romans 13:1–7 asserts the sovereignty of God over the state. Paul says that the state’s policing duties should never be a terror to those who are innocent. Building upon the insights on the link between the soldier and the police officer, we will turn our attention to the ministry of John the Baptist as it’s recorded in Luke’s Gospel. There we will see him calling on the soldiers/law enforcement officers to do their job with integrity. I will close with a brief analysis of the implications of our exegesis for Christian engagement with the question of policing.

The Issue Is Bigger Than You Think: Romans 13:1–2 and the Problem of Evil Rulers Romans 13:1–2 does not, on first glance, seem to be a productive place to begin to speak about the limits that God places on the treatment of its citizens. It reads: Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. (Rom 13:1–2)

The focus of this passage appears to be individuals, not the state. Furthermore, Paul tells those individuals to submit to those in authority because they have been placed there by God. Those who resist these authorities run the risk, then, of opposing God’s will. Paul’s lack of qualification here has been a cause of concern for many.6 Do we not have a case in which the proper Christian response to mistreatment is not revolution, but obedience under suffering in the hopes of an eschatological righting of wrongs? Christian eschatology is a much-maligned area of reflection. The hope of new creation is often portrayed as an opiate lulling us into complacency. Eschatology, however, need not be dismissed as some small thing. The coming kingdom remains a central pillar of theology that not only gives us hope for the future, but also negates the power of those who can kill the body but do Christopher J. Fuhrmann, Policing the Roman Empire: Soldiers, Administration, and Public Order (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012). 6 Leander E. Keck, in Romans, Abingdon New Testament Commentaries (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005), says, “It is not the opaqueness of this passage that has distressed and divided interpreters but its clarity” (311); See also R. Cassidy, “The Politicization of Paul: Romans 13:1–7 in Recent Discussion,” The Expository Times 121, no 8 (2010): 383–89. 5

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no more (Mt 10:28). Nonetheless, I think that Paul has more in mind here than some flattened sub-biblical form of meekness. We need to recognize that critics of Paul and Romans 13:1–2 have not gone far enough. The problem is not that, according to their interpretation, Paul forbids rebelling against wicked rulers. The problem is the wicked rulers themselves. The issue, I want to suggest, is not merely exegetical; it is also philosophical. The path forward is not only found in a new exegetical insight, a new twist on a verb here or a noun there.7 The way beyond the impasse is to pursue the logic of the text to the end. Therefore we must ask why a good God, who is sovereign over all, would allow evil rulers to come to power? Stated differently, the question is not about our submission to wicked rulers, but their very existence. The criticism of Paul, then, is theodicy in a different form. Asking what we are to do when those tasked with governing us use that power to do harm is simply another way of asking why there is harm at all. One response to the problem of evil has been to posit the cross and resurrection as God’s answer to the question. We do not worship a God who sits apart, but who enters human pain and redeems it from within. The Christian is not given a series of deductive proofs that solve the problem of evil to our satisfaction. We are given an act of love that woos us. And we know that this wooing isn’t a false promise because the resurrection proves that God is sovereign over life and death. Our focus on eschatology in any case is not unique. The nihilist is just as driven by their eschatology. It’s just that his or hers is devoid of hope: let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. But we have drifted from Paul. Does the apostle have anything to say about how the state treats its citizens and our public response to that treatment that goes beyond submission? Yes. I suggest that Paul’s words about submission to governing authorities must be read in light of four realities: (1) Paul’s use of Pharaoh in Romans as an example of God removing authorities through human agents shows that his prohibition against resistance is not absolute; (2) the wider Old Testament testifies to God’s use of human agents to take down corrupt governments; (3) in light of the first two propositions, we can affirm that God is active through human beings even when we can’t discern the exact role we play; (4) therefore, Paul’s words should be seen as more of a limit on our discernment than on God’s activities. First, Paul and Pharaoh. Romans 9:17 reads, “For scripture says to Pharaoh: ‘I have raised you up for this very purpose of showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.’” God, according to the apostle, is glorified through his judgment of wicked kings. God removed Pharaoh because of his unjust and tyrannical rule. Exodus makes it clear that it is because of the economic exploitation, enslavement, and harsh treatment of Israel: Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” (Ex 3:7–10, emphasis added) T h is should not imply that the contextual framework within which we place the text does not matter. There are some significant examples of readings of Romans that take our own contexts and the wider letter seriously. For one attempt at such a reading see Monya A. Stubbs, “Subjection, Reflection, Resistance: An African American Reading of the Three-Dimensional Process of Empowerment in Romans 13 and the Free-Market,” in Navigating Romans through Cultures: Challenging Readings by Charting a New Course (New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 171–98.

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Pharaoh’s destruction, as it was presented in the book of Exodus, is largely the work of God. But God acts through Moses. Paul alludes to this story to speak about God’s sovereignty in Romans. Therefore, Paul knew and discussed in Romans an example of someone who did not merely submit to their authorities, namely Moses. This means that in Romans 13:1–2, Paul either has some qualification in mind or he considered Moses sinful.8 Furthermore, we have numerous examples of Old Testament passages where God uses human beings to bring down governments for their wickedness.9 Based on these two realities, I believe that Paul does not simply delay the righting of wrongs until the eschaton. Instead, Paul shows rightful skepticism about our ability to discern how we are functioning in God’s wider purposes. Stated differently, God brings his judgment against corrupt institutions through humans in his own time, and we are not given insight into our proper role in such matters.10 Moses might point the way forward. In his younger days he sees the oppression of his fellow Israelites and responds by killing an Egyptian (Ex 2:11–15). We know that Moses had properly diagnosed the problem of Israel’s slavery, but his solution was ill conceived. Later, God in his own time does bring lasting liberation to his people and links it to proper worship and the transformation of the nation (Ex 3:1–22). I maintain, then, that we read Romans 13:1–2 as a statement about the sovereignty of God and the limits of human discernment. We are allowed to discern and even condemn evil like the prophets did. We are allowed to resist like the Hebrew midwives, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Nonetheless, we cannot claim divine sanction for the proper timing and method of solving the problems we discern.11 Again, this does not place limits on our ability as Christians to call evil by its name, but it does obligate us to be willing to suffer the consequences of living in a fallen world. We recognize that the state has been given its responsibilities. We are not anarchists, but we do recognize that the state is in fact under God. The state has duties, and we can hold them accountable even if it means that we suffer for doing so peacefully. This suffering is only futile if the resurrection is a lie. If the resurrection is true, and the Christian stakes his or her entire existence on its truthfulness, then our peaceful witness testifies to a new and better way of being human that transcends the endless cycle of violence. Paul, then, in Romans 13:1–2 is not far from Jesus who tells his disciples that those who live by the sword die by it (Mt 26:52).

Policing the Empire Although Paul’s words to individuals have received the bulk of attention for exegetes, it is his words concerning the state that point the way to a Christian theology of policing. Paul grounds his call for submission to the state with a description of what the state should do: Surprisingly, Paul’s use of the Pharaoh narrative is almost universally ignored in considerations of Romans 13. The notable exception being Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “Reading Romans 13 with Simone Weil: Toward a More Generous Hermeneutic,” Journal of Biblical Literature 136 (2017): 3–22. 9 Daniel 7:1–28, for example, lays out a whole unfolding history of nations rising and falling according to the will of Israel’s sovereign Lord. 10 Stubbs suggests that Paul might be a little more pragmatic than I give him credit for. She says, “If this passage is read in the light of its surrounding verses (12:1–13:14), it reads less like a prescriptive demand and more like a call for Roman Christians to acknowledge their social reality in relation to the Roman state which is part of the existence of life in the Christian community.” Stubbs, “Subjection, Reflection, Resistance,” 172. 11 I contend that Paul’s theology of government is not much different from what we encounter in Daniel 2:20–21, which says the following: “Blessed be the name of God from age to age, / for wisdom and power are his. / He changes times and seasons, / deposes kings and sets up kings.” 8

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For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval; for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! (Rom 13:3–4)

Two exegetical insights and one historical note will be crucial to our interpretation of this passage. First, the historical. Many have noted that “bear the sword” has connections to the Roman military. The sword refers to the actions of the military at the behest of those in authority.12 However, Fuhrmann has argued persuasively that the rise of the Empire carried with it an increase in the “policing” activities of soldiers.13 Therefore, I contend that Paul’s words here can be seen as a comment on the role that police officers should play in the body politic. To this historical note we add two exegetical insights that should not be too controversial. First, in Romans 13:3–4, it is the state’s attitude, not the soldier/officer as a vocation that stands at the center of Paul’s concerns. Stated differently, Paul recognizes that the state has a tremendous influence on how the soldier/officer treats its citizens. Thus, if there is to be a reform it must be structural and not merely individualistic. This is grounds in a democracy for a structural advocacy on behalf of the powerless. Second, Paul says that the government should not be a source of fear for the innocent. This problem of innocent fearfulness continues to plague encounters between Black persons and law enforcement. Again Paul’s words provide guidance on the shape reform must take.

