MAILER’S FALSE MESSIAH

The story is told of a prominent church historian, notorious both for his learning and his crustiness, who from time to time would find an over-excited grad student in his office, eager to win his master’s applause for an original theological insight. Having waved his visitor into a chair, the historian would say, “I am very interested to hear your new theological idea, but, before you explain it, let me tell you three things about it: One. It was already propounded by a 5th-century Syrian monk. Two. He expressed himself better than you will. Three. He was wrong.”

It is a pity that Norman Mailer had no recourse to such a mentor, for it might have saved him, and us, the embarrassment of The Gospel According to the Son. The embarrassment in this instance is not primarily occasioned by the imputation of heresy. Mailer obviously wants to shock us with the book and has posed for interviewers as a kind of literary Dennis Rodman, delighting in his own naughtiness. Yet he is so far behind the Heterodoxy Curve as to be unaware that his shattering innovations are little more than the platitudes of New Age suburbia, and have long been superseded by those ” weekend spirituality workshops” in which feminist nuns and retired orthodontists are taught how to deconstruct the New Testament and make pumpkin bread. Both heresy-hunters and bishop-baiters will feel somewhat let down by Mailer’s Gospel. True, he does make an attempt to subvert the orthodox tradition by having Jesus “tell the real story” in his own voice. But, first, this ploy was already used by a Sister of Saint Jude in a summer creativewriting seminar; second, she expressed herself better than he does; third, she got a B.

The prime defect of The Gospel According to the Son, from which all others flow, is the author’s own uncertainty about the kind of book he meant to write. Sometimes he sees himself as “re-telling the myth” (i.e., taking the Gospel story at face value), and sometimes he sets out to demythologize the traditional account (i.e., to chip away the encrustations of the Christ of Faith from the Jesus of History). These goals are mutually contradictory, and the resultant incoherence is fatal. Mailer’s Jesus (Yeshua to his pals) turns out to be a Jewish seminary student who has converted to Methodism but isn’t sure why. He shows no curiosity about the disciples who inexplicably collect around him and, in fact, seems unable to maintain interest in his own messiahship.

He tells his story in half a dozen different voices as his author struggles to get him into focus. As narrator, for example, he generally speaks in the kind of eco-aphorism that Hollywood scriptwriters put into the mouths of Comanche elders when they want them to sound like sages. “Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.” “The Word had lived first in water even as the breath that carries our speech comes forth from our mouths in a cloud on a cold winter morning.” “But a weight came upon my heart for cursing the roots of another.” In fact, sometimes the clueless Yeshua forgets his Galilean Aramaic entirely and talks pure Tontoese: “Did I speak with a forked tongue . . .?”

His pronouncements occasionally have the sonority and cadence of folk epigrams, but when cashed out add up to nothing at all. I doubt very much whether Mailer himself is aware of this, as some of his metaphors seem to have been accidentally welded together by his word-processor. Try parsing this one: “Yet his eyes were blue like the faded blue of the sky when the sky is white.” As Wilde remarked, a simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle. (I picture the puzzled editor at Random House tapping his teeth with a pencil as he read the manuscript and ultimately acquiescing with a shrug of resignation: This must be how religious types talk.)

You can almost spot the yellowhighlight stains in the books Mailer read to prepare for the writing of his Gospel, as when Yeshua speaks to us in the voice of a pedantic 20th-century expert: “Joseph . . . told us of a substance called pozzolana, an earth that came from the volcanoes south of Rome; this pozzolana, mixed with lime, became a cement.” More often, however, particularly in recounting direct discourse, Yeshua resorts to Jacobean biblical English, spoken in the accents of Cecil B. DeMille: “And in the moment that Elizabeth saw my mother at the door, so did her babe leap in her womb. Overjoyed, she spoke out: “Blessed art thou, Mary. All generations to come shall call you blessed.'” Again, notice the false pitch: not only the pointless and awkward shift from “thou” to “you,” but the fruity “so did her babe leap,” in which “so” exists merely to give the sentence a faux-antique veneer.

Elsewhere the eagerness to mimic the syntax of the Authorized Version turns the Gadarene swine into “the swine of Gadarene” — rather like rephrasing ” Newtonian physics” as “physics of Newtonian.” Sorry, Mr. Mailer, we just don’t say it that way in our language.

