The Genesis Of Secrecy

An examination of some enigmatic passages and episodes in the gospels.

Frank Kermode is one of the pre-eminent practitioners of the art of criticism in the English speaking world. It has been his distinction to make a virtue – as all the best critics have done – of the necessarily occasional nature of his profession. That virtue is evident on every page of this collection of essays. In one group of essays he asks the reader to share his pleasure in a number of major writers – Milton, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens. In another, he discusses ideas about problems in biblical criticism and their implications for the study of narrative in particular and the interpretation of secular literary texts in general. In them he gives clear accounts of questions relating to interpretation and the debate about canons. A key essay looks at the career of William Empson, a career lived between literature and criticism, between the pleasure of the text and the delight in conceptual issues which is characteristic of so much of the contemporary taste for theory. It is Empson's career, perhaps, which is the foundation for the polemical prologue to the book, where Kermode challenges those who doubt the possibility (and the necessity) of the cross-over between literature and criticism, and who argue that criticism is mere appreciation, mere connoisseurship, that theory has displaced criticism and has left literature in the dust, that theory is the avant-garde of critical thought. This piece defines the author's position in the debate about literature and value.

This book considers a range of twentieth-century novelists who practise a creative mode of reading the Bible, exploring aspects of the Book of Genesis which more conventional biblical criticism sometimes ignores. Each chapter considers some of the interpretive challenges of the relevant story in Genesis, especially those noted by rabbinic midrash, which serves as a model for such creative rewriting of the biblical text. All the novelists considered, from Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and Thomas Mann to Jeanette Winterson, Anita Diamant and Jenny Diski, are shown to have been aware of the midrashic tradition and in some cases to have incorporated significant elements from it into their own writing. The questions these modern and postmodern writers ask of the Bible, however, go beyond those permitted by the rabbis and by other believing interpretive communities. Each chapter therefore attempts to chart intertextually where the writers are coming from, what principles govern their mode of reading and rewriting Genesis, and what conclusions can be drawn about the ways in which it remains possible to relate to the Bible.

This book is a record of Kermode's "error," his wandering through literature past and present. He notes that "in thirty-odd years I have written several hundred reviews, an example I would strongly urge the young not to follow." From these Kermode has selected the pieces he treasures most; they provide an example that will be difficult to follow.

Can Eden, the flood, and the Tower of Babel be real events that historians have simply renamed? Could Finnish and Norse, Hindu, Greek and Egyptian myth all be recording this same real history? Did Noah’s generation surpass the agricultural, nuclear, and biotech technology of the twenty-first century? How did the ancients cut the multi-ton stones of the Egyptian pyramids and Incan walls, or melt Scottish forts? Did ancient China and Sumer know about the twin helix of DNA? Were successful human breeding experiments the origin of giants, while monsters like Grendel were the result of failures? What disaster occurred to them that caused the forgetting of all this knowledge? We know that comets captured by the sun’s gravity break up into boulder streams that periodically intersect the Earth’s orbit. Plato and the rabbis told us that repeating cosmic disasters have erased most of our history, leaving us only myth and Genesis. This book weaves the modern scientific evidence from Greenland ice cores, Mediterranean bathymetry, NASA archaeology, and human genetics with the linguistic insights of the Hebrew of Genesis 1–11 into a compelling narrative that we are only the second-most advanced civilization on planet Earth. For now.

Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy is the first book to draw extensively from material in the Salman Rushdie archive at Emory University to uncover the makings of the British-Indian writer's modernist poetics. Simultaneously connecting Rushdie with radical non-Western humanism and an essentially English-European sensibility, and therefore questions about world literature, this book argues that a true understanding of the writer lies in uncovering his 'genesis of secrecy' through a close reading of his archive. Topics and materials explored include unpublished novels, plays and screenplays; the earlier versions and drafts of Midnight's Children and its adaptations; understanding Islam and The Satanic Verses; the influence of cinema; and Rushdie's turn to earlier archives as the secret codes of modernism. Through careful examination of Rushdie's archive, Vijay Mishra demonstrates how Rushdie combines a radically new form of English with a familiarity with the generic registers of Indian, Arabic and Persian literary forms. Together, these present a contradictory orientalism that defines Rushdie's own humanism within the parameters of world literature.

'Sound Unseen' explores acousmatic sound - a sound that one hears without seeing its cause. Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concr ete, in his Trait e des objets musicaux, first popularized the term 'acousmatic'. After an introduction, the first chapter provides a thorough exegesis of Schaeffer's theory of acousmatics. It also presents three objections to Schaeffer's theories (myth, phantasmagoria, and ontology) around which the book is structured.

Providing the first extended English translation of the earliest anthology of patristic commentary on Mark’s gospel, this book provides a careful analysis of the development of this text and assesses its significance for the history of the interpretation of Mark’s gospel.