Rhizone

Erik Raschke's THE BOOK OF SAMUEL - Specters of "In-Betweenness"

Erik Raschke.  The Book of Samuel.  New York: St. Martin's, 2009. 264 pages.  Paperback.  $9.99. Website: http://thebookofsamuel.com/.   

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Plato's famous observation in The Symposium that both progeny and publishing can be considered gestures toward creating something immortal has always been insightful.   As unquestionable founder of Western arts and letters (and I'm not talking here about the Bible which can hardly be termed "belletristic"), Plato was probably on to something.  And I'm sure he considered flesh-and-blood productions "ontologically" inferior to books, or literary works, that "live forever."  Plato was an "idealist."  The Symposium was not about learning how to, as Stephen Stils might say, "love the one you're with" or the kid(s) you've got, but about transmuting base metals into gold, so to speak through art.   

But what if art and life in the Platonic sense become not so much indistinguishable as interchangeable?  What if your own progeny makes the same gesture by publishing something "immortal" himself?  And what if he is immortalizing someone, or something, that isn't simply either "real" or "ideal", but (as Jacques Derrida would call it) impossible.  The Derridean "impossible," as the now immortal philosopher of postmodernity and so-called "deconstructive" readings of texts employs the term, has nothing to do with not being able to do or accomplish something.  It has to do with discerning the presence of a space of meaning and signification that is neither here nor there, neither within nor without, neither internal nor internal, neither physical nor spiritual, neither (to use big philosophical words) "immanent" nor "transcendent".  

The impossible is, as Derrida suggests, a specter.  It haunts us.  Like all specters, it is a force that impinges constantly on our lives without ever really manifesting, or materializing.  Like the ghost of Hamlet's father in Shakespeare's "immortal" (I won't keep pushing that trope, I promise) play by the same name, Derrida's specter "manifests" at times of transition, confusion, doubt, "in-betweenness", when the "times are out of joint."  Derrida develops the notion of the "specter" in his book from the late 1980s entitled Specters of Marx.  The specter haunts us because it vaguely reminds us of the past, but also intimates something which we can feel in the air, which is both now and therefore, as Derrida would say, "messianic."  The Kingdom of Here is both now and not-yet.  It is both present and "to come."   

The impossible haunts us at in such ways in such in-between and out-of-joint-times, at "such a time as this".  And this book is definitely haunting at this time.  

The young  hero of The Book of Samuel (a book about a kid named "Samuel," Samuel Gerard) is himself an "in-betweener," or "tweener" for short.  The book adopts the actual title of an in-between book of the Bible, which is about the time in-between the golden age of ancient Israel's tribal democracy and the worldly and increasingly corrupt monarchy.  The book is set in an aging, lower middle class, almost exclusively white, pre-gentrified neighborhood of Denver, Colorado during the early 1980s, in the salad days of what conservatives nowadays nostalgically dub "Ronald Reagan's America."    

We used to refer to tweeners as "pre-teens," but now we know that this age for both boys and girls is equally about being "pre-" and "post-."  It is also post-childhood.  The no longer and not yet.  That's why a little over a generation ago we started renaming every "junior high" as a "middle school."  This strange combination of "pre-" and "post", this no longer yet still to come, or "to become", is often described as the time of "coming of age."  Indeed, that's how many of the somewhat formulaic blurbs or reviews of this book online have described it - a "coming of age novel." 

What exactly does it mean to "come of age"?  Usually, it's about losing one's innocence and discovering sex.  It can also involve a sense of being suddenly marginalized in terms of emotions and physical appearance, of entering "the awkward age," to employ a threadbare and quite inconsequential standard descriptor.  But it's not merely coincidental that pre-literate - and sometimes even highly literate - societies have ancient ceremonies performed at this time of life for "coming of age," what are known as rites of passage.  The very concept of "passage" implies transition, in-betweenness. 

The famous anthropologist Victor Turner characterized these ceremonies as accentuating what he called the "liminal space" of life at this time.  The word "liminal" derives from the Latin limen, which can mean "threshhold" or "boundary line."  In this space of in-betweenness it is sometimes almost impossible to distinguish order from chaos, and the confusion is deliberately and strategically enshrined in the rites themselves.

