Crumb Reviewed

Shaw points us to two reviews of R. Crumb's illustrated The Book of Genesis:

David Hajdu in the Times has a few images from the book, and David Colton in USA Today interviewed Crumb in France:

The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest who writes about pop culture and who has seen excerpts of the book, says Crumb is only the latest artist to bring the Bible to a new generation.

Did Paradise Lost seem quite so provocative to 17th Century England?

It might also be worth pondering Crumb's very "human" approach to Genesis in contrast with what Prof. Rogers describes as Milton's effort to be at, or before, the beginning of all poetry, all history, all time:

Milton wants to create the illusion that he's predicting, or that he's prophesying, the actions recounted in the poem, as if Milton were prophesying what of course we know to be already past. This is the strategy of retrospective anticipation. Lecture 9.

Portraits of Milton

The reception of Milton is interesting. He is clearly not everyone's cup of tea. Here's Dr. Johnson, whom we last encountered ripping Lycidas to shreds, here being critical of the poet's whole political cast of mind:

Milton's republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of independence; in petulance impatient of controul, and pride disdainful of superiority. He hated monarchs in the state and prelates in the church; for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be suspected that his predominant desire was to destroy rather than establish, and that he felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to authority. Life of Milton

If such was the judgment of the preeminent critic of the British Enlightenment, here, not too long after, we have Wordsworth, moved by the revolutionary uprising in France, and displeased with the self-impressed social fabric of England:

LONDON, 1802.

Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In chearful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself did lay.

Rogers on theodicy

While we look forward to hearing Milton's verse read aloud, and to thinking about it as we go, it's also possible we might look for some basic premises from which to begin our exploration.

One place that might be of use is a lecture by Prof. John Rogers, Yale University, on Lycidas. Prof. Rogers has no qualms about addressing the extravagant claims made by Milton - for poetry, and in particular his poetry - that emerge in Lycidas as a prelude to the grand, or as some may feel, grandiose task he set for his epic:

Theodicy is the term coined by the eighteenth-century philosopher Leibniz, and he applied this term theodicy to just that kind of philosophical sentiment that's implied by its etymology. The theodicy is an account of the justice (the dike) of God (theos). And so, to use the words with which Milton would begin Paradise Lost, a theodicy is an attempt "to justify the ways of God to men."

Now for a lot of orthodox Christians in Milton's time -- and I think we can say the same for a lot of orthodox Christians in our own time -- to embark upon anything like a theodicy at all can be considered heretical, or at the very least heterodox. A theodicy can be seen as heretical or even blasphemous for the simple reason that it -- think of what it assumes. It assumes that the ways of God are in fact justifiable. A theodicy assumes that God's justice can be witnessed, that it can be accounted for here on earth. A theodicy assumes that things on earth actually make sense and that God's ways are ultimately rationally accessible, that they are comprehensible by human beings, and that God can in some way -- and this is, I think, the central implication of the Elder Brother here -- that God can in some way be held accountable for his actions. To justify the ways of God to men is essentially to put God on trial for the actions that he performs. Of course in the central test case this is what we all care about, for the unfortunate events that befall virtuous people.

The above is from Lecture 6 of Prof. Rogers' free online course on Milton.

The Open Yale Courses series offers video of a wide variety of courses as well as transcripts of each lecture. Rogers devotes two lectures to Lycidas. The second is also quite worthwhile.

On reading

(Click to enlarge):



These thoughts, which echo T.S. Eliot's thoughts about his first encounter with Dante's poetry, are from Phillip Pullman's introduction to his edition of Paradise Lost.

Paradise Lost Online

The annotated Dartmouth Online Edition of Paradise Lost is here. The site elsewhere contains much of his poetry and some prose works.

There's a page of introductory critical commentary on the poem here. However, given our emphasis on reading closely by our own light, feel under no obligation to consult it.

Academic dead end?

"English has become less and less coherent as a discipline and, worse, has come near exhaustion as a scholarly pursuit. "

Professor William M. Chace laments a sea-change in the nature and fate of the Humanities in US higher ed.

