May 12, 1997
Poor Norman Mailer happened to write a very bad book on James Wood’s animating subject, religion—a transgression that earned him one of the most negative reviews in The New Republic’s distinguished history of negative reviews. The piece was supplemented with a cover that plastered the harsh title of the piece across Mailer’s face. When the aging novelist happened to encounter the magazine’s owner, Marty Peretz, on Cape Cod later that summer, he attempted to disprove the headline by punching Peretz in the belly.
Jesus warned us about Norman Mailer. There will be imitators, false prophets, fake messiahs, he said. Here is Mailer, who has been crying in the wilderness, and preparing the way with boasts: “I’m one of the fifty or one hundred novelists in the world who could rewrite the New Testament,” he told an interviewer. He has written the life of Christ as if told by Christ, and he feels that, like Christ, he is half man and half something else—a kind of celebrity-centaur. Mailer can identify with the son of God:
And I thought this one [The Gospel According to the Son] was fine because I have a slight understanding of what it’s like to be half a man and half something else, something larger. Believe it if you will, but I mean this modestly. Every man has a different kind of life, and mine had a peculiar turn. It changed completely at twenty-five when The Naked and the Dead came out. Obviously, a celebrity is a long, long, long, long way from the celestial, but nonetheless it does mean that you have two personalities you live with all the time.
So the nonsense has begun early. With Mailer’s better books, it is easy to separate the nonsense from the talent. It is like playing only the white keys on a piano. But the very melody of this book is foolish. “For those who would ask how my words have come to this page,” Mailer has Jesus say in the novel’s prologue, “I would tell them to look upon it as a small miracle. (My gospel, after all, will speak of miracles.)” Everything that is wrong with The Gospel According to the Son is concentrated in this promise: in that phrase “after all,” which is blithely compact about something that should be felt and explained, and suggests to us that Jesus will wink and nudge his way through his own life; in the verb “speak of,” whose antiqued veneer pledges a book of reproduction language; above all, in the implication that Mailer will not write a novel, but carve a gospel.
In a sense, the four gospels of the New Testament are enemies of the novel. They are not narratives, they are witnessings that occasionally fall into narrative. The life of Jesus is not conceived by the writers of the gospels as the story of an individual whose fate, unknown until the moment of reading, may interest us. Jesus did not live the life of a character in a modern novel. He was a story already told, and he felt this. He existed to fulfill the prophets; he is the completion of evidence. The whole machine of persuasion that is the secular, modern novel—verisimilitude, a believable character, an uncertainty about meanings and endings, the pacing of time, the description of place—is irrelevant. The task of the gospels is not to persuade novelistically, but to convince forensically. In the eighteenth book of The City of God, Augustine writes that Jesus, “in order to make known the godhead in his person, did many miracles, of which the gospel Scriptures contain as many as seemed enough to proclaim his divinity.” “As many as seemed enough to proclaim his divinity”: there were other miracles, suggests Augustine, but the gospel writers picked enough to win their case. Reality was merely the court of the sublime.
The proclamation of divinity has nothing to do with the establishment of credibility as we understand it in literature—the stoking of interest in the belly of the reader. We cannot be persuaded to believe in divinity as we are persuaded to believe in a work of art, and Christian art does not, on the whole, attempt to do this. The halo seen so often above the head of Jesus marks the moment at which verisimilitude, the persuasion of reality, has not just broken down, but has become irrelevant: he is holy, and that is the end of it. A verbal equivalent of the halo, in the gospels, is the ellipsis between verses. The “And” or “Then” with which so many biblical verses begin is not merely abrupt; it demotes fullness of storytelling as beside the point. The narrative does not progress realistically; it is snatched from reality to reality. There is no reality between the verses, just a constant divinity. The effect is like watching, as a child, one of those big institutional clocks whose minute hand does not invisibly coast but jerks at intervals:
When he was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him. And behold, there came a leper and worshipped him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.
Disastrously, Mailer borrows this style that is so inimical to the movement of a novel. Many of his sentences begin with “And” or “Then.” The pith of reality has been spat away, and in its place is a spastic simulacrum of biblical style. Mailer uses a strange, abandoned version of King James English, as if a rival monarch had broken into the text and stolen all its gold. His “biblical English” is simple modern prose with occasional attacks of nostalgia: “I hardly knew why, but I said to Peter, ‘Do not enter into temptation.’ My soul was sorrowful unto death.” Or this: “Then the two fish gave up more than twice two hundred small morsels.”
