John Barth - Final Fridays

Turning now to a bit of proto-Postmodernism: Though far from being a Biblical scholar myself, I was successfully tempted by the bona fide Biblicist David Rosenberg to contribute the following essay on Genesis and Matthew to his anthology Communion 1—having perused which, the distinguished journalist Bill Moyers persuaded me in 1996 to take part in one episode of his 10-part PBS series Genesis : 2a lively round-table conversation with Moyers; the novelists Rebecca Goldstein, Mary Gordon, Oscar Hijuelos, Charles Johnson, and Faye Kellerman; and the theologian Burton Visotzky, on the subject of “The First Murder,” Cain’s offing of his brother Abel in Genesis 4. Whereafter I happily retired from amateur scriptural exegesis.

Bereshith —in Hebrew, the first word of the first verse of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible — says it more aptly than does the usual English translation, “In the beginning.” Both expressions are adverbial, and their sense is inarguably the same: Bereshith means, indeed, “in the beginning,” 3its first syllable corresponding to the English preposition. But if, as John’s subsequent gospel affirms (1:1), “In the beginning was the word,” then any form-conscious writer of a creation-story will prefer that beginning word to be the word Beginning . The text of Genesis (called, in Hebrew, Bereshith ), especially its opening chapters, is virtually proto-Postmodernist in its deployment of what art critics call “significant form”—the form a metaphor for the content, or form and content reciprocally emblematical — and the original Hebrew begins the story best: beginningly. 4

In the “Near Eastern” stacks of my university’s library, once the distinguished haunt of William Foxwell Albright’s Oriental Seminary, there is half an alcove of scholarly commentary, in a babel of languages, on the text of Genesis; enough to frighten any self-respecting fictionist back to his/her trade. Of all this (except for Sacks’s excellent treatise aforenoted) I remain programmatically innocent. No professional storyteller, however, especially of the Postmodernist or Romantic-Formalist persuasion, can fail on rereading this seminal narrative to be struck by two circumstances, no doubt commonplaces among Bible scholars: 1) that the structure of Genesis, particularly of its opening chapter, is self-reflexive, self-similar, even self-demonstrative; and 2) that its narrative procedure echoes, prefigures, or metaphorizes some aspects of current cosmogonical theory.

• Taking, like an artless translator, second things first: As everybody knows, according to the generally accepted Big Bang hypothesis (as opposed to various currently-disfavored “steady state” hypotheses), our physical universe in one sense came into existence “all at once”—at the moment dubbed by astrophysicists “Planck Time” (10–43 seconds after T-Zero), prior to which the concept time is virtually as unintelligible as are physical processes at the infinitely high temperature of the original “naked singularity.” Exquisite scientific reasoning from known physical laws and processes has made possible a remarkably precise scenario/timetable for the universe’s subsequent expansion and differentiation, through its radical metamorphoses in later fractions of that first second, 5to the formation of galaxies and solar systems over subsequent billions of years and the evolution of life on Earth — including, if not culminating, in the day-before-yesterday development of human consciousness and intelligences capable of such rigorous formulations as the Big Bang hypothesis in all its scientific/mathematical splendor. In two other senses, however, the astrophysical creation-story ongoes still:

• The observable universe continues the “creative” expansion and exfoliation more or less implicit in its first instant (in the language of complexity physics, or chaos theory, its processes are “sensitively dependent on initial conditions,” more particularly on certain aboriginal inhomogeneities crucial to the uneven distribution of matter into galactic clusters, superclusters, and superclusteral “superstrings”) — a continuation whose own continuation apparently depends on the as-yet-imprecisely-known amount and distribution of “dark matter” out there. Moreover,

• The intelligence capable of observing, experimenting, reasoning, theorizing, and reporting on these astrophysical matters likewise continues to evolve, refine itself, and build upon its accumulated knowledge, toward the point where the question of the universe’s ultimate denouement (infinite expansion, apocalyptic Big Crunch, whatever) will in all likelihood prove answerable, perhaps also the question whether the extraordinary intelligence that can conceive and successfully address such questions is confined to a few Homo sapiens on planet Earth or is after all less parochial than that.

In the astrophysical beginning, in short, were the seeds of several beginnings-within-beginnings: the beginning of spacetime, the beginning of matter, of radiant energy, and of galaxy formation, down (or up) to the beginnings of life, of human consciousness, of rational inquiry, of scientific reasoning and experiment, and of contemporary cosmological speculation capable even of some empirical verification of these several beginnings.

Analogously, Genesis 1:1—“In the beginning, God created heaven and earth” 6—in one sense says it all. And then the next four verses (i.e., Day One: the creation of light, its division from darkness, their naming as Day and Night, and, coincidentally, the initiation of time) sort of say it all again; and then the remaining 26 verses of Chapter One (the ensuing five days of creation, echoing on a larger scale and with more particulars the first five verses, themselves an expansion of 1:1) sort of say it all again . Whereafter, Chapter Two (following God’s three-verse rest on Day Seven) proceeds to say it all yet again—“This is the generations of the sky and the earth in their creation on the day in which God made the earth and the sky,” et cetera — replaying the same creation-riffs in so different a key that some scholars take it to be another tune altogether (Sacks, pp. 18 ff.). In either case, what’s undeniable is that each successive expansion is an expansion, both in textual space, like the universe’s expansion of physical space (not, strictly speaking, in physical space, since at any moment its expanding space is all the space there is), and also in particularity, differentiation, multiplicity. From mere sky and earth in 1:1, we have evolved by 2:23 a cosmos replete with heavenly bodies in motion, speciated life on Earth, and sexually differentiated human beings endowed with language and intelligence, though not yet with upper-case Knowledge and its attendant hazards.

The rest, as they say, is history: 7the rest of Genesis (creation + fall, flood, and bondage); the rest of the Pentateuch (Genesis + Exodus through Deuteronomy); the rest of the Hebrew bible (Pentateuch + prophets and “writings”); the rest of the canonical Christian Bible (Hebrew Bible + New Testament) — all implicit in the beginning, bereshith . Indeed, one might call the opening verse of Genesis the macrobang from which evolve not only the Jewish and Christian sacred texts but the centuries of commentary thereupon: an evolution no more “finished” than that of the physical universe, as biblical scholarship and archaeology expand our knowledge and understanding of the texts. Witness, for example, the recent scholarly catfights over publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the expectable deluge of associated books and papers now that the text is readily available.