The Roman Christian and the Soldier/Officer In order to understand Paul’s words about the “sword,” we need to do a few things. First, we must define what we mean by police. Then we need to show that in Paul’s time soldiers performed a policing role by outlining the ways in which they policed the empire. This will lead to some practical thoughts on how Roman Christians might have encountered the sword. In referring to Roman soldiers as police, I do not mean that they functioned like modern police whose sole job is to investigate crimes, make arrests, and testify in court.14 When I refer to police officers, I have in mind, “any organized unit of men under official command whose duties involved maintaining public order and state control in a civilian setting.”15 Did Roman soldiers perform this policing role? Yes. In 48 BC Octavian defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra. This made him the sole power throughout the Roman world. One of the first things he did was transform the Roman militia into a standing army. This standing army was responsible for maintaining public order.16 Part of this maintenance of public order included, “guard duty, calming public disturbance,” and “crime investigation.”17 In Rome itself, Octavian created the Praetorian guard whose responsibility included the policing duties mentioned above and seeing to the safety of Octavian and his

Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), 796; Leon Morris, The Epistle to the Romans, PNTC (Grand Rapids, Ml: Eerdmans, 1987), 463–64. 13 Fuhrmann, Policing the Roman Empire. 14 Furhmann, Policing the Roman Empire, 4. 15 Furhmann, Policing the Roman Empire, 6. 16 Pat Southern, The Roman Army: A Social and Institutional History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006), 96–97. 17 Furhmann, Policing the Roman Empire, 7. 12

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family.18 The best estimates maintain that there were nine cohorts of the guard with between five hundred and one thousand soldiers in each cohort. These soldier/police officers were separated from their legions outside the city and lived in and among the people.19 They did not wear military uniforms and were often paid better than normal soldiers.20 Alongside his guard, Octavian set up the vigiles, a group whose initial mandate was to prevent arson and put out fires. Their role expanded, however, to include investigating petty crimes.21 When combined, the vigiles and the Praetorian guard were about ten thousand people charged with maintaining order in the city. This is roughly one officer per one hundred people.22 Therefore, Paul’s words about the sword would not have been an abstraction. Roman Christians would have come into contact, knowingly or not, with the policing power of the state on a regularly basis. We have established that the closest thing to a police force in Rome would be the soldiers who had been stationed in the city for the express purpose of maintaining order. We have also shown that they would not be a peripheral part of a Roman Christian’s life, but that a Roman Christian could expect to interact with the officers/soldiers quite regularly. We have evidence of this regularity in the New Testament itself, which periodically depicts interactions with soldiers. Can we say more? Where exactly might a Christian encounter this police force? Understanding how the Christian might encounter this police force is crucial if we want to understand the actual interactions between Christians and the “sword.” Augustus justified his rule by lauding the “peace” that he brought to the empire. In his famous Res Gestae, he relies on an ancient legend about the closing of the gate of Janus Quirinus to demonstrate the unprecedented peace he brought to Rome. He said, “Our ancestors wanted Janus Quirinus to be closed when throughout all the rule of the Roman people, by land and sea, peace had been secured through victory. Although before my birth it had been closed twice in all in recorded memory from the founding of the city, the senate voted three times in my principate that it be closed.”23 This peace was not merely the result of defeating enemies abroad; it was also about safety at home. Part of this safety entailed the curtailing of crime in the city. This involved setting up cohorts in troubled parts of the city and investigating crimes. These soldiers also worked alongside the vigiles, who functioned as something close to a night watch. They also oversaw gladiator events and other major festivals in the city’s life.24 Another neglected aspect of the soldier’s role was assisting in tax collection. Tax collectors in Rome were known for their corruption, often over, charging the people and demanding bribes.25 The soldiers in imperial Rome often functioned as the muscle behind the threats of these tax collectors.26 There is one more group that we must mention to round out our discussion of the policing in Rome: the Aediles and their staff. In the days of the republic, their job was to care for the temples and some of the public works of the city. Eventually, this role expanded to include maintaining public order. They also oversaw the markets by making sure that taxes were paid and the scales

Southern, Roman Army, 115. Southern, Roman Army, 8. Southern, Roman Army, 115. 21 Furhmann, Policing the Roman Empire, 117. 22 Furhmann notes that this is more than the city of New York, which has one officer per 190 people. Furhmann, Policing the Roman Empire, 118. 23 Augustus, Res Gestae, trans. Thomas Bushnell (n.p.: n.p., 1998), 13, http://classics​.mit​.edu​/Augustus​/deeds​ .html. 24 Furhmann, Policing the Roman Empire, 117, 129. 25 Pheme Perkins, “Taxes in the New Testament,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 12 (1984): 182–200. 26 Perkins, “Taxes in the New Testament,” 183. 18 19 20

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at the market were just. The oversight of the scales also led merchants to bribe Aediles and their staff so that the merchants could cheat their customers.27 A Roman Christian, then, might encounter the police if they found themselves in the wrong part of town late at night. Given that we know the early Roman Christians were not on the whole rich, living in the wrong part of town would have been the daily experience of many.28 Moreover, they might be questioned by the vigiles or Octavian’s guard simply for living in this neighborhood. They might have been bullied by officers trying to get a few extra dollars when tax collection season came around. Christian shop owners might have been pressured to pay the “fee” for doing business or risk being beat out by a competitor. Whenever the city was alive with festival and celebration, the Roman Christian might have had to watch out for an anxious officer who was keen to keep said festivities from spiraling out of control. In short, at any moment in the lives of Roman church members, they might come face to face with the state and its sword. Stated differently, the Roman Christian’s interaction with the power of the state bears some striking similarities to the potential encounters African Americans might have with the police in our day.

Paul, Structural Reform, and the Absence of Fear Having sketched the realities of policing in ancient Rome we can turn to exegesis proper. In Romans 13:3–4 Paul focuses on the authorities, not the officers themselves. He says, “Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval.” Here Paul recognizes that the soldier’s attitude toward the people who reside in the city will in large part be determined by those who give the orders.29 The problem, if there is one, does not reside solely in those who bear the sword, but those who direct it. In other words, Paul does not focus on individual actions, but on power structures. For the American Christian this means that he or she has to face the fact that our government has crafted laws over the course of centuries, not decades, that were designed to disenfranchise Black people.30 These laws were then enforced by means of the state’s power of the sword. Historically in America, the issue has been institutional corporate sin undergirded by the policing power of the state. What does Paul’s focus on structure mean for a Christian theology of policing? It means that the same government that created the structures has some responsibility to see those wrongs righted and injustices undone. Furthermore, if the power truly resides with the people in a democratic republic, then the Christian’s first responsibility is to make sure that those who direct the sword in our culture direct that sword in ways in keeping with our values. We can and must hold elected officials responsible for the collective actions of the agents of the state who act on our behalf. Furthermore, as participants in a free society, we have the ability to shape public opinion about what crime is and how criminals should be viewed. We can create a society where those who are suspected of breaking the law are treated as image bearers worthy of respect. A Christian theology of policing, then, must grow out of a Christian theology of persons. This Furhmann, Policing the Roman Empire, 60–61. See Peter Lampe’s From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003). 29 I use the language of “reside in the city” purposefully. Most were not citizens of Rome. 30 T h omas Hoyt Jr., “Interpreting Biblical Scholarship for the Black Church Tradition,” in The Stony Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 17–39. 27 28

