The Singer on the Shore

Essays 1991-2004

Gabriel Josipovici

• Publisher: Lives and Letters
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781847779274
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The novelist Gabriel Josipovici's new book of essays ranges from writings on the Bible, Shakespeare, Kafka, Borges and the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld to considerations of Rembrandt's self-portraits, death in Tristram Shandy, and what Kierkegaard has to tell us about the writing of fiction. From the title piece, which examines the relationship between artists' works and their beliefs, to the concluding meditations on memory and the Holocaust, The Singer on the Shore is unified by the twin themes of Jewish experience, with its consciousness of exile and the time-bound nature of human activity, and of the role of the work of art as a toy, to be played with and dreamed about. Josipovici's explorations are informed by his own experience as a novelist. He is thus both authoritative and undogmatic. This volume, like a book of poems, rewards repeated reading: it not only illuminates the topics with which it deals, it also raises the large question of the place of art in life and of the possibilities open to art today.

1. The Bible Open and Closed

THE BIBLE IS FROM FIRST TO LAST – from ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’ to Cyrus’s decree ordering the exiles to return to Jerusalem, from Matthew’s genealogy to the end of Revelation – a series of narratives, perhaps a single narrative made up of many pieces. Narrative was clearly how these ancient Semitic peoples made sense of the world, as it was the way the Greeks of the time of Homer, and so-called primitive peoples all over the world did. Yet we in our culture have a problem with narrative. What does it mean? we ask. What is the guy trying to say? And if the book in question is a sacred text the problems grow even more acute. For then it is even more important to understand clearly what it is saying, since our very lives may depend upon it. We need to feel we are dealing with a text that is closed, in the sense that its meaning can be clearly understood and translated into other terms; yet the Bible, like all narratives, but, as I hope to show, even more than most, is open, that is, it resists translation into other terms and asks not so much to be understood as lived with, however puzzling and ambiguous it may seem.

Let me try to flesh out this rather stark opposition between open and closed by giving you some examples of what I have in mind. I will confine myself for the moment to the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament. Rather than arguing this point in general terms, let me take you straight to some specific examples of what I mean. When it becomes clear that David has become a rebel leader and will not be persuaded to return to court, Saul gives his daughter Michal, who had been David’s wife, to a certain Phalti, the son of Laish (1 Sam. 25:44). We hear nothing more of this man, who had not previously been mentioned, until after the death of Saul and his son Jonathan, when Abner, the commander of Saul’s army, makes peace overtures to David, now king in Hebron. David, however, is only prepared to listen if Abner hands over Michal. This is of course no romantic tale of lovers re-united; Michal stands for the Saulide succession, as Ishbosheth, Saul’s sole surviving son, now clinging to the kingship of Israel, and Abner and David well know. But since the power now rests with David, there is nothing Ishbosheth can do about it:

And Ishbosheth sent, and took her from her husband, even from Phaltiel the son of Laish. And her husband went with her along weeping behind her to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, return. And he returned. (2 Sam. 3:15–16).1

We never hear of this Phalti or Phaltiel again. He is a mere pawn in the game being played out between Saul and David and David and Saul’s descendants, only one tiny cog in the chain of history unfolding in the Hebrew Bible, the history of God’s relations with Israel. It would have been perfectly easy for the narrator to say: ‘And David took again his wife Michal, daughter of Saul, which Saul had given to Phalti, the son of Laish.’ But no. He chooses instead to bring this man momentarily to life, to make his pain, whether wounded pride or anguished love, all the more palpable for remaining unspoken. And then he makes him disappear: ‘Then said Abner to him, Go, return. And he returned.’

