My possibly cryptic title invokes a famous piece of nineteenth-century furniture, somewhat reminiscent of a small, beached whale, that adorns the office of the President of the United States in the White House: the "Resolute Desk." Unfortunately I sit behind an Irresolute Desk. I am good neither at the making of resolutions nor at the keeping of those made, but since I write this on New Year’s Day, the pressure is on. So, while I am not resolving actually to do anything except think about something I might do, I intend in this new year to dip a toe of pussy-footing possibility into the shallow end of the kiddies’ pool. To be a little less oblique, I am thinking about undertaking another book. I guess I am in the situation of one of our obscure politicians who announces at a sparsely attended news conference that he is establishing an “exploratory committee” to look into his possible prospects as a presidential candidate. As you read the newspaper squib about this on page seventeen, you are already pretty certain the squib is the last you will hear of it. So I am appointing myself an exploratory committee of one to consider the wisdom of an eighty-seven year old man undertaking a major writing project still needing significant primary research. With artful procrastination I probably can take up the whole year with committee meetings.
During the pandemic, to improve the unshining hours, I put in a lot of time on a Duolingo Portuguese language course. My studies eventually led me—as I have explained before in this blog—to discover a major novelist whose very name I cannot remember having encountered earlier: José Maria Eça de Queiróz, or Queirós (1845-1900). Eça was the conduit by which I became usefully sidetracked into the fictional manifestations of developments in biblical criticism and interpretation as reflected in some major European writers, in the century between the birth of George Eliot (b. 1819) and the death of Mikhail Bulgakov (d. 1940). That is roughly speaking my proposed topic, and it is of course enormous.
How to share with you some sense of what I have in mind? I might well begin with the most famous novel dealing with my chosen theme, as it is also a strong competitor for the rank of greatest novel in the English language: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, first published in 1871/2 but set in the era of the Reform Bill of 1832. This is a book with many plots, perhaps too many, but the “through line” is the history of a remarkable woman named Dorothea Brooke, a provincial orphan, and the ward of an uncle whose affable pomposity at times invites our affection and at others our derision. A major theme of the book is the clash of older and newer modes of social, political, scientific, and religious thought. The book begins with Dorothea, not yet twenty, naively accepting a marriage proposal from the Rev. Edward Casaubon, a country parson of considerable means and an erudite amateur scholar. Casaubon is bogged down in apparently endless research for a vast literary, historical, and theological study called The Key to All Mythologies. The conclusion of his vast researches (determined long before he has concluded them), will prove that all the great myth systems of the ancient world are but distortions or mangled memories of the true revelations of Moses in the Pentateuch: in other words a “fundamentalist” (as we might now call it) defense of the historicity and inerrancy of the Bible.
“George Eliot” is of course the pen name of a woman named Mary Ann Evans who was not merely a Bible reader, having been raised in Evangelical piety that she later abandoned, but a real Bible scholar, the translator of revolutionary works of German theology such as D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835/36) and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841). Her abandonment of orthodox Christian belief, though it scandalized many of her contemporaries, did nothing to qualify her life-long admiration of the literary qualities of the Authorized English Bible.
There are many dimensions to the literary exposition of the sterility of Dorothea’s relationship with her considerably older husband, who sees in her a subservient research assistant rather than anything approaching an intellectual partner. But his vast and wacky Key to All Mythologies is itself a major load-bearing pillar of the novel. It exemplifies in intellectual terms the “dead hand” with which Casaubon would seek to crush his wife’s spirit and control her even from his grave. Casaubon’s erudite stultification would renew and expand the enterprise of numerous episodes of intellectual reaction of the eighteenth century. Specifically, it is clear that his magnum opus in endless progress is a fictional extension, expansion, or imitation of the work of the Cambridge antiquarian theologian Jacob Bryant (1715-1804) entitled A New System or Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774–76). Motivated by the same aims pursued by Casaubon—to defend supernatural Christianity and biblical inerrancy—Bryant erected one of history’s more amazing piles of learned nonsense. His method was pseudo-philological, consisting mainly of the etymological reduction to three- or four-letter “roots” of personal and place names found in ancient Near Eastern and classical texts. These roots he presented as crucially related to vaguely similar forms to be found in the Pentateuch. The relevant part of his lengthy article in the Dictionary of National Biography can be summarized in one sad sentence: “His research is remarkable, but he had no knowledge of oriental languages, and his system of etymology was puerile and misleading."
Eliot critics, especially the female ones, are wont to beat up on Casaubon, and Lord knows, he deserves it. He is prissy, pedantic, emotionally stingy and as we now say “controlling” to an extreme degree. His treatment of his young wife is one of literature’s more convincing depictions of domestic emotional cruelty. Graduate students of English literature long ago found in Casaubon and his monstrous Key to All Mythologies the archetypes of pedantic futility that too often haunt their nightmares.
We can all
endorse the condescension with which Eliot’s readers have scoffed at the
wrong-headedness and futility of his white-elephant scholarly enterprise. Will
Ladislaw (Casaubon’s younger cousin, a spirited modern idealist with modern
ideas and a modern temperament, who eventually marries the widowed heroine) does
so within the text of Middlemarch itself. Ladislaw
specifically alludes to Bryant’s works—part of the sluggish pond of the
past that in the novel the wave of political Reform promises to refresh--as the
emblems of an antiquated intellectual order.
But we can scoff at his biblical studies only in the same way we can scoff at the adepts of alchemy, who, believe it
or not, were still fairly numerous at the dawn of the nineteenth century. There
is scant philological difference in English between alchemy and chemistry,
save that the latter has shed its Arabic article. The
project of the alchemists, however, was a fantastic and sterile one in
terms of its stated goal to transmute base metal into gold. Even so, through the centuries of the
Renaissance and early modernity the alchemists perfected many of the techniques
crucial for the emergence of real chemistry. I find here an analogy with numerous episodes in intellectual
history. The shining pearl is the
oyster’s response to the irritating grain of sand, and that fact makes the sand
of interest in itself. All of this calls
for exploration with or without a committee. But is the world really in need of a Key to the Key?
