74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics

0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Those of you who are Game of Thrones fans and you remember the finale earlier this year, mostly not a success in my eyes and those of some others. But there were some good moments in there, there's a quote I remember from Tyrion when he says, "There's nothing in the world more powerful than a good story."

0:00:23 SC: You hear quotes like that, quite often in fiction, and it may be a little self-serving, since these are words written by storytellers, who are basically telling us through the mouths of their characters, there are no people more powerful in the world than us. But still I'm sympathetic to the quote. There are individual people who do things, people who have more power, instruments of power, whether technological or otherwise, but these are often motivated by the stories people are telling themselves and each other about why they're here, why they're acting in certain ways.

0:00:56 SC: And a wonderful person to comment on the role of stories in our culture, in our world, is today's guest, Stephen Greenblatt. He's the John Cogan University Professor of Humanities at Harvard and a very well-known Shakespeare scholar and literary historian. He's one of the founders, probably the main driving force between the New Historicism school of literary criticism, that takes both the literary text and also its context and the historical resonances all together as part of the analysis of that text.

0:01:27 SC: So Shakespeare has been Stephen Greenblatt's main focus of research over the years, but he's also won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for a book on Lucretius. The book is called The Swerve: How The World Became Modern and Lucretius, of course, is one of my favorite ancient poets, author of De Rerum Natura, on The Nature of Things, which tells a cosmological story for ancient atomists, who didn't want to just give God all the credit for everything. And Greenblatt has also written about Adam and Eve, the origin story of the Christian and Hebrew Bibles. So this is a wonderful opportunity to talk about how we think about the world, which is something we do on Mindscape every week, but in the context of the stories that we tell about the world, which is what we're doing all the time, whether we know it or not. So, let's go.

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0:02:34 SC: Stephen Greenblatt, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:02:36 Stephen Greenblatt: Thanks, pleasure to be here.

0:02:38 SC: We don't usually have Shakespeare scholars on the podcast, but you've written a book about the Book of Genesis, about Adam and Eve in that story. And also a book about Lucretius, who wrote this wonderful poem about the universe back in ancient times. So I begin to get the feeling that maybe you're secretly desiring to be a cosmologist, not just a literary scholar.

0:03:00 SG: Oh, well, I'm not a cosmologist, but I am interested in the origins of things, the origins of the world that we live in, of the ideas that we have and I'm particularly interested in the role that the human imagination has played in our... Fashioning a world for ourselves.

0:03:16 SC: Yeah, and I think since the audience is probably not used to topics like this, why don't we just start with the very biggest picture and, when you're at cocktail parties or stuck in airplanes and people say, explain to me what you do, how do you explain the role of a literary scholar?

0:03:29 SG: I just... I don't... I'm not at cocktail parties that often. People don't invite me to explain what I do very often, but I suppose if they do, I say I'm a writer and a literary historian. I sometimes say I'm a Shakespearian, since that covers a lot of ground, but not as you say, all the ground.

0:03:51 SG: And if you ask what a literary scholar does, it's in general to try to immerse themselves in, and their students in this astonishing thing that survived, that continues to survive from human beings, which is that we over a long period of time, actually from the beginning, as a species have tried to register and leave traces of our experience, which is an odd thing to do, other animals in general don't do that.

0:04:24 SG: So, already 35,000 years before the present people drew things on the walls of caves, and recorded what they thought or dreamt, they thought around them. And they also signed those objects, as you may know, by putting their hands up against the walls of caves and blowing pigment around them. So you see these hand prints if you've ever been fortunate enough to go to those astonishing caves.

0:04:55 SC: I did not know that, no.

0:04:56 SG: So if the... The little thing that says Picasso or Rembrandt is a very old idea and in addition, again, if we're gonna stay there, since we're starting to talk about origins and cosmology, I suppose, in those same caves, archeologists have found flutes made out of bear bone. So that obviously the creation of music goes back basically to the beginnings of what it means to be homo sapiens. So we have art, we have music and then in the oldest of the caves, the oldest of the surviving ones that we know, in France, there is... From the very beginning in that case, there's a figure, very few human figures. But in that instances there's a figure that is the legs of a woman and then the head of a bull. And if we... Who knows what that means, but if we... Among other things what it has to mean is that... Is that something that we would call myth-making or storytelling also goes back to the beginnings.

0:06:16 SC: Fiction, yeah.

0:06:17 SG: Homo sapiens aren't that old as a species. So this is the very... These are among the earliest traces that we have of our species life. So we have art and music and storytelling. And to be a literary critic or to be interested in any case in the humanities or the arts is to be interested in this fundamental series of things that we do as a species.

0:06:43 SC: And it's interesting you went to ancient history right away. I mean, sort of your angle here has been what has been called new historicism or I guess you've called cultural poetics. I don't even want to try to define it but maybe you can put it into words bringing together the history and context of things with the texts themselves.

0:07:00 SG: So the first thing to say, Sean, is that whatever new historicism or cultural poetics is, the first thing to say is that the reason I go back to the beginning is that the humanities unlike, let's say, neuroscience or geology or medical treatments, there's no charting of a history of progress, and that's very strange. We have to take in how strange that is. If I go to a doctor, I don't actually want to be treated with therapies that were current in 1980 and I certainly don't want be treated with the therapies that were current in 1680. So that we actually do... Sometimes we're deceived or sometimes disappointed, but we expect that there is some kind of history of progress. But in the case of the arts, if you go to the caves at Lascaux, you absolutely, you wouldn't say that those paintings are better than Bruegel or Rembrandt, but you also would be very hard-pressed to say they're worse.

0:08:09 SC: Yeah, they can hang with our present day artists.

0:08:11 SG: And that's astonishing. Weird, think how weird that is. And so the first thing to say, putting whatever approach you have aside, is that there is no clear history of progress. There are individual little histories of... There are progressions within technologies, representational technologies, but there's no history of progress. And I think we have to let that, especially in our current culture, we have to actually take in how odd that is. And one of the things that it means is that we can be in strangely intense and direct contact with people who lived a very long time ago, in circumstances and places that we can barely understand, and cultures that we have almost no other access to.

0:09:03 SG: I say it that way because it puts the project of historicism, putting new historicism aside, it puts the project of historicism in a peculiar light. You could say that historicism, traditionally, the historical study of the humanities has tried to recreate the... And understand and explore the cultural historical social circumstances that led to the production of the works of art that we care about. And I think that's important in so far as you can do it, but you... A, you can't always do it and B, so what. What if you do it? You have to start in my view with the other thing which I've talked about, the astonishment that we can still be in touch with this without actually almost any contextual understanding whatsoever.

0:09:53 SG: It's as if we found a random yellowed letter in a desk in a city... In a hotel in a city that we'd never been in before, and we opened the letter and it's addressed to us by someone who's been dead for hundreds of years. So take that in and start there. The trouble with old historicism is that it tended to suppress that fact, I think, that weird fact about our encounter with the ghosts of the past. However, the other side of this encounter is that we can, even if we can't think about what's moving us or reaching us from the history of culture of the past, to take one of those caves, for example, where we have almost no understanding of what that culture was like, or only the most rudimentary and primitive understanding. We actually know something about ourselves and we can think a little bit about why we're responding so powerfully to the thing, so what it's speaking to in us, hence the new in new historicism, that that we start to think about the historical circumstances or the social and cultural circumstances in so far as we can understand them in the past, but only in relation to what we're feeling in the here and now, to the questions that we're asking to who we are.

0:11:15 SG: I say that because all the historical work in the world done by people like me and people much smarter than me, trying to understand what Shakespeare or Homer or Joyce or anyone was about that produced these astonishing works, that kind of historical explanation can never answer magically the power of those works. The works reach you independent, as it were, of the historical understanding, but it remains fascinating to try to grapple with the meanings of the past, with how these works were produced and above all, how works that were not produced in our world still address us.

0:12:02 SC: Well, it's interesting, because what you seem to be emphasizing there is the ahistoricity of some of these texts in the sense that there is a universal aspect to them, to the good ones anyway.

0:12:13 SG: Well, at the very least I would say... I'd start with saying yes, the funny thing about the new in new historicism is that it also is a slightly anti-historicism. It's against the idea that used to be carried when you said, look, you don't understand anything unless you go back into the past and understand what the circumstances are. I mean I'm very sympathetic to that account, but I think that it has great limits. And the other side of what I'm saying is that there is a history that we do have access to, and it's our history, and that to be aware of our history and to bring it to bear on whatever historical traces we're encountering, seems to me part of the project.