What are we to make of this? What, we ask, is this silent Phalti’s role in the history of Israel’s relations with God? How much importance, if any, are we to allot to him? We might let these questions pass in a novel (though we can be sure that if this novel becomes the object of academic study they will sooner or later be raised), but in a sacred text like the Bible the lack of an answer is deeply troubling, so troubling that someone at some point will seek to provide answers to them. I don’t wish to engage with this issue at the moment, but want instead to pass on to another example. Chapter 38 of Genesis concerns Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar. He gives her one of his sons, who dies shortly after, then a second son, who also dies. Anxious to protect the life of his youngest son, he withholds him from Tamar, although he should by rights now let him marry her. She, however, dresses up as a temple prostitute and accosts Judah as he passes on his way to the sheep-shearing. The encounter leads to her becoming pregnant, and, when her father-in-law arraigns her before the court, she turns the tables on him and proves that he is the father. Once this is made clear Judah does not try to hide: ‘She is in the right and I am not; because that I gave her not to Shelah my son. And he knew her again no more’(38:26).2 However, she bears him twins, Pharez and Zarah, and with their birth the chapter ends and we return once again to the story of Judah’s younger brother, Joseph. In Chapter 46 we read that among those who went down with Jacob to Egypt were the sons of Judah, Shelah and Pharez, and the sons of Pharez, Hezron and Hamul. Much later, in Numbers, we learn that the Pharzites, the Serahites, the Hezronites and the Hamulites are still going strong (26:20–21). Then in the Book of Ruth we learn that Boaz, whose own son, Jesse, is the father of David, is himself a descendent of Pharez. Finally, at the start of the New Testament Matthew tells us that ‘Judas begat Pharez and Sara of Thamar; and Pharez begat Esrom… and Obed begat Jesse; and Jesse begat David the king; and David begat Solomon… and Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ’ (Mat. 1:1–16).

In both instances, the brief story of Phalti and the story of Judah and Tamar, we can safely say that the Bible does not conform to our expectations of how narrative should be constructed, and, especially, of how this most important narrative of all should be constructed. If we look for a common denominator we can say that in both cases the narrative is too open for our comfort. No self-respecting creative-writing teacher today would allow a student to bring in a character like Phalti only to drop him again for ever. We want him either developed or excised altogether. The Bible does not do this. Is it because of the clumsiness of the writer? Or because something has dropped out of our text?

As for the second example, it too seems to us to be a blatant case of clumsy writing. Why has the chapter about Judah slipped in to the Joseph story? If the point is that while Joseph imagined himself to be the centre of the universe he was, all the time, a mere side-show in the larger story of Israel, in which Judah and his sons are to play the major role, why is this not made clear? Is it that the scribes or compilers were not aware of this? Or that they simply failed to make the connection? Or that they lacked the skill to integrate the stories of Joseph and Judah?

We could describe our frustration with both examples as due to a failure on the part of the writers to tell a story as it should be told. More neutrally, we could say it stems from the extraordinary reticence of the writers. We find such reticence not simply puzzling but intensely frustrating. We want to shake them, to scream at them: ‘What are you trying to say, you oafs, what is the point, the point, the point? If Phalti has a role in this story then for God’s sake tell us what it is! If the birth of Judah’s twins is that important, then don’t just slip it in at the end of the chapter and go on to something completely different!’

The strategies adopted by readers in the past to cope with this frustration have been various. So long as the text was held to be sacred, the word of God, readers either filled in the silences by elaborating the stories so as to bring out their point, or else they explored the psychology of the protagonists, filling in the inner lives of the characters, as it were. By and large the first of these approaches led to Hebrew midrash and early Christian narrative elaborations, while the latter led to Protestant exegesis. When, at the time of the Enlightenment, the text began to be studied like any other, as the product of men, whether the initial impulse came from God or grew out of social needs, the silences of the text began to be attributed either to a failure on the part of the writers or to lacunae in the tradition. But what if we were to start from the other end, so to speak, and ask what our frustration has to say about us as readers? What if we were to start with the assumption that the text (let us not speak about authors) knows exactly what it is doing, and that it is we who have been found wanting, either because we lack the critical tools to do it justice or because we lack the cast of mind and spirit to respond as the text asks us to respond?

Instead of trying to answer this question straight away let us stay with our frustration for a little longer. Let us look at one or two other examples of the biblical mode of narration and see how earlier readers, both Christian and Jewish, dealt with it, and what this has to teach us about both the characteristics of biblical narrative and the nature of its readers.

After their exile from the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve have two children, first Cain and then Abel. Cain, we learn, was a ‘tiller of the ground’, while Abel was a ‘keeper of sheep’. It comes to pass that Cain brings ‘the fruit of the ground’ as an offering to the Lord, while Abel brings ‘the firstlings of the flock’. We are then told: ‘And the Lord had respect unto Abel and his to offering: But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect’(Gen. 4:4–5). We all know what happens next: Cain is furious, the Lord rebukes him, but that does not stop him ‘rising up against’ his brother as they are talking in the field, and killing him. The Lord now asks him where his brother is, and he answers: ‘I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?’ (9). Whereupon the Lord curses him and makes him ‘a fugitive and a vagabond… in the earth’ (12). Cain responds mysteriously to the Lord’s curse: ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear’(13), he says, but he has no option but to accept his lot. He settles in the Land of Nod, east of Eden, where he marries, begets children, and builds a city called Enoch, after his eldest son. Adam and Eve meanwhile have another child, Seth, to replace the murdered Abel.