New light on Aramaic

Jutta wanted to share this interesting discovery being studied at the University of Chicago:

Images capture details of ancient tablets

U. CHICAGO—High-quality scans of ancient documents discovered in Iran are shedding new light on Imperial Aramaic, the dialect used for international communication and record-keeping in many parts of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires, including parts of the administration at the imperial court of Persepolis.

Members of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California are collaborating with researchers at the University of Chicago to make very high-quality electronic images of nearly 700 Aramaic texts that were incised in the surfaces of clay tablets with styluses or inked on the tablets with brushes or pens.

“We don’t have many archives of this size. A lot of what’s in these texts is entirely fresh, but this also changes what we already knew,” says Annalisa Azzoni, an assistant professor at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University. More...

Genesis by Crumb

Milton's rendering of scenes from Genesis was bold even for its time. Now R. Crumb has decided to offer his own take -- on the entire first book of the Torah:

Crumb's new comic, The Book of Genesis Illustrated, contains all 50 chapters of Genesis and comes with a warning on its cover: "Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors.

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Principe on Science and Religion

Happened upon a blog that recounts the overview of Lawrence Principe, a historian of science, regarding the relation, the "intimate partnership," of science and religion. In a series of lectures Principe did for The Teaching Company, Augustine comes through as a key interpreter who aimed at harmonizing the book of Nature with the book of Scripture:

St. Augustine warned against the danger of embarrassing the reputation of Christianity by being ignorant or dismissive of the demonstrated scientific knowledge of the day. From the viewpoint of traditional Christian theology, science is essential for full understanding of the “literal” meaning of divinely-inspired scripture (and vice versa).

Among other things, what Augustine did was put in place a working definition of a "literal" understanding of the Bible that would appear to be far more subtle and sophisticated than what passes for understanding among some current Fundamentalists:

Much to my surprise, St. Augustine claimed that the literal meaning is the hardest to get right. The surprise comes from our modern notion of biblical literalism as “believing every word of the Bible”—the surface meaning of the words. Prof. Principe points out that for St. Augustine and all theologians until recently, “literal” means “interpretation of a passage in such a way that it maintains its connection to the topic it seems to be describing and assigns meanings to the individual words so that the passage makes sense in relation to other sources of knowledge.” link

The blog by Chris Dunsford is entitled Darwin Watch.

A glimpse

into the Glorious Revolution (thanks to Mussy for the pointer):

Englishmen and
women throughout the country threatened one
another, destroyed one another's property, killed and
maimed one another throughout the revolutionary
period. Englishmen and women, from London to
Newcastle, from Plymouth to Norwich, experienced
violence and threats of violence, or lived in terrifying
fear of violence. This was not a tame event. more -

from Steven Pincus, "1688: A Fight for the Future,"
History Today, October 2009, pp. 11-16.

A procession of voices

Lycidas has been fraught with strong responses from readers since it first saw the light of print. Considered by many to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest English lyric (it's been called "the high-water mark of English Poesy" and, "the most perfect piece of pure literature in existence,") it also has met with lively displeasure from other distinguished readers:

...it was detested for its artificiality by Samuel Johnson, who found "the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing" and complained that "in this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new." [From "Lycidas" in Wikipedia.]

(A comment all the more provocative as it concerns a poem whose final, crucial word is "new.")

What's clear is that the poem seems to leave large areas of itself open to multiple, uncertain, and highly varying readings, despite innumerable learned readings by academics and men of letters. Some of these cruxes are famous, especially the notorious "two-handed engine."

