court). I have to pay particular attention to the multiple meanings of the infinitival intensifiers in the Hebrew, sometimes indicated by italics in the King James version, as well as all the specific information we learn from overhearing the words of YHWH, first in his poetic explosion at the serpent, and finally in his anxious mutterings as he sets the angels with their flaming sword to guard the way back into Eden—which mutterings, of course, reveal to us, after the fact, the most important thing that Adam and Eve (she gets her name only after God gives her and Adam clothes of skins) learned when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of what’s good and what’s bad (etz hada’at tov v’ra): “We are doomed fools; we made a tragic choice; we ate from the wrong tree! We ate from the tree of the knowledge of tov (good) and ra (bad), and the ra (the bad thing) we now know in our bones is that we should have eaten from the other tree—the perfectly licensed tree of life! We now know our choice was mortally bad—for immediately we had to become too busy with our shame to compensate for our error: the knowledge of our mortality (one with the knowledge of how we missed out on immortality), which we have just gained—the knowledge that shuts us out of the garden.”
Those textual details lead me through the implications that such are the inevitable repercussions of all human learning. To learn anything worth knowing requires that you learn as well how pathetic you were when you were ignorant of it. The knowledge of what you have lost irrevocably because you were in ignorance of it is the knowledge of the worth of what you have learned. A reason knowledge/learning in general is so unpopular with so many people is because very early we all learn there is a phenomenologically unpleasant side to it: to learn anything entails the fact that there is no way to escape learning that you were formerly ignorant, to learn that you were a fool, that you have already lost irretrievable opportunities, that you have made wrong choices, that you were silly and limited. These lessons are not pleasant. The acquisition of knowledge—especially when we are young—again and again includes this experience. Older children tease us for what we don’t know. Teachers condescend to us as they instruct us. (Long ago, they beat us for forgetting.) In the school yard we overhear the third graders talking about how dumb the first graders are. When we reach the third grade, we ourselves contribute to such discussions. Thus most people soon actively desire to stay clear of the whole process, because by the time we are seven or eight we know exactly what the repercussions and reactions will be. One moves toward knowledge through a gauntlet of inescapable insults—the most painful among them often self-tendered. The Enlightenment notion (that, indeed, knowledge also brings “enlightenment”—that there is an “upside” to learning as well: that knowledge itself is both happiness and power) tries to suppress that downside. But few people are fooled. Reminders of the downside of the process in stories such as that of Adam and Eve can make us—some of us, some of the time, because we are children of the Enlightenment who have inevitably, successfully, necessarily, been taken in—weep.
We say we are weeping for lost innocence. More truthfully, we are weeping for the lost pleasure of unchallenged ignorance.
Before the Enlightenment stressed the relationship between knowledge and power, there was a much heavier stress on the relationship between knowledge and sex. Freud retrieved some of that relationship in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. (The first intellectual problem almost all children take up, Freud pointed out, is where do babies come from, the pursuit of which soon catapults us into the coils and turmoils of sexual reproduction.) It perseveres, of course, in the concept of “knowing” a woman or a man sexually. It is there in the J-Writer’s version of the Adam and Eve story as well: To know that sex leads to procreation is immediately to want to control it (especially among beleaguered primitive peoples), to set up habits (covering the genitals or other body parts) to dampen the sexual urges. But any effort to keep them under control is to instill habits that produce shame and embarrassment when violated, even in pursuit of procreation itself, to say nothing of innocent, guilt-free copulation. As a deeply insightful “pre-Enlightenment” text, the Adam and Eve story figures this aspect of the tale forcefully just as it figures that death will come before we can do anything about it: that knowledge is the burning blade preventing reentry into the garden and a return to the tree of life. The tragic implications repeatedly produce real tears in me—as I suspect they have for many readers over the centuries.
The story of Eden is a short, ironic tale to teach children a religious tradition—that can make an adult (and, in my case, an adult who happens to be an atheist) weep. That’s among the things that, through statement and implication, stories can do. Such implications as nestle in Keats’s ode and the J-Writer’s Eden story are so broad that, today, most of us would probably figure, “Don’t even try it!”
But both work.
When one approaches Keats’s conclusion about truth and beauty through the historical set-up of Ode to a Grecian Urn’s previous 48 lines, his observation can take the top of your head off. Keats is, after all, the master of accuracy and implication among the English romantic poets, working toward vivid immediacy. Indeed, like Joyce’s story “The Dead” and Lawrence’s tale “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” Keats’s poem is one of the gentlest, one of the most powerful retellings of the tale of the Edenic expulsion implicit in the gaining of any and all knowledge (in Keats’s case, it is the particular knowledge called happiness implicit in domestic social beauty).
Again, not everyone is affected by these texts in this way; nor is each reader affected by them in the same way every time she or he reads them. But enough readers find that they work enough of the time to preserve specific description and withheld implication as valued techniques of the literary, both in prose and poetry. Writings that employ those techniques generously often seem more immediate, more protean, and more vibrant over the long run than works that eschew them for a safer rhetoric and more distanced affect.
I think of myself as a reader with broad, if not actually catholic, tastes. When I have tallied it up, I find that I spend as much on reading matter weekly as I do on food—now that my daughter is grown—for a family of two. That includes a fair amount of eating out. As much as I love to read, however, I enjoy reading far fewer than one out of twenty fiction writers. (That’s currently living and publishing fiction writers.) Certainly I read more books than I actually like. Telling you a bit more about the kind of reader I am will, then, suggest something about the strengths—and the limitations—of the book to come.
VII
My approach to story is conservative—all but identical to the one E. M. Forster (1879–1970) put forward in his 1927 meditation, Aspects of the Novel. (I said we’d return to it.) Because Forster says it well and succinctly, I quote rather than paraphrase. Only then will I point out the few ways in which Forster and I differ.
If you ask one type of man, “What does a novel do?” he will reply placidly: “Well—I don’t know—it seems a funny sort of question to ask—a novel’s a novel—well, I don’t know—I suppose it kind of tells a story, so to speak.” He is quite good-tempered and vague, and probably driving a motor bus at the same time and paying no more attention to literature than it merits. Another man, whom I visualize as on a golf-course, will be aggressive and brisk. He will reply: “What does a novel do? Why, it tells a story of course, and I’ve no use for it if it didn’t. I like a story. Very bad taste on my part, but I like a story. You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story. And I like a story to be a story, mind, and my wife’s the same way.” And a third man he says in a sort of drooping regretful voice, “Yes—oh, dear, yes—the novel tells a story.” I respect and admire the first speaker. I detest and fear the second. And the third is myself. Yes—oh, dear, yes—the novel tells a story … The more we look at the story (the story that is a story, mind), the more we disentangle it from the finer growth it supports, the less we shall find to admire. It runs like a backbone—or may I say a tapeworm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary … It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence—dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death and so on. Qua story, it can only
