On the other hand, how much value should be attached to individual being? I take a clue from the fact that we are individual beings, that we’re constructed that way, we’re unique beings. That’s also the root of many of our problems, of course.
INTERVIEWER.
You’re well-known for critiques of contemporary religion, but also for what might be called an esthetic/distaste for some aspects of modern religion.
BRECKER
If you’re talking about television evangelism and that sort of thing, it’s a waste of time to be critical. I begin speaking from the position that I’m a fool and an ignoramus, which is true enough and not just a rhetorical device, and having said that, I can also say that these performances give me very little to think about. There’s so little content that there’s almost nothing to talk about. A sociologist might profitably study the phenomenon but that’s about it. You note the sadness in the fact that so many people draw some kind of nourishment from what is really a very thin version of religion. On the other hand, people like Harvey Cox, who speaks about “people’s religion,” by which I take him to mean religion in nontraditional forms or mixed traditions or even what might be called bastard forms, have a point too—it can’t be disregarded, it has to be thought about. Not that Cox was talking about television specifically. He’s thinking, after Tillich, about the theology of culture as a whole. His generosity is what’s admirable, and I don’t mean that as a way of saying that his thought is not.
INTERVIEWER
Still, the whole thing, the millions of people watching and mailing in their money, is an example of what you characterize as the need to submit.
BRECKER
It’s that, certainly. But I’d rather talk about submission at the other end of the scale—say the Catholic bishops in regard to Rome, or St. Augustine, any of the classic saints, very strong figures, bending to what they think or feel to be the will of God. Here you have the most sophisticated people imaginable, people for whom religion has been a central concern all their lives, people who have in every sense earned the right to speak on this sort of question, and you find a joyous submission. The other end of the scale from what we were speaking of as the madness of crowds. That’s got to be respected but at the same time it can be examined, because the final effect is precisely submission. What is to be said of this kind of very informed, very sophisticated submission? That it reflects a proper, even admirable humility? It does. Or is it an abdication of responsibility? It’s that too, or can be.
INTERVIEWER
The question is one of degree, then. How much you give up.
BRECKER
The question is, rather, what is proper to man? The right way to proceed in regard to these matters can be argued in so many ways, and has been, that the individual can be forgiven for chucking the whole business, giving up religion entirely, and many people do. Still, the question remains. Is a particular position a reasoned position or is it rather a matter of personality, or even pride, the non serviam? If it is a reasoned position, how do you deal with the finitude of human reason? What should be trusted, reason or authority? Authority or the individual cast of mind?
INTERVIEWER
To get back to fear, why is it so central in your schema?
BRBCKBR
It has to do with the problem of finitude, of which fear is an aspect. A mind without limit would have no fear, not even the fear of death. There’d be nothing to fear. Death, for example, would be understood so perfectly that it could contain nothing that could perturb the mind. It’s the kind of thing the Eastern religions aim at. Obviously, we’ll never get there, to this kind of serenity, because of the limits of human understanding.
But we are most ingenious, most ingenious. One of the finest religious inventions is the concept of absolution. I fall into error, confess it, and you give me absolution, or somebody gives me absolution. That cleansing—itself a very human idea, the washing-away—is of interest. It prevents us from being worse and worse, from in some sense stewing in our own juices. It makes new directions possible. It’s just a bloody marvelous conception, and there are others just as good, of which the idea of life after death is merely the first example. Life-after-death may be seen as coercive, or as providing hope, or as pure metaphor, or as absolute fact. What’s the truth of the matter? I don’t know.
INTERVIEWER
But people can get that from psychiatry, absolution. Admittedly, with greater difficulty.
BRECKER
And perhaps greater efficacy. But as an immediate thing, the fact of absolution is inspired. Although there’s a downside to that too, in that it restores one to the ranks of the blessed and the idea of there being a class of persons whom we agree to call blessed is a bit worrisome. There’s something psychologically worrisome about there being the blessed. I like better the notion that we are all sinners, from a psychological point of view. A sinner who knows himself to be a sinner is always tense, cautious, morally speaking.
INTERVIEWER
What influence would you say your books have had? What do you consider your audience?