Mailer has decided—not without reason—that the crooked vitality of King James English lies partly in its gross specificities, the little whorls of metaphorical detail that enable the Psalmist, for instance, to write that the eyes of the rich “stand out with fatness.” Mailer strives to compress the language into fierce oddity, but the effect is often gibberish: “His face was like a ravine and small creatures would live within,” Jesus reports to us, about the face of John the Baptist. “His breath was as lonely as the wind that passes through empty places,” again of John. “Still, I could hear laughter creep out of their feet,” Jesus says of a crowd in the temple. When the Devil comes to tempt him in the wilderness, Jesus can smell his evil: “I could also perceive how greed came forth from his body. For that was kin to the odor that lives between the buttocks.” (If this is what greed smells like, think what the product of greed smells like.) The key to the bad smell of that sentence is not the idea of greed having an odor, nor even the odor’s drastic placement, but the words “kin” and “lives”—both swirlingly portentous.
Mailer’s Jesus, hobbled by this deprived patois, emerges as a simpleton. He is the Prince Myshkin of Judea. He sounds like an antique imbecile. Mailer is forever plunging his Jesus into platitudes—an attempt, presumably, at biblical “wisdom.” “Rare is the calm that is long free of disturbance” is one of his ponderings. “I thought of how King Herod had wished to kill me. What a bloody creature was man.” “How I hoped that the angel spoke the truth! For then I would be like a light sent into the world. Yet men seemed to love darkness more than light.” This may be Mailer’s idea of how a truly good man thinks.
The problem is the whole conception of the book. In Mailer’s plan, Jesus is telling us this story from heaven; what he recounts has already happened to him. Indeed, in the book’s most absurd moment, Jesus provides a kind of epilogue—as in those movies that, just before they roll the credits, tell what happened to everybody after the story ended—in which he lets us know that everyone, including himself, is doing fine:
I remain on the right hand of God, and look for greater wisdom than I had before, and I think of many with love. My mother is much honored. Many churches are named for her, perhaps more than for me. And she is pleased with her son. My Father, however, does not often speak to me.
But retrospection—Jesus looking back on his life from the safety of heaven—is an especially bad way to tell a familiar story whose momentousness is already known to most people. It is hard enough for a novelist to find a fresh cutting from this story. When Jesus first said that it was harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, the phrase was not rusty. Mailer’s Jesus further removes the novelistic from the book. It is unwise, given the dangers inherent in this enterprise, to have Jesus say, of his own birth, “As all know by now, there was no room at the inn.” Yes, we all know—and so the writer must do something new with it, not complain lazily at its familiarity.
Freed from the pretense of telling a tale that is unfamiliar to him, or a tale full of adventures that have to be shared for the first time, Mailer’s Jesus is constantly anticipating and foreshortening his story. “I was yet to learn that I would care about sinners more than for the pious,” he hints early on. At Cana, having turned water into wine, he turns aside and confides: “That was the first of my miracles. . . .” This is sheer ineptitude on Mailer’s part. It destroys what tang of discovery the narrative might have had, and makes it impossible for us to believe Jesus’s self-doubt. For Jesus has already marked his route. About halfway through the book, Peter says to Jesus, “You are the Christ,” and Jesus tells us: “I shook my head. Even at this moment, I could not be certain.” At this, we laugh in disbelief. Mailer’s Jesus has been dropping hints everywhere: “I could hardly see myself as the Son.” Mailer’s Jesus does not act like a man suddenly chosen by God to be the Messiah. He acts like a fool who cannot keep a secret.
Suddenly one realizes why The Gospel According to the Son reads like a children’s book. Jesus lived and died, but he survived to tell the tale! No real harm came to him. At the book’s climax, as Jesus hangs on the cross, he has a little thought: “God was my Father, but I had to ask: Is He possessed of all Powers? Or is He not? . . . If I had failed Him, so had He failed me. Such was now my knowledge of good and evil. Was it for that reason that I was on the cross?” This is a moment at which Matthew is powerful, like a true storyteller: the Roman centurions dividing up Jesus’s garments; the soldier offering Jesus a vinegar-soaked sponge; the thieves and bystanders challenging him to prove himself by coming down from the cross. But Mailer mangles it; mangles it as a novelist should not. These calm clouds are not the thoughts of a man going through his final agony. We do not believe Mailer’s Jesus here, any more than we believe him a few pages later when he insouciantly tosses out: “Indeed, it is true that I rose on the third day.” At such moments, a baldness of narration that at first merely hinders plausibility seems the emblem of something else: a baldness of mind, an idleness, a vacancy.
Mailer’s novel has been criticized, in The New York Times, for reducing Jesus, for knocking him off his “celestial throne.” But this is to criticize the book for being a novel, something it is not enough of. It would have been perfectly proper if Mailer had knocked Jesus off his throne, as a serious writer should try to do. But perhaps one celebrity cannot do this to another celebrity. So instead Mailer has attempted a “gospel,” full of holy wind. His Jesus is not a human being; he exists only in the frail rigging of Mailer’s insistence that he is alive.