Others, less renowned, still remain problematic, even on the basic level of deciding who is speaking. For example:

It was that fatall and perfidious Bark [ 100 ]
Built in th' eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

Does the "uncouth swain" make this charge? Or is it a continuation of the reported speech of Triton (who is here speaking for Poseidon), a reported speech which itself encompasses the answer of the winds, brought by sage Hippotades? Here's the entire passage:

But now my Oate proceeds,
And listens to the Herald of the Sea
That came in Neptune's plea, [ 90 ]
He ask'd the Waves, and ask'd the Fellon winds,
What hard mishap hath doom'd this gentle swain?
And question'd every gust of rugged wings
That blows from off each beaked Promontory,
They knew not of his story, [ 95 ]
And sage Hippotades their answer brings,
That not a blast was from his dungeon stray'd,
The Ayr was calm, and on the level brine,
Sleek Panope with all her sisters play'd.
It was that fatall and perfidious Bark [ 100 ]
Built in th' eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

Clearly a key word here is "listens": this is a poem that in the act of being sung is listening to other voices, here staged as a kind of coroner's inquest. The culminating apparent accusatory speech, involving perfidy, eclipse, and dark curses (more reported speech: who did the cursing?) depends even for a basic sense of its bearings upon whom we believe we have been listening to.

Navigating this text would appear to require a finely tuned aural compass, along with whatever else we bring. Here we appear to be listening to the poet as uncouth swain, reporting the speech of the winds as reported by Hippotades (perhaps in turn to Triton?) - culminating in a charge of a mysteriously cursed bark voiced by one of these speakers (but who?) -- presenting a further note of murky Miltonic mystery.

This ambiguity of speech and speaker is both underscored and resolved at the end of the poem, when the voice we've identified as the shepherd-friend of Lycidas flows into the voice of the poet, now separate, distinguishing his voice from that the "uncouth swain." This is the "asymmetric frame" we mentioned last time - asymmetric because there is no similar introduction of the swain at the outset of the poem. The question of who is/was speaking comes to the foreground even as the final notes of the poem mark the moment when the voice we thought we were listening to resolves itself into a narrator, who describes the swain, who narrated the poem we have just heard.

Whatever else we are dealing with in Lycidas, it seems there's more, as we heard in Il Penseroso, "than meets the ear."

Typhoeus: A few loci classici

Hesiod, Theogony 820 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :
"Typhoeus; the hands and arms of him are mighty, and have work in them, and the feet of the powerful god were tireless, and up from his shoulders there grew a hundred snake heads, those of a dreaded drakon, and the heads licked with dark tongues, and from the eyes on the inhuman heads fire glittered from under the eyelids: from all his heads fire flared from his eyes' glancing; and inside each one of these horrible heads there were voices that threw out every sort of horrible sound, for sometimes it was speech such as the gods could understand, but at other times, the sound of a bellowing bull, proud-eyed and furious beyond holding, or again like a lion shameless in cruelty, or again it was like the barking of dogs, a wonder to listen to, or again he would whistle so the tall mountains re-echoed to it."

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 353 ff (trans. Weir Smyth) (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :
"That destructive monster of a hundred heads (hekatonkaranos), impetuous (thouros) Typhon. He withstood all the gods, hissing out terror with horrid jaws, while from his eyes lightened a hideous glare."

Then, when Zeus had put him down with his strokes, Typhoeus crashed, crippled, and the gigantic earth groaned beneath him, and the flame from the great lord so thunder-smitten ran out along the darkening and steep forests of the mountains as he was struck, and a great part of the gigantic earth burned in the wonderful wind of his heat, and melted, as tin melts in the heat of the carefully grooved crucible when craftsmen work it, or as iron, though that is the strongest substance, melts under stress of blazing fire in the mountain forests worked by handicraft of Hephaistos inside the divine earth. So earth melted in the flash of the blazing fire; but Zeus in tumult of anger cast Typhoeus into broad Tartaros.

And from Typhoeus comes the force of winds blowing wetly, except Notos and Boreas and clear Zephyros. These are a god-sent kind, and a great blessing to men; but the others blow fitfully upon the seas. Some rush upon the misty sea and work great havoc among men with their evil, raging blasts; for varying with the season they blow, scattering ships and destroying sailors. And men who meet these upon the sea have no help against the mischief. Others again over the boundless, flowering earth spoil the fair fields of men who dwell below, filling them with dust and cruel uproar." (Theogony)