Introductory Note:  This essay was completed in March 2011.  The interpretation of Genesis it proposes first occurred to me in 1996 in the course of writing a book commissioned by Oxford University Press,  Shakespeare and the Bible.  I first learned about Evolutionary Psychology and the field of Darwinian Literary Criticism in 2006.

Introduction

“The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art,” proclaimed William Blake in one of the captions of his etching, “Laocoon” (755). In The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, Northrop Frye replicated part of that proclamation and elaborated some of its implied claims. If indeed the Bible can be said to encode a substantial portion of Western culture’s imaginative, historical and legal heritage, then its first book, Genesis, can be regarded as the Code for the Great Code, since so much of what appears in the subsequent 65 books seems to grow out of it. Genesis’ title is amplified in the names of some of its recurrent themes and images: generation, generations, genealogy, gender, genitalia. The common root of all these words suggests yet another code: that which is carried by genes.[1]

Frye observed that Genesis’ “primary concern is expressed in the Biblical phrase “life more abundant,” and J.P. Fokkelman showed coherence in the book’s motley mosaic of stories with the discovery that its “overriding concern [is] life-survival-offspring-fertility-continuity,” (41) but neither critic associated these concerns with the evolutionary perspective they suggest. Until recently it’s been left to contemporary novelists versed in biology and literature to explore some of the rich meanings that flow from the convergence of Genesis and evolutionary principles, for instance Ruth Ozeki in All Over Creation and Barbara Kingsolver in Prodigal Summer.[2]

Genesis rewards literary analysis because of its complex structure and plot, its concentrated characterization, its vibrant language and its rich but submerged themes, accompanied by what Robert Alter calls “the high fun of the act of literary communication¦ the lively inventiveness …[which] repeatedly exceeds the needs of the message, though it often also deepens and complicates the message”(40-45).  Such analysis can be enriched by combining the relatively rigorous scientific methods of evolutionary psychology with some of the inventive and fanciful tactics of traditional Midrashic interpretation to make sense of the book.[3] That combination seems appropriate to a work which is itself a product of literary evolution–the outcome of a thousand-year history of competition among oral traditions, written documents, individual and group authors and editors assembled in the palimpsest of the received text (Friedman).

Genesis prompts Darwinian analysis because it traces human history back to its beginnings, where it locates the origin of what came later. It chronicles a period of prehistory that figuratively parallels the one and a half million year Pleistocene period that Darwinists refer to as the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA), the span of time long enough to allow most human traits to evolve (Cosmides 1997).

Darwinian interpretation explores the operation of the principle of evolution in literary works, depicting what Jonathan Gottschall calls

the fascinating multiplicity of ways characters react to and manipulate their environment (the setting and the other characters) to accomplish the prime directive of all life: to live long enough to reproduce and, in species where parental care is necessary (like ours), rear young to reproduce again.¦” (260)

Genesis personifies that principle in its characterization of the Creator. Its God designs both animal and human life during their common emergence on days five and six by pronouncing the two parts of evolution’s “prime directive”: “I have given you every seed bearing plant ¦for food¦and to all which has the breath of life within it.” (1.29) “¦be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth¦”(1.28)[4]

Genesis’ God repeatedly affirms evolution’s positive outcome of reproductive success as the reward of those whom He has chosen and trained–from Adam at the beginning of the book to the sons of Israel at the end: “I will greatly bless you and will greatly multiply your seed, as the stars in the heavens and as the sand on the shore of the sea, and your seed shall take hold of its enemies’gate.”(22:17)

Genesis’ word for “seed” –zera in the original Hebrew”has several meanings that converge with those of “gene” (Alter 1996 xiii-xiv). It signifies the originating kernels as well as the foodstuff of fruit and grain–the source of sustenance for animals and humans. It signifies semen, half of the material agency of reproduction. It signifies individual progenitors and progeny connected by inheritance–the generations of genetic relatives who extend personal existence beyond the bounds of individual mortality. It signifies lineage, the mark of kinship drawing individuals together into a survival unit, a community, and eventually, a nation.[5]

Joseph, the culminating hero of Genesis, epitomizes all of these meanings of “seed.”  He distributes seed during famine; he preserves enough grain to feed the world; he procreates two sons, one of whom is named Ephraim, meaning “he has made me fruitful”; at his death, he joins his father and mother in their tomb; and he paves the way for his wise descendant Solomon “whose people, Judah and Israel, were as many as the sands of the sea.”[6]

Genesis establishes literary coherence among narrative units with genealogies that catalogue the succession of seed through numerous generations, binding its many discrete stories into the history of a single genetic strain. Later uses of the text call attention to the importance of this genetic continuity. The first edition of the King James Bible begins with thirty-four folio pages of genealogical charts tracing lineage from Adam to Christ, while the succession of deaths and births of relatives is still recorded on pages inserted in family Bibles.

