Phil Christman

So I’m done with the Babylonians and Egyptians and on to the longest and most complete Ancient Near Eastern canon we have: obviously, the Hebrew Bible. I’ve been trying for years to make literary sense of what Christians call, sometimes disparagingly, the Old Testament, and this time around I find there’s a lot of good sense in Meir Sternberg’s The Poetics of Biblical Narrative.

Ideology, aesthetics and historiography are, for him, the Hebrew Bible’s “three regulating principles”: the writers’ art springs from their attempts to satisfy all three of these imperatives at once. “[T]heir interests and formulations so coalesce that they can hardly be told apart in the finished message.” He elaborates: “To start with ideology, theologians … have rightly singled out features like monotheism, the suppression of myth, the rise of ethics and personal responsibility. But what has generally escaped notice is the shift of ground from existence to epistemology. … Within the Israelite reality model, briefly, God stands opposed to humankind not so much in terms of mortality … as in terms of knowledge. … God is omniscient, man limited, and the boundary impassible. But how to expound and inculcate this new doctrine? Fortunately, both the pragmatic constraints on exposition and the aesthetic preference for indirection ruled out the discursive treatment to which a modern (or a Greek) thinker would almost automatically resort. The solution devised was no less epoch-making … than the philosophy itself: to build the cognitive antithesis between God and humanity into the structure of the narrative.”

And thus we end up with the famous laconic style of the OT writers. Theology and, possibly, a spotty historical record create aesthetic constraints which they, like great artists anywhere, turn into opportunity. They invent a narrative style in which “history unrolls as a continuum of discontinuities, a sequence of non sequiturs, which challenge us to repair omissions by our native wit.” The reader, seeking to make sense of it all, vividly feels that “impassable boundary” between God’s knowledge and our ignorance: “The only knowledge perfectly acquired is the knowledge of our limitation … to gain a sense of the discourse is to gain a sense of being human.”

The same might be said of the reader of Sternberg’s book, which has blown my mind on several occasions, and put me to sleep on several others.

I learned nothing about the literature of ancient Egypt in college. Luckily I recently ran across John L. Foster’s Ancient Egyptian Literature (2001), a book that makes their poetry seem as interesting as their public-works projects.

According to Foster, the two masterpieces of Ancient Egyptian narrative writing are the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor and the Tale of Sinuhe, short works that deal with homesick sailors afraid they’ll never see their beloved Egypt again. (That this was an almost obsessively returned-to theme for ancient Egyptian writers is attested by several other poems in Foster’s book. We could call it the “Sweet Home Alexandria” theme, if we’re willing to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of a bad pun, which Lord knows I am.)

The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor packs a lot of enigma into a few pages. At the beginning, a ship’s crew celebrate a successful landing. The deckhand/narrator admonishes his captain, who is anxious for an unspecified reason and, apparently, short-tempered:

Purify yourself! Pour water on your fingers! 
            Thereafter you can answer what is put to you
That you address the King staunch-hearted,
            responding with no hesitation.

The mouth of a man can save him;
            speech can soften an angry face …

                         —Well, never mind.
You do whatever in the world you want, then.
            It gets to be a bother, talking to you!

The bubbly narrator then tells his captain a wacky story about the time he got lost at sea and washed up on a fabulously opulent island ruled by a talking snake.

 It bared its mouth at me—
I lying prone in fear and trembling—
and spoke: 

What brings you? brings you?
            little man, what brings you?

(I love that onomatopoeia with the repeated “brings you, brings you.”)

The snake turns out to be nice enough, though not really someone to trifle with. He feeds the narrator, predicts that a boat will arrive in a few months to take him home (this is a magic talking snake, see), and tells his life story. He once shared the island with a large family, including, poignantly, a “little girl brought to [him] through prayer,” but they all died after a shooting star crashed into the island. The snake thus enjoins the man to take all the pleasure that he can from the comforts of home and family—as this is precisely what the snake can no longer do.

In due time the boat arrives. The snake loads the man up with traveling gifts, asking him only two things: that he spread the snake’s fame back in Egypt, and, again, that he enjoy his home gratefully.

The man (our first unreliable narrator?) takes the gifts, goes home, gives the snake’s gifts to his king with no mention of the snake, and, one surmises, totally ignores the snake’s advice about enjoying your family and friends, because here he is narrating from, you know, another boat. He concludes:

 Now let what I have told you sink in, my leader—
            you know, things people say can help you! 

The “leader” (I’m assuming captain) replies, oddly enough, 

            “Don’t try to play the expert, friend.
Does one give water to a sacrificial bird
            the morning of its execution day?” 

I don’t know what this means either. With considerable artfulness, the tale’s introduction and conclusion add the suggestion of a whole other story, but let you reconstruct what they mean. Is the captain afraid of being executed by a king less forgiving than the snake? Or what? 

Meanwhile, the Tale of Sinuhe tells of a member of the royal court who happens to be abroad, making war on Bedouins, when Pharaoh turns into a god (i.e., dies). Sinuhe hears rumors of a coup and runs east, where he’s welcomed and nourished by Bedouins—the same Bedouins, presumably, that he’s been making war on—and, over time, becomes a major local power. Some guy tries to kill him and take his stuff, which leads Sinuhe to realize how much he wants to die in Egypt. Finally he becomes a big enough deal that Pharaoh’s court hears of him and invites him to return home. Without a moment’s thought he leaves his wife and family and his Bedouin allies, returns home, gets a shave and a haircut, begs Pharaoh’s forgiveness—three times—for running away in the first place (which anybody might’ve done), and becomes once again a taxpayer/functionary in the nation that will presumably continue kicking the asses of the people who saved his. (There is, at least, no overt narrative acknowledgment of the irony here, though perhaps the audience needed none.) It’s a marvelously put-together story, but the main thing you get from both the Tale of Sinuhe and the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor is a sort of unquestioning Egyptian jingoism—it never crosses Sinuhe’s mind, even after Bedouins show him every kind of hospitality, to question the anti-Bedouin prejudice of his homeland—and a pious terror of authority. Sweet Home Alexandria indeed.

Some weird compulsion drives me to continually re-do my education, as if from scratch—as if everything I’ve already learned was probably wrong and I need a global reset—and lately that’s led me to take another look at some of the classics of the Ancient Near East.

On re-reading Gilgamesh, I find myself wondering if one of humanity’s first fictions isn’t also its first metafiction. Check out the first tablet:

The story

of him who knew the most of all men know;
who made the journey; heartbroken; reconciled;

who knew the way things were before the Flood;
the secret things, the mystery; who went

to the end of the earth, and over; who returned,
and wrote the story on a tablet of stone.

(I quote the version by David Ferry, who treats the poem as a poem, not an archeological repository.)

Check out that “tablet of stone”: Is that a teasing reference to initial readers who would, in fact, have been reading the story in cuneiform? That’s not the last we hear of this tablet, either:

He built Uruk. He built the keeping place
of Anu and Ishtar. The outer wall

shines in the sun like brightest copper; the inner
wall is beyond the imagining of kings.

Study the brickwork, study the fortification;
climb the great ancient staircase to the terrace;

study how it is made, from the terrace see
the planted and fallow fields, the ponds and orchards.

…Go to the temple of Anu and Ishtar:

Open the copper chest with the iron locks;
the tablet of lapis lazuli tells the story.

—the tablet, and story, we’re reading. Like Don Quixote reading his own sequel, Gilgamesh both inaugurates and notices the artificiality of its epic tradition.

People used to talk about the self-conscious writers of the ‘70s (Barth, Coover, et. al.) as if they were a sign of literature’s self-exhaustion. But maybe these two impulses—to create a new way of representing human life in language; to notice, having just invented it, that this “new way” is a human product—are linked, not antithetical.