“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” Thus one of the pronouncements that make up Vladimir Nabokov’s bracingly perceptive essay “Good Readers and Good Writers”. His point is that whereas one can take in the whole, if not the totality, of a painting within a glance or three, it takes time—frequently a lot of it, page after page after page—to discover what it is that a book describes or argues, and that it is only after such a discovery has been made that real reading becomes possible. The business, that is, of working out why an author has chosen to use those particular words, to have a character do that particular thing, and so on. For Nabokov, it was the fact of temporality, along with the recursiveness it demands of writers and readers alike, which made literature supreme: literary art, be it novelistic or poetic or dramatic, could offer the only truly compelling or textured simulacrum of what it was like to measure one’s existence through the media of time and language.
The biblical book of Genesis can hardly be construed as a novel, poem or play, but could easily stand as a test case for what Nabokov had in mind. Its earliest portions (the “primeval history”) describe the creation of the Earth, the creation of Adam and then Eve, the Fall, the Flood and the destruction of the Tower of Babel. Its later portions (the “ancestral history”) describe the troubled but providentially ordained prehistory of the Israelites, God’s chosen people. There is some extraordinary writing. For instance, it feels like more than a nice touch that, amid a stream of narrative prose, Adam (at 1:27) and Eve (at 2:23) are created in poetry. The feeling is confirmed when, at 3:14–19, the punishments meted out by God after the Fall also appear in verse. Or consider the story of Abraham and his long awaited, much loved son Isaac, who is now demanded by God as a blood sacrifice. Its brilliantly spare depiction of terror and incomprehension and agonised obedience in the face of supreme authority has rightly been seen as a form of writing that was unknown to, say, Homeric epic. Genesis demands to be read, reread and reread again.
But as anyone who has sat down with Genesis can attest, it is a disorientating piece of work—one written without the structuring designs of the novelist or narrative historian. The reason for this is not far to seek. Although it was for a long time held that Genesis had been the responsibility of Moses (as directed by the spirit of God or, in the dominant Christian version, the Holy Spirit), we now understand that it is the work of at least four sets of worldly hands: the writers known as the Jahvist, the Elohist and the Priestly source, as well as the person or persons responsible for harmonising and sometimes augmenting their three texts, for fashioning the book of Genesis as it has been passed down through the Jewish and Christian traditions.
The new book by the celebrated American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, is indifferent to almost all considerations of this sort. Her “reading” of Genesis pretends to the humility of one on a pilgrimage or spiritual quest, but it turns out to be an exercise in a particular kind of rereading—one of sustained and imperfectly veiled dogmatism. There is, of course, nothing unusual about this. Doctrinaire and deeply felt accounts of scripture are, so to speak, a dime a dozen. Reading Genesis stands out because Robinson is a writer with remarkable powers of observation, description, moral seriousness and sympathetic intelligence. She is curiously and unflaggingly humane, and has become a national treasure in the United States not just because of her art, but because she is able to speak both to the religious communities of the country’s heartland and South and to the more secular ones of the east and west coasts.
Robinson’s reading of Genesis turns out to be an exercise in sustained and imperfectly veiled dogmatism
The greatest of Robinson’s five novels to date, Gilead (2004), brings to life an ageing Midwestern pastor, grappling with the demands of his faith and his mortality; a protagonist who would not normally feature in the bestseller lists is invested with emotional complexity, a wryly mischievous wit and no little dignity. In brief, Gilead is a masterpiece. By contrast, Reading Genesis only feigns to engage with the world or the representation of it given in scripture. Robinson’s real focus is theological-didactic, and she pursues it relentlessly. Consider her approach to the authorship question. She knows Genesis is the work of many hands, but as dwelling on the “documentary hypothesis” would not support her ends, she brushes it aside—before declaring that, as far as she is concerned, “Moses, he to whom the Lord spoke face-to-face, and his tradition are primary influences on the composition of Genesis.” It is Moses who provides the “unifying vision” of the text, and Robinson wants others to behold this vision as she does.
Reading Genesis comprises two parts. First, 230 pages of meditation on the theological significance of Genesis. Second, the text of Genesis itself, in a modern-spelling version of the King James text. The former is unbroken by chapter headings or other signposts and is held together more by tone of voice than the connective tissue of an argument. Creation, the Fall, the Flood and Babel are rapidly passed over as allegories rather than historical narrative. (More on this in a moment.) Robinson is much more expansive on the ancestral history and is keen to stress not only these chapters’ superiority to the pagan writings of the Babylonians and Ancient Greeks, but also the ways in which they show God maintaining his covenant with his chosen people.
