But what does that actually say?
There are fathers who do kill their children. Some are psychotic, suffering from delusions, some do so under great emotional strain, a darkening of the mind, both these instances falling outside faith, while some do so out of shame, and those who carry out what are called honor killings are motivated by religion; to a certain extent we might say that they kill their children because of God, on his commandment, and in that way there are perhaps similarities here with the story of Abraham and his faith.
Following Kierkegaard’s line of thought in Fear and Trembling there is an essential difference compared to Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, precisely because honor killings, however abhorrent, carry meaning. Honor killing exists in the social world, the domain of the ethical, and while the action may be inhuman, it nonetheless belongs to the human realm with its sets of rules, laws, and agreements. An important distinction in Fear and Trembling is drawn between Agamemnon’s intention to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia and Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Agamemnon’s offering is heroic, his daughter’s death serves a higher purpose, that of the community, and her father’s suffering, apparent to all, is honorable. Abraham’s offering serves nothing, being purely a matter between Abraham and God, and when he takes it upon himself he does so alone, leaving the social world, the ethical, the human realm entirely. And where is he then?
We do not know. What lies outside the human realm cannot be communicated, for the moment it is communicated it becomes human, woven into that which exists between us all and which fundamentally is us and our whole reality. In the essay concerning Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Either/Or, Kierkegaard writes about music, the way words lack access to the things they describe and must consider them from the outside, much as a country whose boundaries cannot be crossed may be mapped by walking its borders and gazing into it from there. Language may encircle Abraham’s turning away from the human world, but it can never gaze into it without at the same time absorbing it, making it something other than what it is, and thereby betraying it.
So what?
In the realm of the ethical the individual is subordinate to the community – ethically, Abraham should love his son more than himself, Kierkegaard writes – whereas in faith it is different, there the individual is ranked above the community, and only for that reason can Abraham be said to sacrifice his son rather than murder him. Sacrifice is a price, the sacrifice of a child the highest price of all, by which one loses everything, more than one’s own life, and if this is so, that the price of abandoning the human realm is to lose everything, the question is then not so much why Abraham was willing to do so, for he was compelled by his blind faith in God, which cannot be explained since faith belongs precisely to the inexplicable, but rather why Kierkegaard writes about it, why he approaches this place at all, the unhuman, which to us in language is nothing, in the same sense as God is nothing.
At the beginning of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard relates the story of Abraham and Isaac four times, each time with a different accentuation, the story’s meaning changing accordingly. Each rendition is followed by a few lines on a different subject entirely, seemingly there is no connection, and these lines receive no comment anywhere else in the book. They concern the weaning of a child, and as with the biblical story, different aspects have been accentuated in each case:
When the child is to be weaned, the mother blackens her breast. It would be hard to have the breast look inviting when the child must not have it. So the child believes that the breast has changed, but the mother – she is still the same, her gaze is tender and loving as ever. How fortunate the one who did not need more terrible means to wean the child! When the child has grown big and is to be weaned, the mother virginally conceals her breast, and then the child no longer has a mother. How fortunate the child who has not lost his mother in some other way! When the child is to be weaned, the mother, too, is not without sorrow, because she and the child are more and more to be separated, because the child who first lay under her heart and later rested upon her breast will never again be so close. So they grieve together the brief sorrow. How fortunate the one who kept the child so close and did not need to grieve any more! When the child has to be weaned, the mother has stronger sustenance at hand so that the child does not perish. How fortunate the one who has this stronger sustenance at hand.
