Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.
There are two very good Jewish
writers whom I sometimes mix up in my mind, even though they are not related to
each other. One is the British-born Howard Jacobson (born 1942), Booker
Prize-winner for The Finkler Question
in 2010 and the author of Roots, Schmoots [my take upon which you can look up on this blog’s index]. The
other is the South African-born, but British-resident, Dan Jacobson (born
1929), who has also had a distinguished literary career. Dan Jacobson’s memoir Time and Time Again (1985) contains some
of the most haunting stories I’ve yet read in an autobiography.
The two Jacobsons are very different writers in
some respects. Howard is more often comic and satirical. Dan is more often
sombre and reflective, though with a sharp satirical streak too. Some things
they have in common, however. For both, their Jewish heritage is something to
be questioned constantly. Both are agnostic, yet both are interested enough in
the Jewish religious tradition to plunge into the Hebrew Bible in a critical
way. Howard Jacobson’s novel The Very
Model of a Man (1992) is his version of the wanderings of Cain at odds with
God. Dan Jacobson has written The Story
of Stories, which is essentially a sceptic’s guide to the Hebrew Bible. Then
there is Dan Jacobson’s The Rape of Tamar
(1970), a tight, frequently sardonic tale also drawn from Scripture.
If you seek the “plot” of The Rape of Tamar, you need only refer to 2 Samuel Chapter 13. King David’s son Amnon feels an incestuous
passion for his sister Tamar. Amnon’s devious cousin Yonadab advises Amnon that
he can lure Tamar to his house by pretending to be sick and asking for her
care. Amnon does so. Despite her resistance, Amnon rapes Tamar… then
immediately (in the words of the RSV version of the Bible) he “hated her with a very great hatred; so that
the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had
loved her”. Tamar complains to her brother Absalom. When King David hears
of the matter, however, he imposes no punishment on Amnon. Tamar continues to
live in Absalom’s house. Two years later, Absalom gets revenge for his sister.
He lures Amnon to a feast with other sons of David, then gets his servants to
fall upon Amnon and kill him. At first King David thinks that all his sons have
been killed by the ambitious Absalom, but Yonadab is able to persuade him
otherwise. However, we can see the matter creates a great estrangement between
King David and Absalom, which will years later lead to the revolt and death of
Absalom.
There are novels, drawn from Bible stories,
which are picturesque and rambling, designed mainly to divert readers by their
exotic descriptions and invented incidents. Dan Jacobson’s The Rape of Tamar is no such thing. As the narrator declares early
in the piece (Chapter 1):
“I can promise you that I will do my very
best to spare you descriptions of our exotic style of life: I don’t intend to
linger over our furniture, our clothes… our utterly inadequate sewage system,
our weapons, our games, our primitive sacral rites, and all the rest of the
ethnographic junk you may be glumly expecting me to inflict on you…”
In other words, we are definitely not in the
land of Hollywood-ian, Cecil B. de Mille Biblical spectacular. This tight and
well-organized novel (a mere 140 pages in the Penguin edition I read) sticks
closely to the Biblical account, inventing few incidents that cannot be
justified from Scripture. Those things that Jacobson does invent are very
direct inferences from Scripture. For example, in the Biblical account, Yonadab
is at first Amnon’s friend and advisor. Later he gives advice to King David, mitigating
Absalom’s activities. Jacobson therefore understandably depicts Yonadab as a
man who “switches sides” and follows power for reasons of self-interest.
The novelist’s focus is on the moral
implications of the story and what it says about power.
The narrative voice is extremely important. The Rape of Tamar is narrated by David’s
nephew and Amnon’s cousin and friend, the “crafty” (RSV’s word for him)
Yonadab. The voice of Yonadab is the voice of a Hebrew Machiavel. He is
obsessed with power, but knows he will never attain it, and therefore has a
sardonic view of the powerful, whom he sets out to manipulate. Jacobson allows
Yonadab to use sometimes a modern frame of reference, describing himself as “Kantian… long before I ever heard of Kant”
(Chapter 5), referring to the branch of King David’s government in which he is
employed as “the Ministry of Public Works”
and otherwise showing a modern sensibility, as well as having foresight. (As he
tells the story of the rape of Tamar, he is able also to tell us of the death
of Absalom, which occurred years later). And yet he is fully integrated into
the historical times of the novel and credible as an historical character.