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Christian theology of policing must remember that the state is only a steward or caretaker of persons. It did not create them and it does not own or define them. God is our creator, and he will have a word for those who attempt to mar the image of God in any person. We are being the Christians God called us to be when we remind the state of the limits of its power. A second series of exegetical insights follow from the first. Paul says that the rulers (who control the police) are not a terror to those engaged in good conduct. Paul states this as a fact. However, given what we said above about God’s ability to judge nations and rulers for corrupt practices, we can see that Paul speaks of an ideal. He knows that some rulers are a terror to those who are good. Paul mentioned a ruler (Pharaoh) earlier in Romans that was a terror, and that ruler experienced God’s judgment. In Romans 13:1–7, then, Paul outlines rulers’ responsibilities as God’s servants without directly addressing the problem of evil rulers. I contend that in absence of that explanation of Romans 13:1–7, we are free to use Paul’s reference to Egypt and the wider biblical account to fill in the gap. Now we come to the heart of it. Black hope for policing is not that complicated. Paul articulates that hope quite plainly in Romans 13:4. We want to live free of fear. When I am pulled over for a traffic stop, I am afraid precisely because the police have been a source of terror in my own life and the lives of my people. This terror trickled down from a national government that often viewed our skin as dangerous. As I entered the last years of high school, I was not afraid of doing anything wrong that might cost me a trip to college. If that happened it would be on me. I could deal with that. But I was afraid of being perceived as a threat because I could not in a few tense moments of interaction with law enforcement argue or wish away centuries of mistrust. I am afraid still because I worry that my sons or daughters might experience the same terror that marked the life of their father and my ancestors before me. This fear might seem unwarranted to some. I am tempted to list statistics about Black folks and our treatment at the hands of the police. But I am skeptical that statistics will convince those hostile to our cause. Furthermore, statistics are unnecessary for those who carry the experience of being Black in this country in their hearts. We know, and this book is for us. Paul provides a few starting points on how Christians can think about policing from a biblical/ theological perspective. He rightly focuses on those who control the sword and not merely the individual. This gives the Christian thinker and advocate the space to think structurally about how a just society should treat its people. Paul also speaks about the absence of fear, a central concern for Black folks. Yes, Paul does speak about the Christian’s responsibility to the government. This is fine. We do not want anarchy. We gladly acknowledge the potential goods of government. We also recognize the church’s ability to discern evil in government actions even if we lack the sovereignty over history to know when God will bring judgment. Nonetheless, we must always remember that Paul’s words on submission to government come in the context of a Bible that shows God active in history to bring about his purposes. God lifts up and God tears down. To avoid that tearing down, those who have the task of government must do all in their power to construct a society in which Black persons can live and move and work freely.

The Witness of John the Baptist and the Responsibilities of Police Officers If our thesis that the soldier is the closest thing to a modern police officer is true, then encounters with soldiers in the New Testament can provide us with important insights into a Christian

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theology of policing. John the Baptist’s ministry in the Gospel of Luke provides us with just such an occurrence.31 It is important to remember how John functions in the wider Christian narrative.32 According to the Gospel writers, God appointed John as a herald of the coming Messiah and of the messianic age.33 All of them associate him with the figure described in Isaiah. Here we will focus on Luke’s version:



As it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’” (Lk 3:4–6)

In the Isaiah quote, the prophet does not prepare the way for the coming messiah; the voice in the wilderness prepares us for the advent of God. This raises the question of the identity of this coming king. In any case, John the Baptist’s call to repentance is a command to prepare for God’s coming. To refuse to change, in John’s estimation, entails missing out on the new exodus to a new inheritance that Jesus will accomplish. Those who heed John’s call to preparation have one question: What must we do to participate in the coming kingdom? John responds with practical suggestions to different groups. The one that is important for our purposes is his response to the soldiers/police officers. He tells them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages” (Lk 3:14). If Romans 13:3–4 focuses on the responsibility of the state, then Luke 3:14 gives us a picture of the individual law enforcement officer’s responsibilities. In what follows I examine the implications of what John says by focusing on issues of (1) policing and power, (2) policing and the image of God (again), and (3) policing and money. First we must address the question of the identity of these soldiers. Are they Jews or Gentiles? What is the exact nature of their work? Given the mention of the tax collectors in the previous verses and John’s discussion of extortion, he probably has in mind those soldiers who assisted in tax collection.34 Yet his advice would hold true regardless of the exact nature of their work. Given their ability to use violence, it is incumbent on police agents to do their work with integrity. John begins by condemning extortion. Do not underestimate the weight of this critique. Extortion goes beyond mere bribes. Extortion involves using your power to prey on the On the importance of John the Baptist in Luke’s Gospel, see Clint Burnett, “Eschatological Prophet of Restoration: Luke’s Theological Portrait of John the Baptist in Luke 3:1–6,” Neotestamentica 47 (2013): 1–24. T h e definitive academic study on John the Baptist is probably John the Baptist in History and Theology (Studies on Personalities of the New Testament) by Joel Marcus. 33 See Luke 1:68–79. 34 John Nolland, Luke 1–9:20, WBC 35A (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1989), 150; Bovon says that “these soldiers could be mercenaries of Herod Antipas, who ruled not only Galilee but also Perea.” François Bovon, Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1–9:50, Hermeneia 63a (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002), 397; Culpepper says that they “were probably not Romans but local mercenaries serving the Herods or the Roman procurator. Their role, therefore, was similar to that of the toll collectors.” R. Alan Culpepper, “The Gospel of Luke,” in The Gospel of Luke-The Gospel of John, NIB 9 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 85. 31

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weak. Extortion is only possible when the exhorted have no recourse. This means that John was concerned with a form of policing in which those who have power use it as a means of pursuing their own agenda at the cost of those most at risk. For this reason, his criticism of false accusations should not be separated from extortion because false accusations often undergird extortion. If the people being extorted refused to comply they might find themselves “accused” of crimes that they did not commit. John also might have in mind a soldier offering up a person for a crime to satisfy the whim of their superior or to achieve some political end. This giving over of bodies as sacrificial offerings for the maintenance of the status quo denies the imago Dei in each of us. The story of Jesus’ crucifixion contains the paradigmatic false accusation. When John’s Gospel recounts Pilate’s unintentionally profound words, “Behold the man,” it speaks to Jesus as the one true human who came to restore us all. At the same time, John makes it clear that even as an innocent person condemned to die Jesus is in fact a person. This is the Black claim on the conscience of those who police us. See us as persons worthy of respect in every instance. Jesus’ treatment by the soldiers strikes us as egregious because he was innocent of the charges (Mt 27:27–30), but do the guilty deserve beatings and mockery? Matthew 27:27–30 speaks to how a corrupt system can distort the souls of those charged with functioning in a broken system. John calls on those in that system to rise above the temptation to dehumanize and act with integrity. Finally, John calls on those who police to be satisfied with their wages. This again points to the link between policing and money. Soldiers/officers must be satisfied with what they receive for the work that they do. In our day, this speaks to excessive fines and tickets given to the poor that only serve to enrich the state. For John the Baptist, money can never trump justice. What does John add to a Christian theology of policing? He adds the personal responsibility and integrity of the officers themselves. He calls upon those with power to use that power to uphold the inherent dignity of all residents and to never use that power for their own ends.

Conclusion We have only scratched the surface of the New Testament’s portrayal of policing, but I take it that my larger point has been made. The closest parallel to the modern police were the soldiers tasked with the work of keeping order in the cities and towns of the empire. These soldiers, especially in Rome, touched on every aspect of the Christian life. Although Paul focuses on the responsibilities that individuals have to the state, in the course of his discussion he lays out the responsibilities that the state has to individuals. The state must remember that it is not divine or infallible. It is a steward of that which belongs to God. Romans 9:17 demonstrates that said stewardship can be removed. Nonetheless, that stewardship involves police work. Therefore, those who rule countries are responsible for the culture of policing that they encourage. As Christians, it is part of our calling to remind those charged with governing of their need to create an atmosphere in which people are able to live without fear. This has been the Black person’s repeated lament. We should not live in fear. Good should be rewarded and evil punished. The United States, historically and in the present, has not done that. Instead it has used the sword to instill a fear that has been passed down from generation to generation in Black homes and churches—but that fear has never had the final word. Instead Black Christians remembered that we need not fear those who can only kill the body. At our best and most Christian moments, we have demanded our birthrights as children of God. But that right should not be purchased at the price of our blood or mental health. A Christian theology of policing, then, is a theology of freedom.

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If Paul spoke to the power of the state and the sword, the Baptist turned his eye toward the individual soldier. He called them, not to heroic feats of physical bravery, but to heroic virtue. He reminded them that their power need not turn them into villains who exploit. They could become champions for the weak. A Christian theology of policing, then, looks to the state and calls it to remember its duties. It looks to the officer and demands that said officer recognize the tremendous responsibility and potential of the work that they do. If we undertake this task of calling on the officer and the state to be what God called them to be, then maybe the hopes of Black folks as they relate to the police in this country might be fulfilled.