BRECKER
Books are dealt with in different ways by professionals in a particular discipline and by ordinary readers. I try to write for both. Let’s say I write a book, a book dealing with the kinds of things we’ve been talking about. And you sit down to read my book. But let’s also say that you’re a specialist and you turn at once to the index—more or less to see where my book originated, if that’s the right word. And going through the index you note, say, references to Alfred Adler, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Dostoevsky, Huizinga, Konrad Lorenz, Otto Rank, Max Weber, and Gregory Zilboorg. So you feel you’ve read my book or at least have a pretty good sense of where it’s coming from, as people say nowadays. You might, with great courtesy, then skim the text in search of unfamiliar ideas, etc. etc. Or to see what I got wrong.
As for influence, I think it’s very slight, tiny. I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s been influenced in any important way by my books. I’ve met lots of people who want to argue particular points, which leaves me at a bit of a disadvantage. I’m not so much interested in resolving varying Christologies or in debating specific religious ideas, techniques of atonement, for example.
INTERVIEWER
Can you accept a disinterested objectivity as finally normative, in regard to historical Christianity?
BRECKER
I’ve never found a disinterested objectivity. You have to view each tradition in the context of its own historical particularity, and these invariably militate against what might be called a disinterested stance. Very often people establish validity through the construction of a criterion, or a series of criteria, which they then satisfy. The criteria can be very elaborate. It’s a neat way of proceeding.
The “good news” is always an announcement of a reconcilation of the particular into the universal. I have a lifelong tendency not to want to be absorbed into the universal, which amounts to saying a lifelong resistance to the forms of religion. But not to religious thought, which I consider of the greatest importance. It’s a paradox, maybe a fruitful one, I don’t know. Looking at myself, I say, hubris, maybe, the sin of pride, again, but this feeling exists and at least I can look at it, try to understand it, try to figure out how widespread it is. That is, are there others who feel this way? Again a paradox, a movement toward the universal: I don’t want to be the only one who wants to be out on a limb. Or I’m seeking validation from outside, etc. etc.
INTERVIEWER
On the question of—
BRECKER
Remember that I was the opposite of a charismatic figure, not a leader, not even a preacher. Perhaps because I had polio and was on crutches and all that. Polio might be said, by a shrink, to be the basis of my psyche in that it set me apart, involuntarily, and it may be that that apartness persisted, as a habit of mind. It would be curious if that accounted for my career, so-called. There are just too many variables to enable you to judge t
he quality of your own thought. Truth rests with God alone, and a little bit with me, as the proverb says.
Also, there’s no progress in my field, there’s adding-on but nothing that can truthfully be described as progress. Religion is not susceptible to aggiornamento, to being brought up to date, although in terms of intellectual effort the impulse is not shoddy either. It’s one of the pleasures of the profession that you are always in doubt.
BRECKER
I think about my own death quite a bit, mostly in the way of noticing possible symptoms—a biting in the chest—and wondering, Is this it? It’s a function of being over sixty, and I’m maybe more concerned by how than when. That’s a … I hate to abandon my children. I’d like to live until they’re on their feet. I had them too late, I suppose.
BRECKER
Heraclitus said that religion is a disease, but a noble disease. I like that.
BRECKER
Teaching of any kind is always open to error. Suppose I taught my children a little mnemonic for the days of the month and it went like this: “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November, all the rest have thirty-one, except for January, which has none.” And my children taught this to their children and other people, and it came to be the conventional way of thinking about the days of the month. Well, there’d be a little problem there, right?
BRECKER
I can do without certitude. I would have liked to have had faith.
BRECKER
The point of my career is perhaps how little I achieved. We speak of someone as having had “a long career” and that’s usually taken to be admiring, but what if it’s thirty-five years of persistence in error? I don’t know what value to place on what I’ve done, perhaps none at all is right. If I’d done something with soybeans, been able to increase the yield of an acre of soybeans, then I’d know I’d done something. I can’t say that.
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First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons 1987
Published in Penguin Books 1989
This edition published in Penguin Classics with an introduction by Dave Eggers 2005
Copyright © Donald Barthelme, 1987
Introduction copyright © Dave Eggers, 2005
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The author gratefully acknowledges permission from Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, Inc., to reprint the following: “Concerning the Bodyguard” and “Great Days” from Great Days.
Copyright © 1977,1978, 1979 by Donald Barthelme. “Concerning the Bodyguard” originally appeared in The New Yorker. “Letters to the Editore” from Guilty Pleasures. Copyright © 1974 by Donald Barthelme. Originally appeared in The New Yorker.
The following stories first appeared in The New Yorker. “Chablis,” “On the Deck,” “Opening,” “Sindbad,” “Jaws,” “Bluebeard,” “Construction,” and “January.”
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-138932-5
Donald Barthelme, Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
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