The operation of the principle of evolution is determined by the “algorithm” of Natural Selection formulated by Darwin in Origin of Species:

Through the preservation of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurrent Struggle for Existence, we see the most powerful and ever-acting means of selection. The struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high geometrical ratio of increase which is common to all organic beings. ¦

These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms (406).

Genesis begins at “Growth with Reproduction; inheritance” and proceeds to the more complex and turbulent aspects of natural selection: “the struggle for Life,” “Variability,”  “Extinction of less improved forms,” and consequent adaptation.

Natural selection arises from three conditions: 1) individuals compete for the resources to stay alive and procreate, 2) they compete for reproductive success through sexual selection–finding mates and raising offspring that preserve and proliferate their genes, and 3) over long periods of time, species adapt, that is, they change in ways that increase their likelihood of survival and reproduction. Such adaptive changes are carried out through improved design of the physical organism and through the adoption of adaptive behaviors.

Adaptive behaviors are patterns of response to recurrent environmental challenges. The brain circuits, or programs that enable adaptive behaviors, become “incorporated into a species’ neural design.”[7] Assemblages of such software circuits evolved as “cognitive domains,” just as the eye and ear, for example, evolved as hardware. Their blueprints were replicated and transmitted by genes in “the seed,” just as were the blueprints for organs.[8]

Adaptive behaviors produced by natural selection include tool use, kinship selection, status competition, territoriality, coalition building, reciprocity, indirect reciprocity and in-group/outgroup discrimination. These adaptations are observed in primates as well as in remnants of hunter-gatherer societies. This essay argues that evolutionary psychology’s account of the development of cognitive and behavioral adaptations offers a key to decode many of Genesis’ particular incidents as well as its overall design.

(more…)

Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures, edited by Travis de Cook and Alan Galey, Routledge, New York and London 2012.

Published in Religion and Literature 44:2, Fall 2012

This is a collection of essays about relationships between the production, dissemination and reception of books and the pairing of two books: Shakespeare and the Bible.

Many recent scholars have studied the either the Bible or Shakespeare in terms of the history of the book”ways that material media have determined their form and message.  Intertextual relationships between Shakespeare and the Bible is also a familiar, if sparse, field of critical inquiry.  But investigating the coupling of Shakespeare and the Bible itself with the methods of textual materialism is a novel and narrowly focused undertaking.

The editors’ discussion of Rudyard Kipling’s whimsical 1934 fantasy about Shakespeare’s drafting language of the King James Bible introduces the book’s overall polemical argument that the consideration of historical and physical conditions of texts should counter the tendency to canonize them and “naturalize” their assumed unity and completeness.

The book’s first group of essays examine ways in which Shakespeare’s use of the specific editions of the Bible he’s presumed to have read affected plot, characterization, theme and language in individual plays. (more…)

This morning I finished the transfer and update and backup of files, erased all my data from Lubertson and turned him in to the College of Liberal Arts. Most likely he’ll be sent to China for recycling of parts. Now I sit in my armchair comfortably typing in front of an extremely bright glass covered screen with a good deal higher resolution than Lubertson’s. There’s no power cord to worry about, no throbbing furnace in my lap, no loudly whirring hard drive, no long waits between operations or need to shut down applications to move from one to another, no need for an external hard drive except for backup. My pose is a lot like that on the ubiquitous billboards for ipads in Los Angeles: relaxed, at leisure. This is all extremely nice: a huge upgrade in comfort and convenience in using the instrument I spend most of my waking hours with.