The question of providence is at the heart of the theology on which Robinson insists. For Robinson, although God is often inscrutable, he is essentially good and loving: “If God does not love kindness and hate bloodshed, He has no stable character as the Father of us all… [and] grace would be no part of His abundant providence.” As beings made in his image, humans are fundamentally good and loving too, albeit that the freedom of choice with which they were created opened the door to errors such as eating forbidden fruit, having the wrong kinds of sex, vaingloriously constructing tall buildings, and all the rest. It follows that providence must tend towards the good, and that the early history of the Israelites as outlined in Genesis must affirm patterns of providential order which themselves affirm God’s love for humankind. The “problem of evil”—how could a God who is at once all powerful and all good permit it?—is for Robinson no problem at all: like sin, evil is a misconstrual of providential matters that human beings cannot fully understand. One might of course say the same of the love and goodness to which Robinson would bind her God, but let that pass. The real problem with Reading Genesis is that the God of the book of Genesis does not have a lot in common with that of Robinson’s devotions. It is no coincidence that she quotes from the Psalms and the epistles of Paul as much as, if not more than, she does from Genesis itself.
Robinson’s conviction that God is good, and that to fixate on human sinfulness is therefore a kind of category error, means that she does not share the preoccupation of Milton, Calvin and Augustine with the origins of sin. It is only with the Flood that her exegetical imagination springs into life. It does so because the Flood is a challenge: the creator has grown angry with his creation and destroys all of it except for Noah, Noah’s family and a carefully curated menagerie of the natural world. How to square this with the notion of a loving and merciful God? Her answer is that “the text, so obviously borrowed [from the Babylonian texts Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish], does not tell us that God once subjected the world to an all-obliterating flood. It gives us a parable”. The parable seems to be that “in Noah we see the whole earth being saved by one righteous man”. This may go against the grain of a story in which life on Earth is all but eradicated, but because the Flood narrative also explains the imposition of laws to ensure human righteousness, the spiritually minded reader knows to move on without asking too many questions.
Rather than an unspeakable crime, the deaths of so many are for Robinson a teaching moment...
Robinson, though, is committed to the idea that Genesis reveals much about the ways in which providence works itself out in the actual human experience of which, for her, the latter portions of Genesis are a record; it follows that she needs to read these latter portions as history rather than as parables along the lines of the Flood narrative. The unhappy tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example: the inhabitants of these cities are slaughtered by God for acts that may or may not (Robinson thinks not) include the transgressions now listed under the heading of “sodomy”. In Robinson’s account, their fate testifies “that nations… have communal identities and obligations and vicious tendencies as well, and that as cities and nations they are liable to judgment”. Had there been a single righteous soul in either Sodom or Gomorrah, then God, at Abraham’s urging, would have saved them—but this was not to be. Rather than an unspeakable crime, the deaths of so many are for Robinson a teaching moment, a reminder to Abraham and his line that they will not be judged merely as individuals. I suppose the crux here is the question of righteousness: are the Israelites elect because they are righteous or righteous because they’re elect? It can be hard to escape the conclusion that they are righteous because God has decided they are in advance, and that righteousness can thus have nothing to do with “justice” as conceived by human minds. At one point, Robinson reflects that “the covenant is much more the heritage of Jacob than it could ever be if he had had to deserve it”, and that this is evidence of God’s love for humankind. Maybe so, but try telling that to those who are not among the chosen few.
Although Reading Genesis is short on humour, it is hard not to smile when, a few pages after learning that history as written in the present-day US and UK “is so much a matter of distortion and omission that dealing in truth feels like a breach of etiquette”, we are informed (in connection with the Israelites’ centuries of enslavement in Egypt) that “providence can become visible in retrospect”. Robinson’s earlier, and equally solemn, warning that “people see what they want to see, even in Holy Scripture, whose presumed authority should encourage careful reading” might give us similar pause.
Coming from an author for the most part so rhetorically serene, Reading Genesis surprises in other ways too. Robinson is frequently overwhelmed by an urge to score cheap points—to adopt an agonistic pose in which various modern phenomena that she cannot bring herself to think about are dismissed out of hand. These include biblical scholarship that has shed new light on the textual status of Genesis, obviously, but also “capital and technology and marketing” and “modern physics”. Robinson tells us that she is conscious “of living in a period when the natural order and the social order are fraying together, and the metaphysical side of religion, the very conception of the sacred, has vanished like the atmosphere of a lifeless planet”. At the start of her ninth decade on earth, she has attempted to put the sacred metaphysics back into both scripture and our sense of ourselves; the only catch is that she has chosen to do so by closing her eyes and pontificating.
Marilynne Robinson is a very great novelist, whose works repay serious and sustained attention. The same cannot be said of her foray into biblical criticism.