How might Jesus the man be portrayed? Ernest Renan, in 1862, wrote a biography of Christ in his Life of Jesus, which had a powerful impact on modern secular thought:
He is tempted—he is ignorant of many things—he corrects himself—he is cast down, discouraged—he asks his Father to spare him trials—he is submissive to God as a son. He who is to judge the world does not know the day of judgment. . . . In his miracles we are sensible of painful effort—an exhaustion as if something went out of him. All these are simply the acts of a messenger of God. . . . He was not sinless; he has conquered the same passions that we combat; no angel of God comforted him, except his good conscience; no Satan tempted him, except that which each one bears in his heart.
This is, essentially, Mailer’s Jesus. Renan was a Catholic who lost his faith. His book is a piece of learned kitsch, soft with surmise and invention. It is a disingenuous book, in which Renan, conscious that he is dismantling Christianity as he turns it into a myth, nervously compensates by idealizing Jesus. Stripping him of supernaturalism, and of his claim to be God’s son, Renan turns the worship of this diminished orphan into a sickly poetry: “The highest consciousness of God which has existed in the bosom of humanity was that of Jesus . . . that which all elevated souls will practise until the end of time.” (A similar nervousness can be felt in Matthew Arnold’s idealizations of Jesus.)
But Renan’s portrait does allow for a man to emerge from the gospels. It is a picture that the doctrine of the incarnation must allow, of course. If Jesus was man as well as God, then he doubted, was tempted, was provoked into anger. Mark tells the story of Jesus cursing a fig tree because he wanted to eat and it had no fruit. The tree withered. Bertrand Russell took this as one of several examples of Jesus’s imperfection. But what enrages the atheist should sting the novelist.
The rise of historical biblical criticism, of which Renan’s book is a late bloom, generated an interest in the lean Jesus of reality, as opposed to the fuller Jesus of worship. There was a secular tilt, which freed the writer. Balzac wrote an extraordinary story in 1831 called “Christ in Flanders,” set in the Middle Ages, in which Christ appears as a mysterious stranger on a boat, and calms a storm. In De Profundis (1897), Oscar Wilde apotheosized Jesus as the greatest artist, and described the gospels as “the four prose-poems about Christ.” D. H. Lawrence wrote “The Man Who Died,” a Nietzschean fantasy in which Jesus does not die on the cross but survives at the last minute. Alive, he realizes that he has never really lived, that his philosophy has been life-denying and death-obsessed.
These visions, some pious, some not, are characterized by their great interest in the real; that is the rich looseness of modernity for such artists. Indeed, the genre of the “mysterious stranger,” the Christ-like figure who suddenly appears and shatters domestic reality (a genre that includes Tolstoy’s “What Men Live By”), takes the interaction of the divine and the real as its very subject. Insofar as the men and women in these stories spend their time trying to uncover the true identity of their visitor, they are actually applying themselves to the “mystery” of incarnation, that impossible imbrication of the godly and the human. That is the true mystery of these visitations.
But Mailer has, apparently, no interest in reality. Whole scenes disappear in a sneeze. Mailer is so besotted with phony grandeur of diction that he refuses to animate. Here is the scene, in full, in which Jesus, just before his death, is being abused by the guards: “The guards beat upon me. These words by Caiaphas had removed all fear that I might yet bear witness against mistreatment. So they felt free to beat my face.” Nothing more! Far from knocking Jesus off a throne, Mailer is blindly, gratuitously, unwittingly reverent. He follows the gospels at times word for word, scene for scene, inventing or changing little. His Jesus is born in Bethlehem; is saved from Herod’s slaughter of the children of Bethlehem; is found by his parents, at the age of 12, speaking with the elders in the temple; is baptized by John; turns water into wine at Cana; raises Lazarus from the dead; heals the leprous and the blind; anoints Peter as the rock of his church to come; walks on water and calms a storm; is crucified and rises on the third day. This is the Jesus of the gospels, but the gospels tell it much better, and they spare us the devil’s odors. Mailer’s imitation is a kind of poor understudy for a performer who is never sick.
Mailer’s loyalty to holiness is what is wrong with this book. Recently he was asked if he believed if Jesus was the Son of God. “As a novelist, I do. I believe Jesus was the Son of God. You can’t be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling. . . . Intellectually, I don’t feel that miracles are impossible—if I did, I could never have entered the imaginative framework in which the book is written. . . . I was able, as a novelist, to believe that the events in the New Testament occurred. So I could write about them as if they were real.” Mailer seems to think that, in effect, he became a Christian while writing this novel. But this is a curious idea of imaginative belief, a misguided literary equivalent of method acting, which severs the novelist’s connection with his everyday imagination. While writing, he is a Christian. While breakfasting, he is a Jew. But why can a writer not describe something that he does not believe? This is surely the very principle of otherness in fiction. In what way did Stendhal believe in Jesuit priests, or Woolf believe in the lighthouse? Those were actualities whose reality was a kind of temptation, not a belief, and whose reality had to be explained in fiction.