Of course the narrator is not the same as the
novelist, but the narrator is often a mask through which the novelist can
speak. God comes into this novel very little. There are references to
syncretism and in Chapter 3 a brief discourse, from Yonadab, on the incestuous
marriages between pagan gods and goddesses (to which Amnon refers in self-justification
when he is attempting at first to seduce his sister Tamar). But Yonadab is a
sceptic (“scepticism was the secret of my
failure” Chapter 1) and basically sees God as a means by which powerful
people justify their own actions and decisions. He does not see God-fearers as
dishonest, insincere or claiming to believe what they do not really believe. “I am not accusing [King] David of hypocrisy,” he says in Chapter
2, “On the contrary I am accusing him of
sincerity.” What he does see, however, are powerful people, who believe
sincerely that their own interests and desires are God-ordained or sanctioned
by God. Thus it is when David “repents” of having killed those who have done
his bidding in killing others, and so believes he is morally justified. Thus it
is when Absalom believes he is morally justified in killing Amnon, even though
it just happens to suit his own plans for gaining power.
Dan Jacobson has another reason for using
Yonadab as narrator. It is so that certain things can be witnessed credibly. In
the Bible, the rape of Tamar – the very moment when she is violated – is one of
those many Biblical passages at which the thoughtful reader has to pause. We
know that there could be no possible witness to the event described, apart from
the rapist Amnon and the victim Tamar, neither of whom would be likely to see
the event as the Bible presents it. Jacobson solves this problem by having
Yonadab play Peeping Tom, and watch the whole thing from a hiding place. The
rape itself (Chapter 6) is virtually played in slow motion, with Yonadab
accounting for every word, movement and gesture. This is not prurient. Jacobson
is emphasizing the rapist’s self-justifications, the young girl’s attempts to
save herself, and the psychological horror of the event.
There’s a further matter in Jacobson’s agenda.
In both the Biblical account and in Jacobson’s novel, Tamar herself virtually
disappears from the story once she has made her public and private protests to
Absalom. She becomes, in effect, less important than the power struggle between
the ageing King David and the ambitious prince Absalom (“the glamour boy of the court” according to Jacobson) who is all too
eager to take charge. As the novel presents it, King David is not outraged by
the rape itself so much as by the fact that Tamar first sought help from
Absalom, thus implying that David was no longer the master in his own house and
the man from whom justice should be sought. Later, when David rebukes Amnon, he
does so by saying that Amnon’s crime must be God’s way of reminding David of
his own youthful sins. Yonadab remarks ironically that David is therefore “the man upon whom God’s mighty interest is
all but exclusively concentrated… the sufferings of Tamar remain entirely
unmentioned.” (Chapter 12)
By giving such a detailed account of the rape,
Jacobson is in effect reminding us that the violation of Tamar should be the centre of the story, even
if it is not seen as such by David and Absalom. In this, I believe Dan
Jacobson’s novel, published in 1970, was a decade or two ahead of those
feminist Biblical critics who have taken the story in 2 Samuel 13 as a typical instance of Scriptural story-telling
dominated by patriarchal interests, and ignoring the centrality and suffering
of women. (I encountered articles by many such critics while doing
undergraduate papers in Scripture as part of a BTheol.)
I have one other reason for liking this
classically structured, disciplined and dense short novel: I love the rave
against historicism which Jacobson puts into Yonadab’s mouth in Chapter 7.
Directly addressing the modern reader, Yonadab turns on us and denounces us for
believing that we are somehow morally different from, and more important than,
people in past ages. He accuses us for “the
very belief in your difference from us, which is no more than a manifestation
of your particular style of self-importance.”
Well said, Yonadab. Or is it Dan Jacobson?
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