From the first the commentators were exercised by this stark narrative. The traditional Jewish commentators felt that gifts should not be rejected arbitrarily. The rejection of a gift needs to be justified. So what had Cain done wrong? Had he perhaps offered God a sacrifice from some inferior portions of the crop while Abel chose the finest of the flock? Or was Abel accepted because he offered with an open heart while Cain begrudged God every bit of what was offered? Or was Cain perhaps inherently evil? The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, is so sure that it had to do with the wrong kind of sacrifice that it renders Genesis 4:7: ‘If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door’ as: ‘If you have properly brought it [i.e. your sacrifice] but have not properly divided it, have you not sinned?’ And that is the view of the Jewish Platonist philosopher, Philo of Alexandria: ‘[I]t is not proper to offer the best things to that which is created, namely oneself,’ he writes ‘and second best to the All-knowing’. The Midrash Tanhuma, an early medieval compilation of rabbinic midrash on the Torah, glosses ‘And Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground’: ‘[W]hat does this imply? The ordinary fruit [rather than the first fruits reserved for God].’ The notion that Cain was inherently evil, on the other hand, is the one favoured by John in his first epistle: ‘By this it may be seen,’ he writes,

who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil; whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother. For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning [i.e. the book of Genesis]: that we should love one another and not be like Cain, who was of the Evil One and murdered his brother. (1 John 3:10–12)3

St Augustine combines the two approaches:4 while arguing that Cain sacrificed wrongly and kept the best for himself, he built upon the episode the entire argument of his City of God. Cain, the builder of cities, is the ancestor of the men of Thebes and Rome, he argues, those conglomerations of men where each is for himself and what your neighbour acquires leaves that much less for you; while Abel is the ancestor of the Christian way of life, of that city of God where what we give we receive back a hundredfold, and where, as Dante puts it, ‘in his will is our peace’.

This is powerful and suggestive both as a philosophy of history and as a psychological insight into the motivations of men. Unfortunately it has no basis whatever in the biblical story. There is nothing in the Hebrew text as we have it that suggests either that Cain sacrificed wrongly or that he was inherently evil. But this is intolerable to us. For the corollary would then be that it is God who has behaved arbitrarily in condoning Abel’s sacrifice and condemning Cain’s. That, of course, is the position taken by those who dismiss the Bible as a wicked and pernicious book. For the moment, though, I want to stay with the reader who in some way believes in and trusts the God of the Bible, but who cannot square that with what he reads in Genesis 4. For such a reader there must be a reason for God’s actions, otherwise the whole book becomes worthless. So he looks for explanations of the kind I have been outlining.

Let us look at one further example, much less outrageous than the Cain and Abel story, but nevertheless instructive. At the end of Genesis 11, after a list of the genealogies of Shem, Noah’s son, we are told that

Terah begat Abram, Nahor and Haran; and Haran begat Lot… And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai; and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran… (Gen. 11:27–9)

Terah takes Abram and Lot and their wives and they ‘went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there’ (31). In Haran Terah dies. ‘Now,’ we read at the start of the next chapter (but the chapter divisions, remember, are medieval editorial additions), ‘Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee.’ He promises Abram innumerable offspring and that he will make his descendants a great nation in whom all the earth will be blessed. ‘So Abram departed, as the Lord had spoken unto him; and Lot went with him; and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran’ (Gen. 12:1–4).

This of course is the founding story of Israel, God’s holy people. This is the moment when those who will later be called Israelites (after the name given to Abraham’s grandson Jacob by the angel) separate themselves off from the other sons of Shem; and the story does not end, in the Hebrew Bible, till many thousands of pages later, when the decree of Cyrus, King of Persia, sends the Israelite exiles back to what is now their land (2 Chronicles 36:23).

The question is: Why Abraham? The rabbis pored over the text for an answer and, not finding one, patched one together out of a few hints in the Bible. The start of Chapter 11 tells the story of the Tower of Babel. The ruler of Babel, they said, was Nimrod. Nimrod was an idol-worshipper and a cunning astrologer.5 He had foretold Abram’s birth, ‘and it was manifest to him that a man would be born in his day who would rise up against him and triumphantly give the lie to his religion’. He sent out a decree that all male children were to be killed, but Terah’s wife got out of the city and gave birth in a cave, which was immediately filled with the splendour of the sun. She wrapped her cloak round him and left him there to the mercy of the Lord. The child began to wail and ‘God ...