The Covert Thrill of Violence? Reading the Bible in Disbelief

One of the perils of being a middle-aged parent in England is that you have to attend school plays. By the time your children are in their mid-late teens, they no longer act in dubious juvenile versions of The Lion King, but any sense of safety this gives you is thoroughly spurious: they have been told by their drama teachers to do Shakespeare. However, Shakespeare in its raw form gives drama teachers cold feet, it seems. Thus it is that you can find yourself watching King Lear or Romeo and Juliet, but not in their tragic form: rather Shakespeare’s tragedies are played for laughs. The thing is, Mercutio’s agonised, dying, ‘A plague o’ both your houses! They have made worms’ meat of me’ does not really work as a gag. Trust me on this.

Now I have no doubt that the drama teacher who produced this comic adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy was doing her postmodern best: ‘witty’, ‘playful’, ‘imaginative’, ‘creative’, ‘rebelling-against-Shakespeare’s-patriarchal-authorship’, ‘the reader-as-empowered-author’. Yet other adjectives seem more appropriate: cruel and violent. ‘Cruel’ because to treat Mercutio’s death in this way is cruel and compassionless. ‘Violent’ because Shakespeare is not simply being gagged or silenced: he is being made a ventriloquist’s dummy and being made to say words of trivial cruelty. George Steiner long ago appreciated that some modern reading strategies had exactly this quality: they had the ‘covert thrill of violence’. ‘Violence’ because the reader make a ventriloquist’s dummy of the author against his or her will, and ‘covert’ because this is carried out under the cover of ‘witty’, ‘smart’, ‘playful’ and indeed ‘scholarly’ reading of the author.

Obviously, we see these techniques applied to the Bible too. Equally clearly, I do want to pick up on Don Carson’s brilliant book title The Gagging of God. Yes, there is a way in which God is silenced, but, going further, there is a sense in which our reading strategies make a ventriloquist’s dummy of God, not simply gagging him, but putting our words into his mouth and then treating our words as if they are his.

Why would we do that? Keep reading