But what’s more amazing is the fact that this machine, nine years newer than Lubertson, has no functions, cant do anything, that he couldn’t do, simply does it all better. If one compares technological progress in the most recent interval to the progress of the previous nine years, 1992-2001, the slowing of innovation is what’s striking. Netscape was founded that year”the beginning of the world wide web. In 1992 Doug and I created the Multimedia Blake Hypercard stacks that within two more years were rendered obsolete by html. 1998 marked the advent of the Powerbook G3 laptop, allowing for portable computing. I carried the machine everywhere”to England for the Shakespeare conferences, to Lund, to Ketchum. Digital cameras and iphoto and itunes came online at the end of that span, in 2001, just before I got the Titanium. By then I had all my course materials generated in Dreamweaver, was working paperless and was taking the computer to every class and projecting onto the screen most of the time, for better and for worse.

The technological change of the preceding nine years was even more transformative. In 1983, computers were only for geeks. My high technology was a selectric IBM typewriter. We got the first Mac 512 in 1984, when Jan started law school. The power it conferred to delete, replace, find, cut, paste, outline, and save was as magical as the ability to flap my arms and fly in dreams. I still have it in the garage.

Dear Professor S Marx

RQ has received a review copy of English Mercuries: Soldier Poets in the Age of Shakespeare by Adam McKeown (Vanderbilt University Press). Would you agree to write a 700 word review due no later than February 10th?

Renaissance Society of America
365 Fifth Avenue, 5400
New York, NY 10016

*******

This book’s scholarly subject is literary works about war produced between 1551 and 1632 by English writers who fashioned themselves both soldiers and poets. Three introductory chapters frame that subject: an account of the author’s experience as an English professor and Marine Lieutenant Colonel deployed in Djibouti during 2006, where questions raised in a class he taught on Shakespeare’s Henry V generated the project, a discussion of an 18th-century pamphlet pretending to collect eyewitness accounts of 16th century warfare, and a description of similarities between the conditions of expeditionary forces under the command of Elizabeth 1 and George Bush 2. The whole book addresses what the author calls a “glaring omission”(11) by voicing perspectives of veterans then and now about war and militarism.

McKeown analyzes texts dealing with military activity during  Elizabeth’s regime. “Age of Shakespeare” in the subtitle alludes to a sentimental characterization of Early Modern England he challenges and to responses to Henry V that begin and end the book.  His readings undermine the hawkish propaganda usually associated with military writings and critique policies leading to the “calamity” of expeditionary war.  Instead, they emphasize the paradoxical, nuanced and invariably tormented experience of soldiers in battle, on deployment or returning home.

In Thomas Churchyard’s 1575 account of  The Siege of Leith, McKeown finds both a critique of the military strategy that fruitlessly sacrificed many lives and disdain for the diplomacy that eventually brought peace yet discredited the sacrifices of those who fought.

Contrasting George Gascoigne’s 1576 The Spoil of Antwerp with Alarum for London,  an anonymous 1602 play based upon it,  McKeown finds the earlier soldier’s account of the English mission in the Netherlands better informed and more judicious than the later adaptation, which converts it into anti-Spanish propaganda.

John Donne’s utterances on the subject “ask their readers to see war as both a testing ground for personal and national valor and a destructive force that ravages human pride and renders whole countries bare, peace both an Eden on earth and a state of gnawing restlessness and internal anxiety.”(19) McKeown states that the purpose of these emblematic paradoxes is to stimulate spiritual awakening, but he finds their source in Donne’s harrowing military experiences in the Cadiz and Azores expeditions.

McKeown juxtaposes John Harington’s popular translation of Ariosto’s war-glorifying Orlando Furioso with his reports on the disastrous Irish campaign for which he volunteered and with his complaints of ingratitude by “the country that scorned him when he came home.”(20)

The book concludes with an affirmation of martial virtue in Ben Jonson’s The New Inn and The Magnetic Lady, where the playwright presents exemplary veteran soldiers who, during the revival of English militarism after the death of King James, warn “Caroline England of its moral and physical unfitness to get involved in foreign war.”(20)

McKeown’s third chapter, “English Mercuries,” begins by presenting a document about heroic soldiers that lionizes Elizabethan military achievements. At the end of a long paragraph he reveals that it is an 18th century hoax often quoted to support 19th century English militarist propaganda.  “Mercury” signifies reporter, as in the names of newspapers, and “English Mercuries” is used by the chorus in HenryV (2.0.7) to describe the king’s recruits. The term appears in emblems and a familiar motto signifying the Renaissance ideal of soldier-scholar: Tam Marti quam Mercurio. But Mercury also represents a liar and thief, alluding to the unreliability of both Chorus and King, as witnessed by the play’s cynical other voices. McKeown restores the term’s honorific meaning in reference to his real soldier-poets.