In fact, except for the incidental archeology footnotes, the novel is unreadable. Perhaps its sentences aren’t written to be read but to be listened to, to serve as a kind of Muzak that occupies the back third of our attention with a reassuring drone while the pictures pass before our eyes.

The book reads less like a novel than a B-movie screenplay. A cinematic rather than a literary sensibility governs the selection of material — both the incidents he has borrowed from the four true gospels and the gaps in the life of Christ filled by Mailer’s imagination. There is a distinct preference for DRAMA — here understood, as it is in westerns, to mean any scene that includes a weeping woman. My favorite is St. Joseph’s discovery of his fiancee’s pregnancy: “But then Joseph grew angry and said, “Why did you bring this shame on yourself?’ She began to cry. ‘I am innocent,’ she told him, ‘and I have never known a man.'” Later, not surprisingly, the same imagination treats us to eight pages on Yeshua’s encounter with the woman caught in adultery (that’s John 8:1-11 in Gospels 1.0). Clearly we are meant to feel suspense here. Will our hero falter? “As I feared, she was beautiful. The bones of her face were delicate, and the hair flowed down her back.” Mickey Spillane couldn’t have put it better. Yeshua the celibate theology student is aghast to find his id in his cassock and, of course, is immediately in conflict with demons: “My abhorrence of fornication had filled my years with thoughts of lust. I had suffered from ravages of unspent fury. But now I heard the soft voice of a spirit.” Relax; it all comes out all right. He remembers himself sufficiently to go beyond the merely physical and ask about her hobbies and interests (“Without the flesh,” she says, “there is no life”) and they part friends. Score that one a draw.

Mailer is not a theologian, not a biblicist, not a man who believes in the Gospel. None of that means he is disqualified from saying something interesting about Jesus. Simone Weil shared all three characteristics with Mailer and yet was endowed with enough philosophical and literary intuition to come to original and valuable insights about the religion she rejected. But Mailer sets himself a tougher job than Weil. Not only does he want to get into the skin of God-become-Man — ambitious enough by itself — but the god with whom he tries to commune is, in his reckoning, neither omnipotent nor omniscient. Consider what this means. If God is defective, then His every attempt to reveal Himself and His will to men is suspect, for the reason that no one, God included, can know with certainty what has been communicated or to whom. All sacred scripture, and all extra-scriptural tradition, is thus intrinsically unreliable. What then becomes of the project agnostics cheerfully call “man’s search for God”? What can man possibly find at the end of his quest that he did not bring with him from the beginning?

Viewed in the terms of classical Christology, Mailer’s Yeshua turns out to be a Messiah Lite. He had a supernatural conception, but his overbearing mother just wants him “to become a good Essene.” The hand-wringing type, he is unsure when his divine Father is speaking to him and when not, and he repeatedly prays, “Help my unbelief.” He performs miracles diffidently, and in fact they sometimes fail to come off. The miraculous feeding of the five thousand, Yeshua assures us, was really a feeding of five hundred — not a bad summation of the project of liberal exegetes, by the way: supernaturalism diluted to a 10 percent solution.

After the fast in the desert, Satan tempts the Messiah with “a leg of lamb, well cooked,” apparently with some success. In the unintentionally hilarious scene in which he encounters John the Baptist at the river, Yeshua, for the nonce a 14-year-old Catholic, actually goes to confession: “I searched to find evil in myself and came back with no more than moments I could recall of disrespect toward my mother and contests in the night with lustful thoughts. Perhaps there had been a few acts of unkindness when judging others.” Three Hail Marys is what I’d give him.

At the core Yeshua is no sacramentalist. He’s bummed out by churches and by repetition of the same prayers. He’s sensitive to the environment. He doesn’t get bent out of shape by “men who did not know women but other men.” He uses gender-inclusive language. Most wonderfully of all, at the supreme moment of eschatological revelation in which the Messiah makes known to his disciples that the world is to come to an end, he admits, “As I said this I could feel their pain.” Bingo. When the last veil is torn away, God is a New Democrat. Our Apocalypse is going to be a caring Apocalypse.

Paul Mankowski, S.J., is a professor of Semitic languages at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome.