Cartoon by Will McPhail
I.
Someone asks why it is that for a self-professed anti-Christ and atheist I seem to refer so often to the Bible. And I suppose it's a fair enough question (though I don't much care for the implication that I'm some kind of crypto-theologian).
Well, apart from the fact that it is always wise to know what one's enemies believe, the fact is that the Bible continues to play an important cultural role and has crucial significance in the work of many of the authors that I love most.
Writers such as D. H. Lawrence, for example, whose work can be read as a prolonged struggle to (re-)interpret the Good Book in a very different spirit than that sanctioned by the Church. As one critic notes:
"His writing, at all stages of his career, contains frequent references to biblical characters and symbols while, even when not invoking any particular passage from the Bible, his language is permeated by the rhythms of the Authorised Version." [1]
II.
Michel Tournier is another writer who, by his own admission, was a great reader of the Bible - a book that he describes as a huge attic in which you can find pretty much everything you may need; a constant source of inspiration.
Like Lawrence, Tournier might also be said to perform a creative misreading of the Bible for his own (perverse) ends:
"Impatient with conventionally pious glosses, which are too often likely to support the puritanical status quo which he deplores, he reads the Bible against the grain [...] seeking other and more surprising meanings. Further than this, he will recast a story completely, to change its meaning, like a composer who writes variations on a well-known musical theme. If the variations are memorable, they may for ever affect the way we react to the original melody.
This (mis)reading of the Bible is thus central to the production of meaning in Tournier's texts and in particular to the ethical and metaphysical reflections they develop." [2]
Again, like Lawrence, Tournier takes up the cross (i.e., the religious challenge presented by Jesus to imagine a new way of life), but he doesn't follow the latter; indeed, he loses Christ in order to find himself and his own way of being in the world.
Both writers offer a disrespectful and disloyal reading of the Bible (some would say blasphemous); they treat it as "a corrupt text which needs to be interpreted and even reformulated" [3] in line with their own inner experience.
Above all, what Lawrence and Tournier both desire is a version of the Bible which reinstates the body as central and "re-establishes the link between spiritual love (agape) and carnal love (eros)" [4].
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Lawrence's The Escaped Cock (1929), a short novel which, for me, is the culmination of his work, placing the Christian tradition back within a wider religious context and giving us a Jesus unafraid to come into touch and rejoice in the sensual world.
As David Gascoigne writes (with reference to Tournier's fiction):
"The moral implications of placing the body back at the centre of religion in this way are far-reaching. All human appetites, even the basest, are open to spiritualisation: it is not just the soul, but the whole person which is saved." [5]
This is the gospel according to D. H. Lawrence and Michel Tournier ... And to fully understand it, you will need to know your Bible ...
Notes
[1] See T. R. Wright, D. H. Lawrence and the Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 1.
[2] David Gascoigne, Michel Tournier, (Berg, 1996), pp. 98-99.
[3] Ibid., p. 119.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., p. 120.