McKeown’s paradoxical method is prominent in the introductory chapter, entitled “Ecole Lemonier” after the “forward antiterrorism base” in Djibouti U.S. forces shared with the French Foreign Legion.  Here, McKeown tells us, he taught Henry V to fellow marines who wanted to know if Shakespeare ever served. He describes this class to reporters and to NPR listeners he addressed in a commentary as neither “the story of one sensitive intellectual’s attempt to create a meaningful experience in a war otherwise without meaning” nor that of “a patriot who risked the censure of an elitist and hypocritical academy to serve his country and give Shakespeare back to the regulars guys fighting the war.”(12) Rather he claims, “it was a real war story by real soldier about other real soldiers fighting in a real war.”

The book concludes by repudiating the perennial use of Henry V to promote military adventurism. In the self-portrait on the back cover, the author wears no uniform, but his black t-shirt, shaved head and fierce smile convey the message, “Semper Fi.” Speaking both for and as one of the English Mercuries, he characterizes soldiers as “morally strong people¦who are not stooges of the state or servants of its whims¦They are above all products of political violence and witnesses to how people come to terms with political violence not as an idea but as an action they must commit or endure.” McKeown provides valuable insight to outsiders about what military people for five hundred years have thought about their profession.  But in this age of a volunteer army, I still fail to understand his meaning of  “must.”

This book is still in proposal form “ that is, it has not yet been signed for publication.  Your comments are very important to us in determining whether or not to publish this project, and are very helpful to the author(s) in terms of getting specific recommendations for revision, where necessary.

1.  Overall Reaction: What is your general reaction to this proposal?

a)    Do you find any of the features of the text particularly appealing?  Is the book based on any assumptions with which you agree? Disagree?  Please explain.

I find the idea of a collection of essays on Shakespeare and the Bible most appealing.  The relations between these texts is a topic of interest to a wide audience and carries great potential for scholarly research and interpretation.  A number of excellent essays dealing with aspects of the topic are now available, but puzzlingly few academic books have been devoted to it.  Assembling such a large and illustrious gathering of scholars to converge on this subject is a timely and useful project.

The project’s focus on metacritical themes”ambiguities in definitions of the terms “Shakespeare” and “Bible,” efforts to stabilize those definitions, and the afterlife of the coupling of the two for ideological purposes”is based on an assumption that such inquiries should take priority over direct interpretive approaches.  This assumption may depend on another assumption: that literary scholarship is obliged to unmask “transcendentalizing” and “naturalizing” evaluations of texts by earlier readers and authorities.  Such evaluations are prevalent in the coupling of Shakespeare and the Bible, as is exemplified by the prevalence of titles like Shakespeare and the Bible: showing how much the great dramatist was indebted to Holy Writ for his profound knowledge of human nature in any keyword search.   But I would prefer a collection of essays that presented a range of interpretive approaches to the larger topic rather than one primarily devoted to such critique.

What I found most valuable in the abstracts of essays to be included were the insights into ways that Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood, responded to and used specific Biblical texts”the Geneva Bible’s marginalia, Paul’s insistent argumentation, the relations among Scripture-quoting, character, and Biblical context, and Shakespeare’s adaptations of Biblical women’s voices. To me the theme of “History of the Book” as it appears in the essays in the first half of the collection, referred to as “Scriptural Negotiations,” is of secondary interest.

Chapters 6,7, and 8 move away from any consideration of intertextual relations between Shakespeare and the Bible to the issues of book packaging and canon-formation during the early modern period. They provide a fitting transition to the second half of the collection devoted to the afterlife or reception of the coupling of the two. The discussion of Bardolatry and of Scripture each as support for British Cultural authority is well-trodden ground, but these essays shed fresh light on their mutual reinforcement. (more…)

A review of To Speak, To Tell You, Sabine Sicaud 1913-1928
by Odile Ayral-Clause

Natives of poverty, children of malheur,
The gaiety of language is our seigneur.

Wallace Stevens

Odile Ayral-Clause is an emissary from the land of beauty in anguish.  With a voice both urgent and composed, she leads the reader to the lives and works of individuals who have extruded art from tragedy and pain. In her previous book, Camille Claudel, (Abrams 1990) Ayral-Clause delivered a definitive biographical and critical study of the person famous as the pupil and mistress of Auguste Rodin, but less known as a brilliant sculptor herself, one whose free spirit and talent were crushed by the ravages of mental illness and forcible incarceration in an insane asylum for thirty years by members of her own family.