Perhaps Mailer is simply being noisy. Perhaps he is confusing identification with belief. But notice that what is holy to Mailer are not miracles, but writing: it is the “imaginative framework in which the book is written” that becomes sacred, and writing a kind of religion. In order to write, says Mailer, one must “believe.” This is in keeping with his generally athletic and operatic approach to literature, which he has always seen as a prizefight of the spirit. Yet the failure of his novel is precisely its inability to make real such things as miracles. An artist struggles to make something real when he is not sure that others will believe. Is it not possible that Mailer’s “belief” short-circuited that struggle, made it irrelevant? If miracles exist, then why labor to evoke them? If Jesus is the Son of God, then why convince anyone?
Mailer is not a novelist here; he is a very late, very bad pseudepigraphist. Though he does not mean to, he returns the novel to a piece of biblical writing. His belief turns him into a religious “enthusiast” for fiction at the very moment at which he should be a novelist. It is a dereliction familiar in Mailer’s career. In order to write about these events “as if they were real,” he tells us, he had to believe that they were real. Believing them to be real, he does not labor to make them real. He has already done the imaginative sweating at home. Why share it? But of course he has done no sweating at all.
It is possible to credit Jesus’s humanity without irreverence. Equally, it is possible to credit Jesus’s divinity without believing in it. Two great works of our time, both by non-believers, demonstrate this. They are Pasolini’s film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), and a novel by the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991). Both works embarrass Mailer’s earnest fraudulence. Both present a Jesus who resembles, at first sight, Mailer’s, or Renan’s: tetchy, confused at times, a fallible gatherer of men, a revolutionary. Both artists are unafraid of the supernatural: their Jesus speaks with God, is visited by angels, walks on the water. Yet both artists wrestle with the biblical texts they have inherited, seeing them almost as a devilish challenge to artistic originality.
It is because their stories already exist as stories that these artists sink themselves so heavily in the real. The real is their great modern advantage as artists, over their inheritance. “Belief” may be surrendered, but the real must be guarded. Pasolini, using Calabrian peasants and non-actors, lets the camera browse beautifully over the faces of poor men and women. He makes the camera explore a physiognomic skepticism: an innocent sarcasm stares from these peasants’ faces as Jesus preaches to them. Animals snuffle in the mud. There are children everywhere, shouting and begging. Jesus moves in a cloud of urchins. There is dirt and noise. At one moment, Jesus strides past a group of men working in the fields. As he passes them, he tells them to repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. They turn and look at him as if he is a madman. The camera slows. The deep irrelevance of Jesus to their lives is made manifest. And while they look suspicious, their faces also have a kind of sanctity, for they cannot be touched. Mailer’s entire novel is not worth that one scene.
Saramago does not mimic the gospel stories like Mailer, he bounces off them. He novelizes. Mary is a poor wife, Joseph is a mediocre carpenter. (Mailer makes Joseph a sage of carpentry.) While Matthew tells us that Joseph sees in a dream that he and his family must escape Herod and flee to Egypt, Saramago has Joseph overhear two of Herod’s soldiers talking about the dread orders that they have just received, and must soon obey. Terrified, he runs home. Unlike Mailer, who accepts the biblical absence, Saramago makes Joseph a real father to Jesus. Saramago’s Joseph is captured by mistake, rather as Pierre is captured in War and Peace, and crucified by the Romans as a rebel. When Jesus, who is only a little boy, hears of his father’s death, he cries out: “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?” The irony is not forced, and it humanizes the later identical lament, enriches it. Jesus becomes Mary Magdalene’s lover. The two are inseparable, and she is one of the few who truly believes in him. When Jesus is on the verge of raising Lazarus from the dead, Mary Magdalene stops him, saying, “No one has committed so much sin in his life that he deserves to die twice.”
It is in such swerves, such disobedience, that a great novelist refreshes himself. The gorgeous paradox of Pasolini’s film and Saramago’s novel is the paradox of the incarnation made animate: the more real Jesus becomes, the more divinely he shines. The more skeptical these works of art, the more reverence is in their skepticism. The more reverent they are, the more it is a reverence for the real. Mailer cannot show us a real Jesus, and so he cannot tempt us with the expensive lure of the incarnation. Besides, would Mailer, once so talented at scouring the actual, even recognize the greatness of these two versions of the gospels? Each new book by him is worse than the last: he has become a bibliographer’s definition of nostalgia. He remembers that one must be daring as an artist, but he has forgotten to what end. His Jesus blusters, in Mailer fashion, about the importance of boldness, and despises “the timid heart.” But a timid heart might have flinched, properly, at sounding this worthless echo.