In the Roman empire the word referred to the invisible boundary line (usually a river) between "civilization" and the "barbarian" realms.  Roman legions were garrisoned there (modern European cities such as Frankfurt and Vienna were originally such outposts) in order to prevent order from absorbing chaos, or barbarism from penetrating the limina that marked the boundary of civilization.  It is the very nature of a limen, however, to be temporary, to collapse in the face of penetration by the threatening "other" from "over there", beyond the limen.  In The Book of Samuel  the liminal "river" is what the middle schoolers term "the gulch" (actually, the Harvard Gulch, which is not a river so much as a drainage area that separates certain neighborhoods in South Denver), and the "other" are what the boys deliberately refers to, both generically and provocatively, as "the  Mexicans."  

The gulch is where Samuel and his two young friends, Jesse and Jonathon, go to enjoy the "innocent" sport of bike jumping, in which they've engaged throughout grade. It is a place all their own that is betwixt and between, away from school, away from parents, away from the dysfunctionality of white, working class family life which the book often portrays, humorously as well as poignantly, in the manner of the old "Archie Bunker" series from the same era.  But the gulch is haunted with the specters of change.  Jonathon is the angry and the defensive one, the one that senses the change, who acts as the garrison against the growing onslaught.  Jonathan goes to the gulch routinely not just to have fun, but to "fight" the onslaught.

    "I'm sorry about today," he said, finally.  "You're like my best friend.  You don't want to fight.  Some things you can't change.  You don't want to fight.  Okay."

    "He stood.

    "Where are you going?"

    "This doesn't feel like my gulch anymore."

    "Why? Because of the Mexicans." (p. 256)...

    There were so many Mexicans now, all gathering around.  More and more.  Gravitating.

    'Jonathon.'" (p. 257)

In the book "the Mexicans", a phrase that will grate on the politically correct and hypersensitive but is necessary to underscore the rigidity of the false sense of "otherness" that occupying the limen without any awareness of its liminality fosters, are the specter of how this in-betweeness comes to be resolved in the surprise ending, in a powerful way.   

But The Book of Samuel has far less to do with the sociology of transition, and the intractability of race prejudice, than it does with the "liminality" of the spiritual rites of passage of our age - from Jesus-freak, reformed-hippie, Bible-quoting, evangelical Christianity to one which is now and not yet, that is avenir (in French-speaking Derredese) "to come."  It is the passage of the Christianity which, culturally speaking founded the Reagan era and reached its apogee in the age of George W. Bush, but now finds itself awash in a strange,  culturally diverse, globalized, world-flattened, increasingly upside-down, spectrally threatening, morally ambiguous, and increasingly violent environment.

It is an "impossible" Christianity, which Samuel at first and rather unsuccessfully seeks to find in the mutterings - somewhere between prophetic and purely apocalyptic - of his post-Sixties, Jesus-freak father, who has quite his job as a psychology professor to "save the world", but in the end discovers unintentionally and in an unforeseen way through his own unplanned "apocalypse." 

I will have more to say about this kind of Christianity in a soon-forthcoming, follow-up post as well as in a future meditation about what the novel says about my generation, and the generation that is supposed to now succeed it.   I've always been a critic of my own generation - the Boomers and self-righteous post-Vietnammers - but I've also been a critic of the much vaunted "millennials", who were supposed to save the world too.  The author, my son, is neither a boomer or a millennial.  He's an "X"er, that undesignated "liminal" generation that we can't easily make sense of.  The Xers are now approaching middle age, another "in between" time, so whatever wisdom they can offer to us has to be read between the lines of the always-to-fail conventional wisdom.

The Book of Samuel was designated by the publisher as a "teen novel," but it really goes beyond that.  It's really an "in-between" novel  that can be read with relish by 20-somethings, 30-somethings, and 40-somethings alike.  It's easy to read.  And it compels.  Furthermore, it grows on you, and you have to re-read it.  Your kids can read it and perhaps chuckle at the pure juvenalia of it all, as in that other Colorado creation known as "South Park."  Or you adults can read it and begin to unpeel the deeper layers of irony and meaning.  

Samuel Gerard is indeed a present day, postmodern Huck Finn.  And like Mark Twain's immortal character (shoot, I said it again) he is not only a mischievous, irrepressible, hormone-saturated argonaut of his own times, but the secret conscience of our age.  I'm not sure what the "religious" people of our day will do with the book (none of the "Christian" publishers were remotely interested in it). Nor am I sure what the fashionably non-religious will do either (it doesn't glorify any of our stock, identity-political victim heroes, nor villify any of our stock, identity-political, "oppressor" bad guys). There's no theology in the book, just truth.  It's only in those in-between spaces that truth, God, or the meaning of life can be genuinely discovered.