In a new book, To speak, To Tell You, Ayral-Clause introduces Sabine Sicaud, a child-poet recognized during her own brief lifetime from1913-28 but largely forgotten since.  While Claudel lived to age 89 having spent many decades in joyless and unproductive isolation, Sicaud died at the age of 15 after a year of excruciating suffering brought on by a rare untreatable disease under the care of loving parents who fostered her creativity but couldn’t alleviate her torment.

To Speak, To Tell You? includes 50 of Sabine’s poems, in the original French and in face-en-face English  translation by Norman R. Shapiro, a distinguished scholar and translator, along with a 40 page introduction, explanatory notes, and annotated bibliography by Ayral-Clause.  The volume also contains numerous antique photographs of Sabine and of the family estate, La Solitude, that many of her poems make familiar.

The title Ayral-Clause chose for the book is part of a first line which concludes, “No I cant.” The line exemplifies the oscillations between extreme emotions shaping each poem and the collection as a whole. The poet reaches out to the reader to establish a connection, to beg for rescue, then senses the inexpressibility of her pain and takes some comfort from resentment and self-pity, which is itself undermined by self-irony, leading to another kind of relief in humor, detachment and equanimity.  On the way she shifts her appeal to a bird on a branch and a leaf on a tree, finding in the mute existence of other living beings some companionship and promise. (more…)

Dear Prof. Marx,

As the arts and humanities section editor for the Encyclopedia for Sciences and Religions, I am writing to inquire if you would agree to contribute an article of 4000-5000 words on the subject of “The Bible as Literature” for this particular reference work. The volume will be published in 2011.

As a leading international publisher, Springer is known not only for its comprehensive reference works, but for the global scope of the knowledge and expertise these works contain.

Your name was selected for this project because of your visibility and reputation in your particular field, and I genuinely hope will you say yes.  In the meantime, I thank you so much for taking the time to look over the particulars of this groundbreaking and highly significant project.
__________________________

1. Describe this discipline/subdiscipline and some of its most recent developments.

“The Bible as Literature” denotes an academic subject taught in high schools, colleges and universities and the academic specialty of a worldwide network of scholars. As a Library of Congress subject category in World Cat it elicits entries for 1252 books. In recent years, practitioners have preferred the term, “Literary Study of the Bible,” which produces listings as the subject of 653 books. There is no professional organization or journal specifically devoted to the topic.
The Bible as Literature/Literary Study of the Bible is a subdiscipline of both Biblical Studies and Literary Criticism.  Its activity is “exegesis,” that is, commentary on and interpretation of the Bible.

The word “Bible” has several meanings. It refers to a collection of separate books and to that collection defined as a single book. The Jewish Bible consists only of the Hebrew Scriptures or Tanakh. The Christian Bible includes the books of the New Testament plus the Hebrew Scriptures, which it refers to as the Old Testament. The Catholic Bible contains, in addition, the Apocrypha, a set of books not included in the Protestant Bible

Literature is defined as “¦artistic writings worthy of being remembered. ¦that are characterized by beauty of expression and form and by universality of intellectual and emotional appeal.”  Literary Study is defined as “the humanistic study of literature.”  “The purpose of a literary inquiry is a better understanding of the text”its construction, its forms of expression, its meaning and significance, and/or its relation to non-textual elements or to other texts.”  Although the text that Literary Study examines is usually concrete and specific, no understanding it produces is exhaustive or conclusive.

The Bible as Literature /Literary Study of the Bible is governed by a set of hermeneutic methods”i.e. certain principles of commentary and interpretation. It takes a secular approach, treating biblical texts as works produced by human beings within human history rather than a theological approach, which treats them as Holy Scripture, Divine Revelation or The Word of God.  It applies techniques of literary criticism to the Bible in the same ways they have been applied to other literary works since the time of Aristotle. These include:

¢    analysis of plot and structure,
¢    discussion of character, including the characters of narrator and author
¢    exploration of theme
¢    consideration of historical and geographic setting
¢    delineation of linguistic and stylistic devices, including figures of speech and verse and prose conventions
¢    categorization of genres
¢    correlation of intertextual references to other works

Some readers within faith communities that adhere to a theological approach to biblical interpretation regard the The Literary Study of the Bible as subversive; others see it as complementary. (more…)