0:13:00 SG: I pulled down a book when we were getting ready for this interview because I thought this question would come up, and I wanted to suggest how it works. So a very long time ago, 1980, I published a book called Renaissance Self-Fashioning. And even before then, I had written the particular passage I'm looking at, about Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe, and about the strange, violent and disturbing imagination of Marlowe and the works that he produced in the 1580s for his late 1580s, for his contemporaries. But in the beginning of this chapter, in this old book of mine called Renaissance Self-Fashioning, I begin the following way: "On June 26, 1586, a small fleet financed by the Earl of Cumberland, set out from Gravesend for the South Seas. It sailed down the West African coast, sighting Sierra Leone in October. And at this point, we may let one of those on board, the merchant John Sarracoll, tell his own story." And what follows is a quotation which I'll read.

0:14:16 SG: "The fourth of November we went on shore to a town of the Negroes, which we found to be but lately built," lately, recently built. "It was of about 200 houses, and walled about with mighty great trees and stakes so thick that a rat could hardly get in or out. But as it chanced, we came directly upon a port, which was not shut up where we entered with such fierceness that the people fled all out of the town, which we found to be finely built after their fashion, and the streets of it so intricate, that it was difficult for us to find the way out that we came in at. We found their houses and streets so finely and cleanly kept that it was an admiration to us all, for that neither in the houses nor streets was so much dust to be found as would fill an egg shell. We found little in their houses, except some mats, gourds and some earthen pots. Our men at their departure set the town on fire, and it was burned for the most part of it in a quarter of an hour, the houses being covered with reed and straw."

0:15:18 SG: Okay, that's the passage. And I go on to talk about Marlowe's plays and about the strange current of violence in in Marlowe's work, the peculiar blend of almost incomprehensible admiration and violence, and so on and so on, and way of opening up plays like Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus and so forth. But the reason I read the passage is that probably not for you, and probably not for most of your listeners, but for me and for my generation, that passage which comes from the past had a very specific resonance when this was published in 1980, and when I wrote the essay back in the '70s. And the resonance has to do with a scene that had burned its way into our consciousness, which was shown on television, CBS, I think. When Morley Safer was then a young reporter, recently died after a distinguished career as a reporter, was in Vietnam, and showed a famous clip, was only a few minutes or less, of a GI setting fire to a Vietnamese village with their straw roofs, with his Zippo lighter, a famous scene where... A kind of meaningless, a random act of violence against people who were non-combatants.

0:16:52 SG: So new historicism, my work and the work to some extent of others in my generation had to do yes, with excavating the past. But excavating the past is never a neutral activity, it has something to do with what we're interested in, who we are. So why this passage from John Sarracoll out of, if you actually look, I don't have it in this office where we're having this conversation, but if you look at Hakluyt's Voyages, there's volume after volume after... There's huge bodies of this. And I was particularly at this point of my life, a mad reader of those things, just a kind of crazy grazer into the past that way, and I always trusted my unconscious, if that's what it was, when I would read and read, I would suddenly think, "Here. Stop, what is this? Why is this reaching me from this enormous body of things, that traces that survive from the past?"

0:17:54 SG: And that passage from Sarracoll is a perfect example, where just out of the enormous randomness, I wasn't particularly interested in Sierra Leone or the Earl of Cumberland, or this virtually anonymous merchant, but suddenly something leapt off the page for me, and I asked myself, "Why is it leaping off the page for me?" And it was both because it spoke to my present and because it seemed to be a key that unlocked a door in Christopher Marlowe's work.

0:18:26 SC: It's not stuck there in the past, we recently just had Columbus Day a few weeks ago, and there's an ongoing argument about how to think about that part of the past.

0:18:33 SG: Yes. I was flabbergasted, by the way, I don't know if you read... This is another piece of historicism, of a curious kind. I didn't know this before, but I didn't know about the origins of Columbus Day. So one time... It was meant as a one-time event by the President Benjamin Harrison.

0:18:53 SG: I didn't know that.

0:18:54 SC: Who instituted it in the wake of the lynching in New Orleans of 11 Southern Italians who had been exonerated in a trial, accused of some nefarious crime or other. And then a crowd caught them and lynched them. And the lynching was actually, in this article about it was weirdly approved of even by Northern newspapers like the New York Times. Why? Because Southern Italians at that point, particularly Southern Italians, were perceived as black, and were treated the way in the mass murder mode of American racism, the way blacks were treated. So Columbus Day originated, if you think of it from that perspective, as an attempt to make Italians white, certain Italians white, at the expense, of course, or, you could say, at the expense of blacks, I mean, of African-Americans. I mean, to try to create the boundary around those whom it was okay to lynch. Can you imagine? I never knew that.

0:20:07 SC: No, no, yeah.

0:20:08 SG: I was quite astonished by this, there was an article in the New York Times that ran around Columbus Day.

0:20:15 SC: It speaks to the usefulness of remembering some of that history. I guess you point out the idea that we can't understand texts in the past, unless we dive into their history, that's probably wrong, that's probably too far, but then there's the other idea that these texts are just supposed to be understood as works of art in some pure realm of aesthetic beauty. And if I remember correctly, you probably remember this better than I do, but in the '80s and '90s, your name was invoked in the culture wars, right? When people were talking about The Tempest and whether or not we should think of it as telling us something about colonialism somehow and there were people who thought like, "Oh, no, no, that's not how we should be thinking about Shakespeare."

0:21:00 SG: Yeah, I had a brief moment of notoriety because of George Will, who actually is sort of a interesting figure, I mean, often quite, I think, thoughtful, wrote something that said that people who, like me, who said that The Tempest was actually about colonialism, were more dangerous than Saddam Hussein. That was a very implausible thing to say, but this was all the passions of the moment. Look, two quick things about the work of art as pure beauty. Of course, it's not true.

0:21:38 SC: Right.

0:21:39 SG: I mean, works of art are embedded in particular moments, like everything is embedded. I mean, take place and make statements and have influences. On the other hand, the idea that works of art don't matter or that they're works of pure beauty or that they have no relation to society has served art well in various circumstances. For example, in repressive regimes that have allowed works of art to say things that would be punished elsewhere. So the idea that works of art are not engaged in political or social work, but are purely about beauty is itself an historical or cultural...

0:22:34 SC: And political.

0:22:35 SG: And political phenomenon with an enormous importance at various moments. In 1610, The English authorities under James I caught and decided to kill a Welsh Catholic, a Benedictine named, I think his last name was Roberts, John Roberts, maybe, who was very popular, worked with the poor, and had a kind of a charismatic following. And the state in its general hostility to Catholics, which extended through the late 16th and early 17th century, decided to kill this guy. And when they had the execution, they did the usual unspeakable things, and then they took his heart, the executioner took his heart out of his chest, held it up before the crowd and said, "Here is the heart of a traitor. Long live the King." And the crowd was completely silent.

0:23:42 SG: So we know about this because this was, the crowd's silence was surprising and upsetting from the point of view of the authorities, 'cause they... The authorities expected the crowd would shout, "God save the King." So if you said anything other than God save the King, you could be in tremendous trouble in a circumstance of that kind. And the authorities of the time watched very carefully how the crowd was responding in events of this kind. Same year, 1610, The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's Winter's Tale is performed before 3,000 people in an afternoon in the theater in London.

0:24:29 SG: And the character, the tyrannical king says to a woman character named Paulina, who's enraged him, "I'll have you burned." And she says, "It's a heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in it." Now, if someone said anything of the kind at that execution, "It's a heretic that's making the fire. It's a heretic that's executing the man. This guy is not a heretic," this victim. If someone said that at the scene of the execution or if someone said that in the tavern, they would have their ears cut off, their tongue cut out, or they'd be killed. But a character could say this before 3,000 people on an afternoon and neither the actor, nor the playwright, nor the company got in trouble for it. Why? Because it's a work of art. I mean, it doesn't mean anything, it doesn't have any political life. I mean, it's... That's what people... I think what I try to make people understand which is that saying these, that works of art are pure aesthetic experiences and have nothing to do with other aspects of life is itself a political statement that serves a particular purpose, including an aesthetic purpose that allowed these things to go on. And it doesn't mean... In that sense, I don't want the walls to go away, I don't want all of this to be us just a wink and understand that it's not true, but I want us to know that this is how it works and it's true.

0:26:15 SC: Yeah, and it goes both ways, right? Knowing something about the culture and what was going on helps us understand the works and reading the works can help us understand the present moment. Your most, I think your most recent book is Tyrant. Is that right?

0:26:30 SG: Yes.

0:26:31 SC: And this is about all the different ways that Shakespeare talks about bad rulers taking over. And did you learn anything by studying that particular angle in Shakespeare?

0:26:40 SG: I did, I actually felt I learned quite a lot. And as often happens, you learn in the writing, you learn in the doing, it's after all the basic principle of... It's why teaching is a gratifying act 'cause you don't know what you think, and one says to one's students, and I feel for myself, you don't know what you think before you actually sit down and try to think it and write it. And so in the course of writing that book and thinking about the trajectory of Shakespeare's thinking about politics, I learned both about how he thought catastrophic leaders could arise and I learned about how he thought it might be possible under different circumstances, and he tried experimentally, as it were, different scenarios for thinking how to get rid of a disaster of this kind, short of civil war, since most often the way these things is through civil war, and Shakespeare understands this to be a, as we all understand this to be, a catastrophe. But how else do you get rid of such a disaster visited upon? First of all, he's interested in why would sane people who are self-interested, a society that actually after all wants to function more or less peacefully and prosperously, why would they allow themselves to fall into the hands of a catastrophic leader? And then of course why when they get in to it, how can they get out of it?

0:28:17 SC: Yeah. What is it about Shakespeare that makes him especially good at this, in some way? There's been many plays written, many books written about terrible rulers, about any other topic, but he does seem to have something interesting to say about just about everything.

0:28:31 SG: He does. I don't have a magical, I wish I did, have a formula to explain this. I have the usual evasions of an answer. He was a genius. He was an unbelievable genius. He's super bright. I mean, that he thought about everything. He had an unbelievable imagination. But this is just a way of saying, "I don't know."

0:28:52 SC: Right.

0:28:52 SG: I mean, I don't know how it's... How did Mozart do what he did, how did Bach did what he did, I mean how did Jane Austen do what she did? People, we're a huge species with a lot of people in the population, every once in a while someone pops up who's just astonishing, I mean, so that's as I say a dumb explanation but I don't have a smarter one. I could say several other things. He came along by the accident of his birth at a moment at which his language was exploding with possibilities and power. He came along by the accident of his birth at a moment in which there was a new medium that had not been, whose resources had not been exploited. So like the first generation that or the first generations that figure out how to make movies or how to make long-form television series, I mean we're, shortly after you start making long-form television series, someone makes The Wire, you think, "God, how did that happen?"

0:29:50 SC: It's perfect already, yes.

0:29:51 SG: Yeah, it's fantastic, but it has to do with the medium being new and available, as it were, for experiments without a tremendous oppressive past. So that's a second explanation. We could say that it helped in a somewhat perverse way, that he came along at a time in which this censorship, and he has to be thoughtful, careful and cunning.

0:30:19 SC: A little clever.

0:30:20 SG: About how he wants to, how he in his culture wants to talk about things that are not possible to talk about openly.

0:30:29 SC: Do you think that he was very often trying to make trenchant political observations but in a sneaky way or...

0:30:34 SG: I do.

0:30:34 SC: Yeah.

0:30:35 SG: I do, I think quite often, I think and not just trenchant political observations but trenchant observations about what can't be spoken in other ways. What can you say about same-sex love that you can't say openly in the late 16th century, what can you say about perverse family structures? What can you say about disobedience, what can you say about transgression as well as, of course, more directly political, a dog's obeyed in office. Shakespeare has a character step up and say. You said that in the wrong place, you got in tremendous trouble.

0:31:16 SC: Right.

0:31:17 SG: In the late 16th and early 17th century, but...

0:31:20 SC: You mentioned that there's no history of progress in the creation of these kinds of art, but there are changes of style and so forth. Do you see if you teach Shakespeare, your students respond to it differently now than they would have decades ago?

0:31:33 SG: Yes, and I should quickly say, there may not be a history of progress but there are some artists who are greater than other artists. That's the premise of what we're saying. I mean that... So there are astonishing things that happened. It's just that you don't want to say that Shakespeare, I think it's not interesting to my, I think to say that Shakespeare is a greater dramatist than Sophocles or what does that mean, that these are both great dramatists, but it doesn't mean that Shakespeare is not better than the person who wrote Crack Me This Nut or there's tons of miserable plays that survive from the late 16th, early 17th century, so we know there were bad people at their game as well as good people. So, and now I've lost the train of your question.

0:32:20 SC: How do students respond to it over time?

0:32:22 SG: Oh, yeah, students are the same as us, as it were, in that they, depending on what's going on in their lives and in their world, some things reach them more powerfully than other things. So it's certainly the case now that if I teach Othello or I teach Hamlet, the race issues or the gender issues are registered in a different way now than they would have been when I was a student. Certain things can be spoken. No one said when I was, when I read Hamlet for the first time, "God, what happens... What happened to Ophelia? Why was she treated this way? What... Isn't this... Shouldn't we think of this as Ophelia's tragedy or Gertrude's tragedy?" That what does it mean to block that out and so but now it rushes in, so, and likewise with lots of these plays that... Shakespeare's very good at writing very uncomfortable plays.

0:33:29 SC: I once saw this BBC televised production of Shakespeare where Othello was played by a white guy, and there was this long intro sort of excusing and/or apologizing for it. And so am I correct in thinking that was just a crazy thing to do? [chuckle]

0:33:46 SG: Crazy thing to do it by a white guy? Or a crazy thing to...

0:33:49 SC: They made the case that...

0:33:50 SG: Or apologize for it?

0:33:51 SC: As far as we know, Othello could easily have been white. That sounds very wrong to me.

0:33:56 SG: Well, there's several different things; I'm not sure I've... Not having seen this, I'm not sure what they were up to. The play was always, long, long performed until... Actually, I think the first time was in the 19th century when it wasn't... It was performed by white actors in various forms of black face, or darker face. So it's certainly true that the play was written for Richard Burbage, a white actor, and it was performed by white actors all the way through until Ira Aldridge.

0:34:24 SC: No, they were trying to really make the case that all this language of the Moors and so forth could just have been Southern Europeans.

0:34:30 SG: Well, it certainly was the case that in the 19th century, particularly in America, when the idea that a white woman could fall in love with a black man, one way of, was disgusting and outrageous from the point of view of the racial codes of the whites. One way of arguing about the play, to justify the play, was to say, "Well, he wasn't really a black man in the sense of a sub-Saharan black man. He was a Moor, slightly swarthy," or whatever, "but not... " So maybe that's what they were up to.

0:35:03 SC: Yeah. That was the impression I got too.

0:35:04 SG: Yeah, it's not crazy, it just happens to be racist [chuckle] as an argument. Or oddly... Or odd... I dont know. I shouldn't accuse the people who did. It's an uncomfortable, disturbing thing to claim, depending on what the nature of the claim was, because, as I say, it has an ugly history of being invoked as a way of justifying what was otherwise to the racist audience unjustifiable.

0:35:30 SC: Do you have a particular way of thinking about the plays of Shakespeare's that we now cringe at a little bit? The Taming of the Shrew, or The Merchant of Venice, where the sexism or anti-Semitism seems to us to be a little bit different, maybe, than it would have been at the time? There are people who say, "No, it's really not anti-Semitic or sexist," and other people who say, "Well, this is an illustration, we should look at it closely"?

0:35:57 SG: I think this is an important issue, and certainly it's an important issue now because of the nature of heightened awareness and sensitivity in... Especially in universities, but I think it always is an important issue for historical reasons, both in the past but certainly for ourselves. The Merchant of Venice post-Holocaust is not The Merchant of Venice before the Holocaust. And that doesn't mean it's irrelevant, the Holocaust is irrelevant, it means as I started to say, this is our experience. How can you watch this play without thinking a little bit about what happened in the 1930s and '40s? You can't. And that's not only because we're importing a completely irrelevant thing, it's because what happened in the 1930s and '40s is not completely unrelated to what was already expressed in the late 16th century, which was the use of the figure of the Jew as the mortal enemy of the Christians. You tell that story enough and powerfully enough, nasty things happen.