Reading with these lines in mind, the character of what comes after changes slightly, the break with the social world is accentuated, what Abraham turns away from being accorded greater meaning than what he turns toward. The infant lives in symbiosis with its mother, exploits her body as its own, is a part of it, is nourished by it, warmed by it, and has little or no sense of any distinction between it and itself, nor thereby of itself. Weaning marks a transition, a turning away from the mother to those who exist outside the mother, and is the first act in the formation of identity, paradoxical in that the self becomes aware of itself as the other emerges, in a second-order symbiotic relationship, that between the individual and society, which to begin with comprises the family, then such circles as exist around the family, neighbors and friends, then institutions, nursery, school, university, job. Anyone who has ever had small children knows that weaning is brutal but necessary. Some friends of mine did it the drastic way, sleeping upstairs while the child lay downstairs screaming, wanting its mother, wanting her milk and getting none, not knowing why. After two nights, the child was weaned and slept all night from then on. We chose the slower method, shying away from the pain of listening to such desperate cries, which meant that the process took a lot longer, and perhaps it was worse for the children, perhaps it was only ourselves we were protecting. Nevertheless, as Kierkegaard writes, it was a brief sorrow, and then it was over. But that sorrow is followed by others, for children must become their own selves, and in order to do so they must sever the bonds that bind them to their parents and turn away from us toward the world: we lose them, they gain themselves. If instead we hold them close to us, they become dependent, unfree, helpless, in a sense incapable of life. This is a sacrifice, a small one certainly, an everyday occurrence, arguably not worth mentioning, but a sacrifice nonetheless, and what we give up is what we love more than ourselves. In that light, faith, as manifested in Abraham’s inhuman, unfathomable will to sacrifice his son, marks a turning away from that second-order symbiosis, the social world in which we emerge, in which we become integrated, toward a place where we are alone, unique. There, it is the social, the ethical that fades into meaninglessness, because from that vantage point the human realm in itself is little other than a shield against the emptiness of existence. The divine, which exists outside the human realm, is incommensurable with it, and therefore we cannot understand it, and therefore faith is all we have, our only possibility. This faith exists within the human realm, but stands above it, and therefore Abraham can sacrifice Isaac, who is within that realm. He can only do it alone, for when he does it, symbiosis with the community is broken just as that fundamental symbiosis between child and mother is broken in weaning. The community that awaits the child is one we know, into which we want it to proceed: it is good. What awaits Abraham is something we do not know, we do not even know if it’s there, it exists and is possible only in faith. Therein lies the radicalness.
It is totally dark outside, and still, it is just before three in the morning. I came home from Beirut two days ago and the images from that place dwindle slowly from my mind, now it feels like a dream, everything was so different from here, not just the buildings and the clothes, but also the mood of the city, which I found tense and watchful.
The last evening I was there I was interviewed onstage in a room on the second floor of a building next to a wide, busy road just outside the city, an American writer called Jonathan Levy was asking the questions, and the event took place in front of a small audience of a dozen or so people, most of whom had some official function at the festiva
l or were authors who had been invited to take part. Toward the end, Jonathan asked what I was working on now, and I said I was writing an essay about Kierkegaard and his treatment of the story of Abraham and Isaac. Jonathan said he believed the Muslims marked that event with a celebration, and he turned to the audience to learn if anyone knew if that was true. An older man spoke. Indeed, he said, it was. What they celebrated was God replacing Abraham’s offering of his son with a ram, and that every year they sacrificed a ram in remembrance.
“These stories come from here,” he said. “They come from this land, from this culture. They belong to us. They are our stories. Not yours!”
This is true, and it is strange that these texts, from which we are separated not only in time, but also in space, have been and continue to be, albeit more obliquely than before, so important to us and our understanding of who we are. That Abraham and the stories about him are foundational to three monotheistic religions – one of which so permeated a nineteenth-century Danish philosopher’s mind and work – says a lot about their power and a lot about the immutability of man. What is this immutability? Fear and Trembling concludes with a reflection on exactly this, suggesting that it resides in what a generation cannot learn from the one before it, which Kierkegaard calls the essentially human:
The essentially human is passion, in which one generation perfectly understands another and understands itself. For example, no generation has learned to love from another, no generation is able to begin at any other point than at the beginning, no later generation has a more abridged task than the previous one, and if someone desires to go further and not stop with loving as the previous generation did, this is foolish and idle talk.
Nothing significant has changed in the human realm since biblical times: we are born, we love and hate, we die. But the archaic in us, and in all that we do, is as if soaked up into the quotidian, the culture we have created and which we comprise, where reality is horizontal and the vertical reveals itself to us only exceptionally, and then only in glimpses. All it takes to grasp it really is to look up, for there suspended in the sky is the burning sun, and it is the same sun that burned for Abraham and Isaac, Odysseus and Aeneas. The mountains before our eyes are of the same dizzying age. That we are but the latest in a line of descendants stretching back over thousands of generations, our feelings the same as theirs, for the heart that beat in them beats also in us, is not however a perspective we are able or willing to embrace, for in it the unique is extinguished and we become nothing more than a site of emotions and actions, much as the sea is the site of waves or the sky of clouds. We know that every cloud is unique, that every wave is unique, yet we see only clouds, only waves. Mythology directs us there, for the ancient myths and legends are about the one, but what is expressed by the one is true of us all.
I understand this. And I understand that the Muslim tradition, which accentuates a quite different aspect of the story of Abraham and Isaac than Kierkegaard did, keeps it alive in another way, by means of the offering, which is a way of repeating that story, but also of keeping it within the world, not as an abstract issue of faith and doubt, but physically: the blood gushing forth as the ram’s head is severed from the body, flowing onto the ground to bind the dust. The same ram, the same world, the same God, the same faith, the same blood, the same dust.