But what do I know?  I'm just in-between the book and the author - somewhere.

More to come...

     

 

     

     

About Rhizone - It's About the Great Commission, Stupid

Rhizone is about the spread of Christianity worldwide and the growth of its emergent, global frontier.   

The tag "Dispatches from the Next Christendom"  captures the sense of what is happening on a planetary scale and derives from the title of a book by historian Philip Jenkins.   Jenkins' The Next Christendom  , published by Oxford University Press in 2002, projects the accelerating, future growth of Christianity, which is no longer really a Western phenomenon, but a global one.  Christians in the West still have little clue.  According to the book blurb, "the explosive southward expansion of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin American has barely registered on Western consciousness. Nor has the globalization of Christianity--and the enormous religious, political, and social consequences it portends--been properly understood."

While Christianity is spreading rapidly in Asia and Africa, it is also undergoing some radical and long-term shifts in the West itself.  The sudden decline of the evangelical establishment in America with its almost single-minded focus on "family values" and "social issues" such as abortion and gay marriage has been offset by the growing influence of socially conservative Christians in the global south, as the recent fracturing of the Anglican church's worldwide communion suggests.    At the same time, American evangelicals are becoming more socially "progressive," or at least not so lockstep when it comes  to the traditional issues that their leaders have espoused.

The so-called "emergent church" - which is now a catch-all label for new, experimental, and youth-based forms of Christianity in the West  - may have seeded the current trend in Western evangelicalism.   But in many ways all the different varieties of emergentism for the most part tend to be the mirror image of the old guard against which they are reacting.  What they have in common is a preoccupation with social and political issues, the gist of what was once called the "culture wars," and a kind of choleric take on how the other half represents itself.  In many ways the emergent movement, broadly conceived, has defined itself as simply the "alternative" to the now senescent evangelical empire of the 1980s and 1990s.  Traditional evangelicalism  favored mega-churches and "church growth."  Emergents have concentrated on small gatherings, even "house churches."  The "religious right", as embodied in the influence and agenda of Jerry Falwell, was  for years on its high horse about the takeover, which happened in the Sixties, of mainline Protestantism by liberals and social activists.  The new evangelical "religious left," personified in Jim Wallis and his Sojourners movementa presidency and the all-out push for an Obama, seems to want to turn the hands of the clock one more time again.   

By and large American Christianity  across the political, cultural, and theological spectrum remains focused on what faith "can do for me and my lifestyles," an outgrowth of consumer capitalism which Americans pioneered and perfected over the last half century.  It is what I have called "Burger King Christianity,"  which coined the marketing slogan "have it your way."  But consumer capitalism is currently going through a crisis that it has never  in the past experienced.  Oil shocks, credit crunches,   offshored jobs, and generalized economic Angst without any immediate prospect of a turnaround are the bitter harvest of decades of consumerist self-absorption.  The idols everywhere are now falling. 

If Christianity during the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century was forced to disentangle itself  from  the Constantianian heritage of Christ as Caesar (what historians call "Caesoropapism"), Christianity in the new millenium will find itself forced to separate from the legacy of consumerism.  Consumerism is about "me" and "what I want."  Christianity is about "God" and "what God wants."  God and self cannot be served any more than God and Mammon can. 

When Christ rose from the dead, he bid his followers to "make disciples of all nations."  He did not say "start churches that will appeal to people and grow because of that appeal."  Nor did he say "figure out what you want in life and go for it."  He said "make disciples of all nations."  That bidding has come to be known as The Great Commisson.  Scripturally, the Great Commission is the practical imperative corresponding to The Great Commandment - "love the Lord your God with all thy heart and your neighbor as yourself." 

The new Christians of the global south are likely to lead the old Christians of the super-indulged west into what is truly the next Christendom.  The next Christendom will be the realization of the Great Commission. 

In our next post we will begin to explore more fully what that means, and what the word "rhizone"  means for the next Christendom.

NOTE: many of these ideas are explored in Carl Raschke's new book GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn, set for release by Baker Academic Books on August 1, 2008.