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What We Talk about When We Talk about Samson Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper

If the world fails to give you consideration, because you are black men, because you are Negroes, four hundred millions of you shall, through organization, shake the pillars of the universe and bring down creation, even as Samson brought down the temple upon his head and upon the heads of the Philistines. —Marcus Garvey, 19231 The United States has never existed without a Black Samson. His story begins before the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Mid-eighteenth-century court records in colonial America reveal that a number of enslaved African men were named after the biblical hero Samson (sometimes spelled “Sampson”). Samson is a popular subject in biblical scholarship on the use of the Bible in art, literature, and popular culture, although this scholarship tends to focus on Samson in White European and White American art and literature.2 Scholars have paid little attention to the many interpretations of Samson as a Black man.3 In this book we seek to rectify this neglect and to demonstrate how Americans from various racial and ethnic backgrounds have used the story of Samson to talk frankly about race for over two hundred years. By invoking this controversial figure, they developed a vocabulary to address race alongside myriad political issues, including slavery, education, patriotism, organized labor, civil rights, and gender equality. Our goal for this book is not simply to catalogue references to Black Samson in American art and literature as a corrective to a gap in the scholarly literature. Rather, by investigating legal documents, narratives by enslaved people, speeches, sermons, periodicals, poetry, fiction, and visual arts, we seek to tell the unlikely story of how a flawed biblical hero became an iconic figure Marcus Garvey, “The Future as I See It,” in The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey or, Africa for the Africans (compiled by Amy Jacques Garvey; Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1986), 77. 2 Recent examples of scholarship on Samson in reception history include Erik Eynikel and Tobias Nicklas, Samson: Hero or Fool?: The Many Faces of Samson, Themes in Biblical Narrative: Jewish and Christian Traditions, 17 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); David Gunn, Judges, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Caroline Vander Stichele and Hugh S. Pyper, eds., Text, Image, and Otherness in Children’s Bibles: What’s in the Picture? (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012). These scholars, who are representative of those working in reception history, focus on White European and American representations of Samson. 3 Samson is not a popular figure in African American biblical scholarship. Consult, among the many other examples, Randall C. Bailey, ed., Yet with a Steady Beat: Contemporary U.S. Afrocentric Biblical Interpretation (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003); Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Cain Hope Felder, ed., Stony the Road We Trod: African-American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991); Emerson B. Powery and Rodney S. Sadler, Jr., The Genesis of Liberation: Biblical Interpretation in the Antebellum Narratives of the Enslaved (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016); Vincent L. Wimbush, ed., African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (New York: Continuum, 2000). 1

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in America’s racial history.4 In telling the story of Black Samson we are telling a story of race in America.5 Like any story of race in America, the story of Black Samson is not linear. The first three chapters of this book cover Black Samson traditions mostly in the nineteenth century. The last four chapters focus primarily on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will move back and forth at times in order to link various uses of Black Samson in different historical periods. In this chapter, we discuss physical descriptions of Samson in the Bible, provide examples of the use of Black Samson in America, and consider why the biblical story of Samson may have become associated with African Americans. The Bible covers Samson’s entire life story in only four short chapters (Judges 13-16). The King James Version of the Bible, which is the version we quote throughout this book, needs barely over three thousand words to translate these chapters into English (consult the appendix).6 In contrast, the story of Abraham and Sarah occupies thirteen chapters in the book of Genesis. Joseph also gets thirteen chapters in Genesis and a lavish Broadway musical. Queen Esther gets ten chapters and an entire biblical book named after her. The story of King David spans three books of the Bible and then is recapped in 1 and 2 Chronicles. Moses’s story spans four lengthy books: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Compared with other major biblical figures, Samson’s story receives relatively little attention. Outside of the book of Judges, he appears only one other time in the Bible, in a passing reference to him buried in a laundry list of ancient heroes of faith in the New Testament (Hebrews 11:32). He is never mentioned in any ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian literature outside of the Bible, and there is no archeological evidence of his existence. Moreover, nothing in the few biblical descriptions of Samson’s appearance accounts for his later racialization as Black. The Bible never describes his eye color, skin color, hair texture, or phenotype.7 Despite later artistic interpretations of a pale-skinned Samson with a chiseled, muscular physique, biblical texts do not discuss his body. They mention only his hair styled in “seven locks” (Judges 16:13-14, 17) and that the Philistines “put out his eyes” after his capture (Judges 16:21, 30). In contrast to Samson, biblical texts describe the future King Saul as tall and To be clear, this book does not provide a history of African American religions. For a recent study of the history of African American religions, consult Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); for a study focusing on the early twentieth century, consult Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2017). On the influence of religion in twentieth-century African American literature, consult Josef Sorett, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 5 T h is is not to say that uses of the Black Samson figure were limited to the United States. For example, on racialized interpretations of Samson primarily from Jamaica, consult Ariella Y. Werden-Greenfeild, “Warriors and Prophets of Livity: Samson and Moses as Moral Exemplars in Rastafari” (PhD dissertation, Temple University, 2016). On the use of Black Samson imagery in Black labor publications in South Africa in the 1920s, consult the cartoon and the brief discussion in Victoria J. Collins, “Anxious Records: Race, Imperial Belonging, and the Black Literary Imagination, 1900–1946” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2013), 198–99. By comparison, consult chapter 4 of this book for a discussion of Black Samson imagery in debates over race and labor in the United States during the same time period. 6 T h e appendix provides a complete list of biblical texts mentioning Samson. Unless otherwise specified, the biblical quotations throughout this book use the King James Version because nearly all of the writers that we discuss use that version. 7 T h is book focuses on racialized representations of Samson in American literature and art. It does not address questions about whether the Samson from the Bible ever existed or whether representations of the biblical character in literature and art accurately reflect any commonplace physical features among ancient Israelites. Thus, this book does not entertain questions regarding Samson’s possible physical features if he had been an actual person. 4

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handsome (1 Samuel 9:2) and the future King David as a handsome lad with beautiful eyes (1 Samuel 16:12). Although we might imagine Samson as tall and muscular because he performs feats of superhuman strength, biblical texts do not describe his physical frame or even his height. In contrast, when introducing Goliath, the Philistine giant who battles David, the biblical text provides his height and describes his heavy armor and thick weaponry (1 Samuel 17:4–7).8 Despite this lack of physical description, the name Samson became linked with enslaved and free African Americans as early as the eighteenth century. For example, a document from the session of the Council of Maryland held on May 17, 1738, requests a pardon for “Negro Sampson a slave belonging to John Rider Esq now under Sentence of Death in Dorchester Country.”9 Also, a document from the session of South Carolina’s Commons House of Assembly held on January 31, 1754, describes a slaveholder named Mr. Robert Hume as “the Negro Sampson’s master” and includes a resolution to pay three hundred pounds to Hume “for the Negro man named Sampson, upon the said Negroes discovering the Remedy for the Bites of Snakes.”10 On February 5, 1788, the Council of Virginia issued a pardon “to Negro Sampson, belonging to Mary Dickson, under Sentence of death by the judgment of James City County Court for burglary.”11 The name Sampson also appears in reference to presumably free persons of African descent in the eighteenth century. For example, Richard Allen, the founding bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Absalom Jones, the first bishop of African descent in the Episcopal Church, mention a man named Sampson in their book on people of African descent during Philadelphia’s yellow fever epidemic of 1793. Regarding this Sampson, they wrote, “A poor black man, named Sampson, went constantly from house to house where distress was, and no assistance without fee or reward; he was smote with the disorder, and died, after his death, his family were neglected by those he had served.”12 It is not surprising to find references to free and enslaved men of African descent named Samson in these eighteenth-century documents. In colonial America, free and enslaved people were often named after characters from biblical texts or from Greek or Roman classical literature. There are records of enslaved and free persons of African descent named Abraham, Hagar, Hercules, Moses, Sarah, and many other names. Yet, while many of these names come from the Bible, when slaveholders gave these names to the persons whom they enslaved, they did not necessarily intend to connect the enslaved person to the biblical stories about their namesakes.13 For example, when a slaveholder named an enslaved woman Hagar, it was probably not meant to invoke memories of the biblical story about the enslaved Egyptian who ran away from Abram and Sarai (Genesis 16:6–14).14 Likewise, naming an enslaved man Samson was not meant to connect him to the story of how the biblical Samson killed thousands of his captors after they T h at most of Samson’s life involved ethnic conflicts with the Philistines does not explain why his story was interpreted along racial lines. After all, the Bible provides far more extensive and detailed accounts of David’s battles with the Philistines in the books of Samuel and Chronicles. 9 Reprinted in William Hand Browne, Archives of Maryland: Proceedings of the Council of Maryland, 1732– 1753 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1908), 137. 10 Reprinted in Terry W. Lipscomb, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, November 21, 1752–September 6, 1754 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 333. 11 Reprinted in George H. Reese, ed., Journal of the Council of the State of Virginia, Vol. IV (December 1, 1786– November 10, 1788) (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1967), 210. 12 Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793: And a Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, at Franklin’s Head, 1794), 11. 13 T h is is not to say that slaveholders were the only ones to give such names to enslaved persons of African descent. For example, enslaved parents also gave their children biblical names. 14 On this topic, consult Nyasha Junior, Reimaging Hagar: Blackness and Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 8

