Broken Frontier

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about underground phenom R. Crumb’s new graphic novel, The Illustrated Book of Genesis. A few Christian groups have lodged protests against the book. As Laura Hudson pointed out last week at Comics Alliance, this seems like a puzzling response—Crumb has taken no literary license here; he has merely illustrated Genesis as it is written in the Bible. Genesis, in case you haven’t read it, contains some pretty gory stuff…incest, gang rape, honor killing, madness, murder. Crumb has left nothing to the imagination. This is the facts-of-life, birds-and-the-bees Genesis, in which euphemisms like ‘lie with’ and ‘smite’ are what they are: sexual intercourse and violent death.

The controversy has unfolded in the usual way: religious people get upset, secularists tell them they’re free not to read the book/look at the cartoon/stay up to watch Leno if they’re so offended. I feel compelled to point out that this argument is hypocritical. We are constantly told by secularists that books are important and art can change the world. Salman Rushdie, a secularist who’d know, said "what one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy." But as soon as there’s trouble, this impassioned defense of art flies out the window, and is replaced by the peevish ‘it’s only a book; if you don’t like it, don’t read it’. Well, which is it? A book can’t be world-changing when it’s convenient and trivial when it isn’t.

Has Crumb really illustrated Genesis just as it is? The most glaring evidence that he hasn’t is right on the cover. Crumb depicts God as an old, bearded Caucasian man. If anybody can point to the passage in the Bible where God is so described, I’d appreciate it. Whether out of laziness or in agreement, Crumb has bought into one of the most impressive memetic crimes ever perpetrated against humankind: the idea that the creator of the universe is European. This visual fallacy has been so successful over the centuries that even Crumb, who doesn’t believe in God, believes that God is European. This is why the whole effort seems comically sad to me: in attempting to show believers what they really believe, Crumb has demonstrated how completely the most erroneous of those beliefs has permeated his worldview. This is why the debate over religious imagery is not a simple matter of ‘close the book if you don’t like it’. An image does not require your consent to influence your perceptions. Art really can change the world, and not always for the better.

It’s very telling that Crumb’s portrayal of Lot’s incestuous daughters (a story that really is taken from Genesis verbatim) has been more controversial than his portrayal of God. A lot of people probably read the previous paragraph and thought "so what?" I’ll be frank: it bothers me that after centuries of scientific advancement, the abolition of black slavery, and the election of a black president, educated Americans are still so comfortable with the idea that God is an invisible white guy. Some would protest that this is just a metaphor. But it’s not just a metaphor—for centuries, it was the only metaphor. It has had a profoundly destructive impact on world history. Yet it is the most uncontroversial image in Crumb’s book.

I sympathize with the frustration of Christians who feel insulted by Crumb’s Genesis, yet as often happens when these debates arise, I find myself wishing they were frustrated by different things. Religious people the world over are so obsessed with the secular portrayal of history that we become totally ambivalent about the portrayal of God. Too many religious people argue about the significance of war or polygamy in the ancient world until they’re blue in the face, but fumble with the most basic question religion is meant to answer: what is God, and why am I here? Crumb himself expresses frustration and doubt  over this question. Like so many, he’s never heard a rational, meaningful answer. He’s left with ludicrous stand-ins: God is either a "bright light" or a "stereotypical Charlton Heston" character, or nothing. And that’s not his fault, oh true believers—it’s ours.