In the taxi on the way to the airport, which I share with the German writer Christoph Peters, I say that I find it strange that the ancient archaic texts once written in this area, which are essentially so very alien to us, are so significant to our own culture in our own part of the world. Christoph, who grew up with Catholicism and went to a Catholic boarding school but is now a Sufi Muslim, says that it is not strange at all, these were agricultures that shared much the same set of values, the same basis of experience, which is why religion died out in our part of the world, we never see a dead animal and have no idea where the meat we consume comes from, in fact we hardly even think of it as coming from animals at all, more as some kind of antiseptic substance, and we never see a dead human either, but live at a distance from all of this, whereas here, in this part of the world, people still live close to the body, the flesh, the blood, death, or at least closer than us.
“Before Abraham, of course, there were lots of gods,” he says. “Abraham brought them together into one. For three thousand years we have worshipped one god. What has happened now, I think, is that in our part of the world we have gone back to the time before Abraham. Now again we have many gods.”
I live in what Kierkegaard speaks so sarcastically about in his preface to Fear and Trembling, in lightness and remoteness, and I do so in regard to his writings too, which I know about and veer away from, lacking as ever the ability or will to fully explore their meaning. I am like that when it comes to nearly all knowledge. I know about atoms and electrons, galaxies and supernovas, gravity and entropy, Plato and Augustine, Heidegger and Foucault, but understand none of it and have never tried to understand it either, at the same time as I pretend to myself that I do. It is the same with cities and places, countries and continents where I have never set foot but still think I know. My life is surface, depth my yearning. The feeling that the essential is possible, the authentic a reality, is strong, but how they are possible and real, I am not sure. Faith is not an alternative, not for me, it would be like forcing something back, doing violence to something.
This is a question of meaning, and meaning is in life. The more life is threatened, the greater its meaning becomes, and it becomes greatest in death: I still remember how everything I saw appeared so crisp and clear in the days after I was told that my father was dead, and especially after seeing his dead body, which had lost everything I’d still retained, and which made every other person a living person, and allowed me to see life as life in a near-explosive display.
Then it passed and a veil descended once more over all things.
Is it merely an alertness to the circumstances of life? Not as thoughts, for thoughts are remoteness, but as feelings? And is this why Kierkegaard ventures so far toward the edgelands of our human existence, where everything is acute, precarious, shimmering with life and meaning?
I got home late at night, everyone else was asleep, and after putting my suitcase down in the hall I went upstairs and lay down to sleep. I was woken by our eldest daughter a few hours later, she wanted to tell me everything that had happened while I was away. That evening, after I had read to her, our youngest daughter said suddenly, “Eat, sleep, die. That’s what life is.”
I looked at her. She looked at me and smiled.
“That’s not true,” I said. “You must not believe that. It’s eating, and then lots of fun. It’s sleeping, and then lots more fun. And that’s the way it is for many, many, many years before we die.”
“Not so many years,” she said, and smiled again.
“Yes, many,” I said. “So very many. It’s true. Now go to sleep.”
She is seven years old, and I knew she had got this from a film I had just bought, which I had left out in the living room, its title was Eat Sleep Die. But that it could be taken to sum up life was a thought she had arrived at herself. It saddened me, I didn’t want her to think about the fact that she would one day die, for there was so much life in her having reasoned it out, so much vigor, and she had been lying there, perhaps all alone in bed, looking up at the ceiling, thinking about how everything hung together.
Madame Bovary
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary occupies a place apart among novels written in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Not only has it been highly influential in terms of style – it has almost single-handedly shaped our conceptions of the realist novel such as it continues to be written and read – but its thematic relevance too has prevailed in every age since it appeared. Countless are the critics and writers who have held up Madame Bovary as the perfect novel – the best novel that has ever been written, at that. Perso
nally I am no fan of perfection when it comes to literature; for me writing and reading are all about transgression, whereas perfection is all about faultlessness. And yet I agree: Madame Bovary is the perfect novel, and it is the best novel that has ever been written.
Why?
What is it about this tale of a rural doctor’s wife and her yearning to escape from the daily round of provincial France at the time of our great-great-great-grandparents, long before the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Second World War, the atom bomb, the automobile, the airplane, the growth of prosperity, female emancipation, the explosive spread of public education, radio, television, the telephone, the Internet – indeed almost everything we think of as defining our contemporary age – that no other novel since has surpassed?
It isn’t its universality, for a novel more fixed in time and place has scarcely been written: the most significant stylistic feature of Madame Bovary is perhaps the salience of its descriptions of material reality, how thoroughly and exactly all the houses, rooms, furniture, and effects are described, as well as the landscapes and the skies above them. There is never any doubt as to where we are; we could never be anywhere other than a village outside Rouen in Normandy in the mid-nineteenth century.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 26