INTERRUPTED MEDLEY

I'm putting a short hold on the next EVIL post, to respond to a comment by AT-AT Pilot in the comments to Part 2. One of his two references included a link to a post on the EDUCATED IMAGINATION blog, excepting a section from one of Northrop Frye's essays, albeit one devoted entirely to the Christian religion he practiced, and not to the literary works he more often analyzed. 

In an argument against the social tendencies toward literal readings of Biblical passages, Frye says in part:

In short, the Bible is explicitly antireferential in structure, and deliberately blocks off any world of presence behind itself. In Christianity, everything in the Old Testament is a “type” of which the “antitype” or existential reality is in the New Testament. This turns the Bible into a double mirror reflecting only itself to itself. How do we know the Gospel is true? Because it fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament. But how do we know that the prophecies of the Old Testament are true? Because they are fulfilled by the Gospel. Is there any evidence for the existence of Jesus as a major historical figure outside the New Testament? None really, and the writers of the New Testament obviously preferred it that way. As long as we assume a historical presence behind the Bible to which it points, the phrase “word of God,” as applied both to the Bible and the person of Christ, is only a dubious syllepsis. In proportion as the presence behind disappears, it becomes identified with the book, and the phrase begins to make sense. As we continue to study the significance of the fact that the Bible is a book, the sense of presence shifts from what is behind the book to what is in front of it. (CW 4, 82-6)

I like to think I fully understand Frye's point in stressing the circular nature of the Bible-- and possibly, by extension, of most or all other religions. However, Christianity in particular has encouraged some degree of literalism in its discourse, not least as a result of grounding many events of Scripture in the perspective of a linear history. True, the Bible does not offer the sort of close chronicling of minutiae that readers today expect of "history." Further, many narratives in the Bible that purport to relate historical events are disputed by the evidence assembled by modern historiography. Yet it's unquestionable that Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, centered all narratives within a *simulacrum* of linear history. This means, at the very least, that certain key events happen in a straight line. The Jewish captivity in Egypt always precedes Rome's dominance of Judaea, for example, and the repetition of religious images or tropes across history does not eradicate that historicity. Certainly all three "religions of the Book" have profited enormously from grounding their religious narratives within the sphere of "real" history. 

As it happens, reading this coincides with my having read another chapter of Bataille's LITERATURE AND EVIL-- and, as in Part 2 of EVIL, I find myself choosing Bataille over Frye in this particular arena. For his part, because this chapter is on his response to William Blake, and to Blake's idea that "Poetic Genius is the true Man," Bataille agrees with Blake to the extent of stating that "there is nothing in religion that cannot be found in poetry." Bataille's essay on Blake takes issue with a particular Jungian scholar who, in Bataille's opinion, sought to reduce Blake's narratives to Jungian paradigms. Blake, who disputed any philosophy that smacked of idealism, concocted an interesting take on how Poetry "destroys immediate reality" yet "admits the exteriority of tools or of walls in relation to the ego."

Though poetry does not accept sense-data in their naked state, it is by no means always contemptuous of the outer world. Rather, it challenges the precise limitations of objects between themselves, while admitting their external nature. It denies and it destroys immediate reality because it sees in it the screen which conceals the true face of the world from us. Nevertheless poetry admits the exteriority of tools or of walls in relation to the ego. Blake’s lesson is founded on the value in itself, extrinsic to the ego, of poetry. -- LITERATURE AND EVIL.

For Bataille, then, Poetry subordinates but does not negate all "real-world referentiality." I would say that, even though I don't concur with Bataille that Poetry and Religion are consubstantial, Religion follows the same dynamic, in which even linear history is subsumed by the vision of godhood continually interacting with mortals confined within, but not limited to, that history. If I wanted this essay to go on forever, I'd bring in the ways "real-world referentiality" also takes in the endorsement of specific, work-oriented goals, found in both religion and literature.

Next, back to considerations about taste, sadism, and perceptions of evil.