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imprisoned him and forced him into labor (Judges 16:21–30). Biblical names are not always meant as allusions to biblical stories. Nevertheless, by the early nineteenth century, opponents of slavery had enlisted the biblical Samson in their cause. Although these early anti-slavery advocates did not necessarily interpret the biblical character as a Black man, they applied parts of Samson’s story to racially charged issues in the United States. A memoir published in 1810 provides the earliest evidence of an enslaved African’s interpretation of the Samson story. In this memoir, Boyrereau Brinch, nicknamed Jeffrey Brace, recalled how he was forced to fight in the Revolutionary War in 1777 when his slaveholder Benjamin Stiles was drafted.15 Brace noted the irony of an enslaved man fighting for his oppressors’ independence. He recounted: I also entered the banners of freedom. Alas! Poor African Slave, to liberate freeman, my tyrants. I contemplated going to Barbadoes [where he was first enslaved] to avenge myself and my country, in which I justified myself by Samson’s prayer, when he prayed God to give him strength that he might avenge himself upon the Philistines, and God gave him the strength he prayed for.16

Brace refers to Samson’s dying plea for vengeance moments before he brings the Philistine temple down. Samson prays, “O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes” (Judges 16:28). Although Brace does not necessarily interpret Samson as a Black man, he finds biblical support for avenging his enslavement by linking it with Samson’s desire for revenge, which Samson expresses throughout his battles with the Philistines (Judges 15:7–8, 11).17 Another early reference to the biblical story of Samson appears in an 1822 letter that mentions Denmark Vesey’s plans for an uprising in Charleston, South Carolina. This letter provides indirect evidence that the organizers of the uprising invoked Samson in connection with their cause. Mary Lamboll Beach, a White slaveholding widow from Charleston, wrote a letter, dated July 5, 1822, to her sister Elizabeth Gilchrist in which she discussed Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man of African descent. Vesey is best known for allegedly conspiring to lead what could have been the largest revolt against slaveholders in US history.18 The plan was suppressed before it could be carried out. Vesey was tried and hanged with five others on July 2, 1822. Brace told his story to Benjamin Prentiss, a White lawyer. When Brace met Prentiss, Brace was living in Vermont, the first state to make slavery illegal, but years earlier, he was captured from West Africa, shipped to Barbados, and eventually taken to Connecticut where he was enslaved by the Stiles family in Woodbury, Connecticut. 16 Kari J. Winter, ed., The Blind African Slave, or, Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 159. Originally published as The Blind African Slave, or, Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace (transcribed with commentary by Benjamin F. Prentiss; St. Albans, VT: Harry Whitney, 1810). 17 Although Samson is often remembered as a martyr, a desire for revenge fuels many of Samson’s attacks against the Philistines more than a concern for the freedom of his fellow Israelites. In Judges 15:7–8, he swears revenge against the Philistines after they kill his wife and her household: “And Samson said unto them, Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease. And he smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter.” When Samson’s fellow Israelites question the wisdom of his actions, he indicates that vengeance was his primary motivation: “Three thousand men of Judah went to the top of the rock Etam, and said to Samson, Knowest thou not that the Philistines are rulers over us? what is this that thou hast done unto us? And he said unto them, As they did unto me, so have I done unto them” (Judges 15:11). Finally, in Judges 16:28, as Samson leans on the pillars in the Philistine temple of Dagon in his final moments of life, he cries out to be avenged of the Philistines for his eyes. 18 Although scholars have debated the scope and details of the plan, allegedly Vesey planned to kill slaveholders, liberate enslaved persons in Charleston, and escape to Haiti. For a detailed treatment of Vesey’s life, death, and 15

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According to court records, Vesey used several biblical texts to justify the revolt.19 Although no references to Samson appear in any of the trial transcripts, Beach’s letter, dated three days after Vesey’s execution, claims that “the voluminous papers found [in connection to Vesey’s plans for insurrection] . . . speak of their deliverance from the hand of the Philistines.”20 Before Samson is born, an angel informs Samson’s mother that “he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines” (Judges 13:5). While there are many instances of Israelites fighting the Philistines in the Bible, in the context of an uprising, the revolt’s organizers may have been referring to Samson’s role as a deliverer. Beach’s letter suggests that some people of African descent may have used the story of Samson to justify militant action against slaveholders early in US history. In 1834, Margaretta Matilda Odell, a White New Englander who claimed to be a descendant of Phillis Wheatley’s slaveholders, associated the experience of enslaved persons with Samson when discussing the possibility of the enslaved taking revenge on their slaveholders. In her best-selling book, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, a Native African and a Slave, written three years after Nat Turner’s well-publicized rebellion in 1831, Odell cautioned that southern plantations were not filled with the singing and dancing of happy enslaved persons but with their cries for vengeance.21 She wrote: We have been told of the happiness of the Negro in his bondage; how blithely he joins in the dance, and how joyously he lifts the burthen of the song, and how free he is from all care for the morrow. . . . [Yet,] Make him acquainted with the wealth of his own spirit—his own strength—and his own rights—and the white man would strive to bind him as vainly as the Philistines strove against Sampson. Even now, in his day of darkness, how often has he made the hearts of his keepers to quail, and their cheeks to blanch with fear, when they have looked on their wives and little ones, and heard the cry of vengeance fill their plantations with dismay.22

Odell alludes to the Philistines’ capture of Samson at Lehi when the Spirit of the Lord rushes upon him: “and the cords that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his bands loosed from off his hands. And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith” (Judges 15:14–15).23 its aftermath, consult Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey, revised and updated edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). 19 T h ese texts include Exodus 21:16 (“And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death”) among other texts (e.g., Exodus 1; Joshua 6:21; Isaiah 19; Zechariah 14:1–3). For a discussion of biblical references in the trial of Denmark Vesey, consult Jeremy Schipper, Denmark Vesey’s Bible (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming); Jeremy Schipper, “‘Misconstruction of the Sacred Page’: On Denmark Vesey’s Biblical Interpretations,” Journal of Biblical Literature 138 (2019): 23–38; Jeremy Schipper, “‘On Such Texts Comment Is Unnecessary’: Biblical Interpretation in the Trial of Denmark Vesey,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85 (2017): 1032–49. 20 For the full text of this letter, consult Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette, eds., The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2017), 376–81. 21 Phillis Wheatley was a formerly enslaved woman who became a celebrated author. Wheatley’s 1773 volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was the first book of poetry published by an African American. In 1834, fifty years after Wheatley’s death in 1784, Margaretta Matilda Odell edited a collection of Wheatley’s poetry that includes a brief biography of Wheatley and an introduction. Margaretta Matilda Odell, ed., Memoir and Poems, a Native African and a Slave (Boston: George W. Light, 1834). By 1838, Odell’s book was already in its third edition. The 1838 edition includes Poems by a Slave, written by George Moses Horton, another formerly enslaved person. 22 Odell, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, vi–vii. 23 Samson was not always associated with resistance in early nineteenth-century literature about slavery. In 1838, James Williams published an autobiographical account of his life as an enslaved man on a plantation in

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Eventually, anti-slavery advocates began to use the name Samson as shorthand for African Americans collectively. Austin Steward was born into slavery in 1793 in Prince William County, Virginia, and in 1857, he published his autobiography. The book begins with several letters of recommendation that endorse its publication.24 In one of the letters, dated July 1, 1856, Edwin Scrantom of Rochester, New York, wrote, “Your book may be humble and your descriptions tame, yet truth is always mighty; and you may furnish the sword for some modern Sampson, who shall shout over more slain than his ancient prototype.”25 Scrantom suggested that books like Steward’s autobiography would serve as weapons to inspire contemporary Samson-like revolutionaries who would kill more of their oppressors than the thousands of Philistines who were slain by the biblical Samson (Judges 14:19; 15:8, 15; 16:30). In an 1859 book titled Roving Editor: Or, Talks with Slaves in Southern States, James Redpath, a Scottish-born journalist and outspoken abolitionist, documented his travels to the southern states, which he began in 1854.26 At one point, he provided a detailed narrative of a slave auction held by Dickinson, Hill and Company that he witnessed in Richmond, Virginia.27 He was horrified when several enslaved women and men were stripped naked and closely examined. Redpath concluded his chapter about this auction by quoting in its entirety a poem by an unidentified author titled “A Curse on Virginia.” Curses on you, foul Virginia, Stony-hearted whore! May the plagues that swept o’er Egypt— Seven and seventy more, Desolate your homes and hearths, Devastate your fields, Send ten deaths for every birth-pang Womb of wife or creature yields; May fever gaunt, Alabama, where he witnessed the degrading behavior of enslaved persons forced to entertain their slaveholders. Williams compares this behavior to Samson’s entertainment of the Philistines when “they called for Samson out of the prison house; and he made them sport” (Judges 16:25). James wrote, “On almost every plantation at the South you may find one or more individuals whose look and air show that they have preserved their self-respect as men;—that with them the power of the tyrant ends with the coercion of the body—that the soul is free, and the inner man retaining the original uprightness of the image of God. You may know them by the stern sobriety of their countenances, and the contempt with which they regard the jests and pastimes of their miserable and degraded companions, who, like Samson, make sport for the keepers of their prison-house.” James Williams, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (Boston: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838), 53–54 (emphasis in the original). In this passage, Williams does not associate Samson with the rare individual whose spirit cannot be broken by slavery. Instead, he links Samson with enslaved people who cannot or do not resist the degradation of slavery. 24 As some were skeptical about whether enslaved or formerly enslaved African Americans could produce narratives or poetry, their publications often included letters of endorsement meant to authenticate the work’s legitimacy. Consult the brief discussion in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 214. 25 Austin Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman; Embracing a Correspondence of Several Years, While President of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada West (Rochester: William Alling, 1857), vi. 26 In the 1850s and 1860s, tours of the southern states by White journalists living in the North or Midwest were not uncommon. For representative examples, consult Horace Cowler Atwater, Incidents of a Southern Tour: Or The South, as Seen with Northern Eyes (Boston: J. P. Magee, 1857); John Richard Dennett, “The South As It Is: 1865–1866,” serialized in The Nation 1–2 (July 1865 to April 1866); Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A Southern Tour (May 1, 1865 to May 1, 1866) (London: Samson Low, Son, and Marston, 1866). 27 James Redpath, Roving Editor: Or, Talks with Slaves in Southern States (New York: A. B. Burdick, 1859), 245– 54.

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Protracted want, Hurl your sons beneath the sod, Send your bondsmen back to God! From your own cup, Soon may you sup, The bitter draught you give to others— Your negro sons and negro brothers! Soon may they rise, As did your sires, And light up fires, Which not by Wise, Nor any despot may be quenched; Not till Black Samson, dumb and bound, Shall raze each slave-pen to the ground, Till States with slavers’ blood are drenched!28

The poem curses the state of Virginia and proposes that slaveholders will reap the bitterness that they have sown. It describes those involved in a slave insurrection collectively as “Black Samson” and suggests that these enslaved persons will rise up against their oppressors. In 1866, John Townsend Trowbridge, a White northern writer, claimed that during “a tour of the old negro auction rooms” in Richmond, Virginia, his unnamed guide told him, “I’ve seen many a Black Samson sold; standing between those posts; and many a woman too, as white as you or I.”29 Albion W. Tourgée, a White lawyer who served as the lead attorney for Homer Plessy in the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, used the term “Black Samson” and “ebony Samson” to describe enslaved African Americans multiple times in his 1880 novel Bricks Without Straw.30 In the same year, Timothy Thomas Fortune, who was Booker T. Washington’s ghostwriter and the editor of the highly influential African American newspaper the New York Age, described the comfortable economic conditions that the southern plantation owner enjoyed before the Civil War. He wrote, “Their vast landed estates and black slaves were things that did not fluctuate; under the effective supervision of the viperous slave-drivers the black Samson rose before the coming of the sun.”31

Redpath, Roving Editor, 254. The poem’s description of enslaved persons in the South as “Black Samson, dumb and bound” also occurs in an April 27, 1861, editorial from the African American newspaper, Weekly Anglo African. The editorial calls for free African Americans in the North to support the cause of enslaved people of African descent in the South. The unidentified author writes, “The free colored Americans cannot be indifferent to the progress of this struggle. . . . Not alone are the free colored Americans involved in the contest, but their action in the Free States will be representative. They speak for the voiceless. They stand for dumb and bound Black Samson.” “Have We a War Policy?” Weekly Anglo African (April 27, 1861): n.p. 29 John Townsend Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, a Journey through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People: Being a Description of the Present State of the Country—Its Agriculture—Railroads—Business and Finances (Hartford, CT: L. Stebbins, 1866), 183. 30 Albion W. Tourgée, Bricks without Straw: A Novel (New York: Fords, Howard and Hulbert, 1880), 31, 55, 312. Plessy v. Ferguson was an 1896 Supreme Court case in which Homer Plessy, who was mixed race, challenged a law that required him to sit in segregated seating while on the train. The Court upheld racial segregation in public places under the policy of supposedly “separate but equal” accommodations. Eventually, the ruling was overturned in the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which involved the lack of equality in segregated public schools. 31 Timothy Thomas Fortune, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1884), 133. 28

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In August 1885 in Chautauqua, New York, William Henry Crogman delivered a lecture entitled “The Negro Problem.”32 Crogman was a professor of Greek and Latin at Clark University in Atlanta, Georgia, and, in his lecture, he debunked the paternalistic idea that African Americans would “die out” if left to care for themselves without their enslavers.33 Noting failed efforts to institute voluntary or involuntary colonization of formerly enslaved persons, Crogman highlighted the growth in the African American population since the abolition of slavery with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.34 He exclaimed, “Black Samson had just begun to grow, and that under freedom he has attained a growth unequaled in any similar period of his bondage.”35 Although it may appear to be an obscure reference today, in 1885, Crogman’s audience would have understood his use of “Black Samson” as referring to the social and political advancement of African Americans. Church manuals and bulletins from that era included speeches and sermons that also referred to Black Samson.36 An article in the African American newspaper Savannah Tribune summarizes an 1899 lecture on Black Samson delivered by Dr. W. P. Thirkeild, who was the president of Gammon Theological Seminary, a historically Black seminary in Atlanta.37 In an 1899 Saint Louis Sun article, reprinted in Topeka’s Plain Dealer, the author assumed that the audience was familiar with Black Samson as a representation of African American progress. In considering the prospects for African Americans in the twentieth century, the author asked, “What is there to discourage his going forth but the old adage, ‘A lion in the way’? If he be a black Sampson, as most of our writers have pictured and denominated him, let the Negro, like the giant of old, procure the jawbone of an ass and slay the king of the forest, which figuratively lies in his pathway.”38 The writer uses a rhetorical question to claim that no reasonable obstacle will prevent African Americans from achieving progress and that they can overcome any impediment through Samson-like strength.

William Henry Crogman, “The Negro Problem,” in William Henry Crogman, Talks for the Times (South Atlanta, GA: Franklin, 1896), 241–69. Crogman, “The Negro Problem,” 262. In 1988, Clark University (formerly Clark College) and Atlanta University merged to form Clark Atlanta University, a private, historically Black university. The school should not be confused with the Clark University currently in Worcester, Massachusetts. 34 Library of Congress, Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, https://www​.loc​.gov​/rr​/program​/bib​ /ourdocs​/13thamendment​.html​#American. While the Thirteenth Amendment is commonly understood as prohibiting slavery, it does so “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Consult the documentary film 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay, which addresses issues related to mass incarceration in the United States. Internet Movie Database, 13th, http://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt5895028/. 35 Crogman, “The Negro Problem,” 262. 36 For example, consult Rev. W. H. Hickman, “Black Samson and the American Republic,” Manual of the Methodist Episcopal Church 8 (1888): 76. 37 “Dr. Thirkeild Delivered a Lecture on the ‘Black Samson,’” Savannah Tribune 14.34 (June 3, 1899): 2. Thirkeild also gave an address titled “The Black Samson: His Freedom and His Future” (cited in the program for the Cincinnati Camp Meeting Association in 1900 in “Editorial Notes,” Western Christian Advocate 67 [October 24, 1900]: 1346). Thirkeild also delivered a sermon titled “The Black Sampson” on July 12, 1902 (cited in the program for the Cincinnati Camp Meeting Association in Western Christian Advocate 68 [July 2, 1902]: 31). 38 “A 20th Century Negro: Will the Negro of that Century be an Improvement as Compared with a Negro of this Day and Generation? Let’s Hope So,” Plain Dealer 1.33 (August 18, 1899): 1. The saying “a lion in the way” is a partial quotation of Proverbs 26:13 (“The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets”). It refers to an excuse for inaction because of an imagined or greatly exaggerated danger. The author may also be influenced by Henry Wadsworth Longellow’s poem “The Warning,” which describes how Samson tore apart “the lion in his path.” We discuss Longfellow’s poem in chapter 1. The article invokes images from two episodes in the biblical story of Samson. The first takes place when he tears apart a lion, the “king of the forest,” with his bare hands (Judges 14:8–9). The second episode happens when he uses the jawbone of an ass to kill one thousand Philistines (Judges 15:15). 32

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By the late nineteenth century, the term “Black Samson” was not used only as a reference to the collective strength of African Americans. Physically gifted African Americans were also described as “Black Samsons.” An 1874 article titled “Black Sampson—Fall of the Chair Factory Ruins” reports that a “colored” man named Daniel Young quickly brought down a wall of a ruined chair factory that local firefighters had been working on for quite some time.39 In 1880, the term “Black Samson” was used to describe Tom Molineaux, an African American heavyweight boxer, in a racist account of his European boxing tours written decades after the fact. The article explained, “The Black, like most of his race, had a childish propensity for gaiety, and a strong passion for dress, was amorously inclined, and devoted himself by turns to Bacchus and Venus. Of course, the Black Samson met with many mercenary Dalilahs.”40 Another article published in the Boston Daily Globe in 1908 discusses a local “beef lugger,” born into slavery, named Jimmy Golden. The article, titled “Marvels of Strength: ‘Jimmy’ Golden is Called the ‘Black Samson,’ ” reported that Golden was known for “the heavy lifting and carrying that made him famous in the district as a marvel of strength.”41 In 1910, the Baltimore Afro-American reprinted an article from the Philadelphia Tribune about a title fight between Jack Johnson (born John Arthur Johnson), the first African American world heavyweight champion (figure I.1), and the former champion James J. Jeffries.42 The article about the fight stated: The black Samson slithered and knocked out the white Goliath at Reno, July 4th. . . . The white philistines throughout the country bet on their Goliath and when he was done up they got sore in the head as they were in the pocket and began to maltreat black people . . . There may be no more legalized prize fighting in this country. In that case the championship of physical prowess will remain with the black Samson and his people.43 Although Johnson’s most popular nickname was the “Galveston Giant” because he was born and raised in Galveston, Texas, a number of other African American publications referred to him as “black Samson.”44 “Black Sampson—Fall of the Chair Factory Ruins,” The Baltimore Sun (May 15, 1874): 1. Henry Downes Miles, Pugilistica: The History of British Boxing Containing Lives of the Most Celebrated Pugilists; Full Reports of Their Battles from Contemporary Newspapers, with Authentic Portraits, Personal Anecdotes, and Sketches of the Principal Patrons of the Prize Ring, Forming a Complete History of the Ring from Fig and Broughton, 1719–40, to the Last Championship Battle between King and Heenan, in December 1863, 3 vols. (London: Weldon, 1880), 1:285. The spelling “Dalilahs” follows the original. In Roman mythology, Bacchus and Venus are deities associated with winemaking and love, respectively. Molineaux was born into slavery in Virginia in 1784 but fought primarily in England and Ireland after gaining his freedom. He unsuccessfully challenged the champion Tom Cribb for the English title in 1810 and then again in 1811. 41 “Marvels of Strength: ‘Jimmy’ Golden Is Called the ‘Black Samson,’” Boston Daily Globe (July 4, 1908): 8. 42 Johnson won the heavyweight title on December 26, 1908, by defeating the White champion Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia. On July 4, 1910, in Reno, Nevada, Johnson defended his title against Jeffries, who had retired undefeated six years earlier, in what was promoted as “The Fight of the Century.” When Jeffries came out of retirement for the title fight, some hailed him as the “Great White Hope” who would defeat Johnson and reclaim the title for the White race. Yet, by the fifteenth round, Jeffries’s corner threw in the towel. Johnson had resoundingly defeated his White opponent. Across the nation, the film of the fight was banned from theaters and widespread violence against African Americans ensued. Consult Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgiveable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Knopf, 2004). Also, consult Unforgiveable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, directed by Ken Burns (Public Broadcasting Service, 2005), https://www​.pbs​ .org​/kenburns​/unforgivable​-blackness/. 43 Reprinted in “Views of the Afro-American Press on the Johnson-Jeffries Fight,” Baltimore Afro-American (July 16, 1910): 4. 44 Among other examples, consult “John Arthur Johnson Still Holds the Championship Belt of the World,” Broad Ax (July 9, 1910): 1; Dr. M. A. Majors, “Jack Johnson Is Crucified for His Race,” Chicago Defender (July 5, 1913): 1. In a 1917 poem, the White American poet Vachel Lindsay linked Johnson with Samson. He wrote, “The bold Jack Johnson Israelite,—Samson—The Judge, The Nazarite.” Vachel Lindsay, “How Samson Bore Away the Gates of Gaza (A Negro Sermon),” in Vachel Lindsay, The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 124. In addition to Johnson’s physical prowess, the press and the public also 39

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The Bible and Cultural Studies

Finally, in 1921, the African American newspaper the Broad Ax published a poem titled “Black Sampson” that tells the story of a “plain black fellow” named Sam who “could lift surprising weights which seemed light to him.”45 So how can we account for the myriad associations of Samson with African Americans? Among the many biblical characters, Samson may seem to be a curious choice for expressing ideas about race in America. Although descriptions of Samson’s appearance in the Bible cannot explain why he became closely linked with African Americans, biblical stories about him may provide some clues. Many interpreters noticed a small, easily overlooked detail. After his dramatic capture by the Philistines, the text notes that the Philistines “bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house” (Judges 16:21). As we discuss throughout this book, generations of American interpreters understood Samson as an enslaved man forced into labor. His death became a final act of resistance against his oppressors. For some interpreters, it represents the ultimate sacrifice of a heroic martyr. For others, it is the foolish consequence of a selfish vendetta. In the end, however, there is no clear victor amid the rubble of the Philistine temple. The story does not leave us with the triumph of a shepherd boy over a giant or a victory dance of the formerly enslaved on the banks of the Red Sea. Samson’s story is not one of liberation but of continued struggle against oppression in a morally complicated world. When read against the backdrop of American history, the Samson story becomes a haunting analogue for the hope and horror of race relations in the United States.

compared Johnson to Samson due to what some regarded as an excessive lifestyle. Known for his outspoken courage and pride, he raced fast cars, bought expensive clothes, and married three different White women, which was considered especially taboo at the time (consult Majors, “Jack Johnson Is Crucified for His Race,” 1). An article in the Philadelphia Tribune stated that Johnson “was the architect of his own making and his own undoing. No braver man ever faced [a] host of enemies than he did in Reno and Havana. . . . But he dragged himself down by all his excesses, and like the Israelite Samson, helped to drag his people down with him” (“Jack Johnson Still Nagged by White Hopes,” Philadelphia Tribune [August 7, 1915]: 4). This article compares Johnson with Samson but contends that he has harmed his own people rather than just the Philistines (Judges 15:11). 45 “Black Sampson,” Broad Ax (October 15, 1921): 2.

