Like a Grain of Sand Irritating an Oyster. Howard Jacobson’s The Very Model of a Man and the Bible
Keywords:
the Bible, midrash, subversion, contemporary novelAbstract
For contemporary novelists rewriting the Bible (e.g., for Winterson, Barnes, Roberts, Crace or Diski), Scripture proves a potent irritant with which contemporary literature can still maintain a lively, interactional relationship. Far from being taken for granted, neglected, plundered, the Bible functions as a grating cultural presence approached with a sense of both abrasion/unease and incorrigible attachment. This paper focuses on Howard Jacobson's The Very Model of a Man (1992), a novel rewriting the biblical narrative of Abel and Cain, and examines ways the novel plays out its attachment and detachment, friction and acceptance of the Bible. It is argued that the complex character of the novel (written by a Jewish born British author) derives from midrash (a rabbinic mode of reading and relating to Scripture), a form not unknown in English literary tradition. Drawing on those theories of midrash which emphasise the culture-bound, historically conditioned position of the Bible reader, the paper investigates the ways the scriptural “irritant” is filtered through/inflected by the cultural milieu of its late twentieth-century reader.
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