Index Readers are encouraged to also consult the annotated bibliographies on pages  4–5, 107–8, 170–2, 236–7 and 308–10 Adorno, Theodor  14, 40–2, 314–15 affect, affect theory  306, 339–41, 367–8, 370–1 Ahmed, Sarah  342 Althusser, Louis  4–5, 9–11, 25–6, 38–9, 104, 314 animal studies  305–6, 311–13, 317–21 Aronofsky, Darren  235 Asklepios (Greek god of healing and medicine)  364–6 Augustine (Christian saint)  205, 266 axis mundi (lat. “Center of the World”)  196–7 Babylon  348–50, 352–3 Bach, Alice  5, 12, 16, 18–19, 22, 71, 80, 106, 122 Bach, Johann Sebastian  22 Bakhtin, Mikhail  116 Bal, Mieke  16, 113, 116, 118, 124, 126–7, 145, 147–8 Barth, Karl  206 Barthes, Roland  10, 14, 44, 50–1, 104–5, 249, 372 Baudrillard, Jean  75, 239, 251 Bauman, Zygmunt  226 Being John Malkovich (1999; film)  267–9 Bell, Derrick  380 Benjamin, Walter  40–1, 126, 239 Bennett, Tony  28, 42, 44, 45, 60–1 Bentham, Jeremy  312 Berger, John  120, 123, 125–7 Big Lebowski, The (1998; film)  271–2 Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS). See CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) Boer, Roland  4–5, 16 Bourdieu, Pierre  14, 26 Boyarin, Daniel  21, 214–20 Bultmann, Rudolf  266 Butler, Judith  273, 276–7, 284, 288

Caws, Mary Ann  120 CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies)  4, 6–13, 23, 25–6, 28, 31, 36, 40–3, 47, 54, 61, 64, 67–9, 72, 104 Certeau, Michel de  10, 14, 72–8, 80 Church of God (Christian denomination)  196–8, 200 Church of God of Prophecy (Christian denomination)  196–7 Clough, Patricia  339–40 Cowper, William (hymnist)  149 Crenshaw, Kemberlé  381 critical race theory  379–82 critical theory  184–6, 306–7 cultural elitism  186–7 Culver, R. D.  111, 118 David and Bathsheba (1951; film)  122–3, 134–5 Davies, Margaret  20 Dawkins, Richard  221–6, 232 Deleuze, Gilles  79, 81, 306, 341–2, 367, 371 Delgado, Richard  380–1 DeMille, Cecil  235, 241, 370 Dennett, Daniel  221, 225, 228, 232 Derrida, Jacques  104, 110, 140–2, 186, 311, 314, 323–34, 380 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)  223–4, 230–1 Doré, Gustav  112–14 Douglass, Frederick  380 DuBois, W. E. B.  381 During, Simon  5, 13–14, 104 Eastwood, Clint  141 Economist (The)  89, 91–2, 99 Eden (biblical utopia)  246–50 Ellis, John  39 Exum, J. Cheryl  4, 7, 16–17, 21–2, 71, 81, 106–7, 111, 118, 137–9 feminism  64 and cultural studies  11–12, 26

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Index

film, film theory  48–9 Fiske, John  58, 64, 66 Flatliners (1990; film)  252–3, 255 Fokkelman, J. P.  121 Foucault, Michel  14, 26, 314 Fowler, R.  42 Frankfurt School (philosophy)  37 Freeman, Alan  380 Freud, Sigmund  277–9, 285–6, 315 gender  277, 279, 282, 284–6 genetics, genes  222–3 Gentileschi, Artemisia  125 Gibson, Mel  255–9, 261–3, 270–1, 367, 369, 373–4, 376 Gilmour, Michael J.  107 Golden, Jimmy  405 Gould, Stephen Jay  232 Gramsci, Antonio  5, 9–13, 38–9, 50, 60–1, 65, 67–9, 104, 178, 180, 380 Greenblatt, Stephen  105 Grey, Zane  140, 142 Griffiths, D. W.  177 Guattari, Félix  79, 81, 341 Hall, Stuart  5, 8, 10–15, 25, 28, 32, 34, 36, 41, 43, 59–65, 67–9, 72, 78, 104 Harraway, Donna  313, 315, 352 hegemony  66 Heidegger, Martin  331 higher criticism  103–4 Hoggart, Richard  6–8, 11–12, 23–4, 52, 65, 67, 69 Horkheimer, Max  314–15 horror films  374–5 ideological state apparatuses  9 ideology, ideological criticism  39–40, 59–60, 74, 105 Index of Christian Art (Princeton University)  112 intertextuality  105–6, 298, 302–3 Irigaray, Luce  140, 143–4, 145–6 Irwin, Benjamin Harding  195–6 Jameson, Frederick  6, 44, 63, 69, 72, 105 Jasper, David  21 Johnson, Richard  4, 8–9, 11, 28, 34, 59, 61 Judaism, protestant views of  210–12 Kaplan, E. Ann  125, 137–9 Kasdan, Pamela  87, 98–9

Kennedy, George  297 King, Rodney  385 King David (1985; film)  122–4, 135 Kristeva, Julia  105, 116, 118 Kroc, Ray  83, 87 Lacan, Jacques  75, 80, 81–2, 314 Leavis, F. R.  6–7 Lefebvre, Heri  72–3, 78, 81 Legaspi, Michael  6 Levinas, Emmanuel  314 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  83–5, 89, 93–7, 100 Lord’s Supper (also: communion, eucharist)  150–2, 159–67 Luther, Martin  266 Lyotard, Jean François  14 McRobbie, Angela  12–13, 26, 43, 54, 62–7, 69 Mann, Thomas  21 Mantel, Hilary  19 Martin, Joel W.  71, 81 Marxism, Marx, Karl  4, 8–9, 25, 29–31, 37–9, 44, 60, 63, 72, 74, 83, 94 post-Marxism  62–3, 315 memes  222, 230 Miles, Margaret R.  125–6, 136–7 Mill, John Stuart  312 Molineaux, Tom  405 Moore, Roy  201 Moore, Stephen D.  4, 7, 16, 22, 71, 81, 88, 100, 107 Morley, David  11, 13–14, 50, 53 Morris, Meaghan  14, 59, 61, 64, 67, 75–6 Nancy, Jean-Luc  314 Nelson, Cary  14–15, 58, 61, 65, 68, 69 “new perspective” (readings of the Pauline letters)  203–7 Neyrey, Jerome  296 objectivity (in interpretation)  207–9 Pasolini, Paulo  235 Passion of the Christ (2004; film)  255–7, 259–60, 367, 369–70, 373–6 Paz, Octavio  141 policing, racist aspects of  389–90, 393 postcolonial, postcolonialism  13 posthumanism  305, 312 poststructuralism  45–6, 51–2, 104 Pynchon, Thomas  89, 100

 Index race, racism  64–5, 68, 110–12, 383 and cultural studies  12–13 Rank, Otto  103 reader response criticism  289–90 reception criticism  3, 105–6 rhetoric, rhetorical (structural) criticism  292–6 van Rijn, Rembrandt  16, 19–20, 126–7, 129–30 Robbins, Tom  115–17, 119 Rome, ancient  345–7, 391–2 Sagan, Carl  229 Sanders, E. P.  205–6, 211 Saussure, Ferdinand de  48 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth  111, 119 Schwarz, Bill  67 Scorsese, Martin  235, 263–5 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  14, 340, 342 Segovia, Fernando  16, 105–6, 108, 174, 179–83, 292 Sherwood, Yvonne  108 Shyamalan, M. Night  264 Singer, Peter  312 slavery, U.S.  173–7 Society of Biblical Literature (SBL)  16 Sojourner Truth  380 Spivak, Gayatri  14 Sprinkle, Annie  83, 100 Stanton, Elisabeth Cady  110, 119 Stendahl, Krister  205–7, 258 Stigmata (1999; film)  269–70 Stoker, Bram  152–4 Storey, John  4, 8–9, 14, 61, 69 structuralism  43, 46–7

409

Taylor, Mark C.  368 television sitcoms (situation comedies)  242–3 text defined  42–3, 188–90 as subject  55–7 Thatcher, Margaret (and Thatcherism)  41 Thirkeild, W. P.  404 Thompson, E. P.  8, 11, 38 Tolbert, Mary Ann  16 Tomkins, Silvan  340–2 Tomlinson, Ambrose Jessop  195–6, 198 Tompkins, Jane  141, 143, 145 transgender (violence against)  275–6, 279–80 Turner, J. M. W.  21 Unbreakable (2000; film)  264–5 Unforgiven (1992; film)  141–8, 259–60 United States of America cultural studies “arrives at”  13–15, 105 Vesey, Denmark  400–1 Waldrop, Judith  87, 98, 100 Warshow, Robert  144 West, Cornel  14 westerns (film and fiction genre)  141–5, 148 Williams, Raymond  6–8, 12, 23–4, 29, 58, 60, 62, 69 Williams, Robert  381 Willis, Paul  11, 28, 35, 54 Zizek, Slavoj  72

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