0:37:18 SG: And so I don't mean that Shakespeare is responsible for the Holocaust, I just mean that it is a... He's not. But I think that the tropes of anti-Semitism that the play actually explores in a rather profound way, but not in a clean way, are very much involved in the way in which the subsequent history... As we could say the way... We started by talking about Adam and Eve; the way Eve is represented in Genesis is not innocent in the long-term treatment of women. It's not the whole story; it's not responsible solely for that, but it's not innocent. The cultures are not innocent. The greatest artists are not innocent; they reflect the values of their world and their time. They think about them, the great ones that we care about, Shakespeare is a perfect example, manage... Shakespeare is not an enlightenment artist; he's not writing to try to make people who live in 02138, people like myself, feel great about every one of their opinions being validated; he's living in a different world.

0:38:26 SG: The Taming of the Shrew is a very disturbingly misogynistic play; The Merchant of Venice is a disturbingly anti-Semitic play. I have no desire to white-wash it and say, "Oh, no, they're not, not at all." But on the other hand, because he's a great artist he actually manages to explore and to unsettle the very things that he seems to be also exploiting.

0:38:51 SC: There's something worth appreciating about it; there's something worth understanding and developing...

0:38:54 SG: Yeah. Appreciating, entering into, trying to understand; how else do we enter into them? How else do we understand this world, which continues, in the case of misogyny and anti-Semitism, to have a contemporary life? How do we get back into... How do we ever enter into this consciousness if it happens that it's not ours? How do we ever take some critical distance toward it? But simply denouncing it and saying, "Let's get rid of it" imagines that getting rid of it will just simply eliminate the phenomenon in itself; it won't.

0:39:28 SC: Yeah. And Adam and Eve is a very special case, because other than Shakespeare, the Bible is probably in the English language the most influential work of literature; those are probably the top two. And like you said, Adam and Eve as a story influence not only how we treated and think about women, but many other things.

0:39:46 SG: Nature, for example. We should be the dominant species, which is what it seems to say at the beginning of Adam and Eve. But is that a good way of thinking about what we are in relation to the rest of the natural world? That we are somehow the top banana? Well, it happens it was accurate. We did... This was after all the text written when humans weren't principally responsible for the great die-off and so forth, but we would become that. And that text is not innocent of our becoming it; on the other hand, it doesn't produce that. I mean, it doesn't make us, but it helps to make us what we became.

0:40:25 SC: Or at least it comes from a common source, right?

0:40:27 SG: Yeah, exactly.

0:40:27 SC: There's something that makes us and something that makes Adam and Eve.

0:40:29 SG: Exactly. And we could then, because it's written in this form, as is indeed the transgression that begins with Eve's eating of the fruit, it enables us to start thinking about where we come from, who we are. We started this conversation by talking about my interest in origins and I think that literature, not only super old literature like the Book of Genesis, but all literature enables us to get down into the places that we come from and to look at them in a way that we can't ordinary look at them 'cause we just, we don't normally think that way about ourselves, represent ourselves as we're doing things, unless we're very neurotic.

0:41:16 SC: In your book about Adam and Eve, you go through a lot of how it was interpreted over the years, but tell us a little bit, 'cause probably many people are not familiar with how the story was written or the original way in which those first couple of chapters of Genesis came to be.

0:41:28 SG: We don't know, of course, for sure, we don't know... The story certainly preceded the first time it was written down, it was probably written down in the wake of the Hebrews' return from exile in Babylon. In the... I would have to now remind myself of what the date was, when they returned under Cyrus from their exile. But the story must have originated long before that, almost certainly as an oral tale, it has the form of an oral tale. So that it wasn't someone who sat down with a pen in hand and wrote the thing down, but probably a story that had been endlessly told and re-told in various forms.

0:42:15 SC: Is it safe to think that most fiction that was written down, I shouldn't say fiction, most stories that were written down at that time did start orally and then got written down or were there novelists, did such a thing exist?

0:42:26 SG: I mean, something, not novelists, but some things certainly were... Once writing, Cuneiform was originated, what, about 3500 BC, I think. These are... We don't know for sure.

0:42:43 SC: We won't fact check, don't worry.

0:42:45 SG: No, but we don't know for sure; in any case, when someone had the idea, but in, Uruk in Mesopotamia. So, someone has the idea of actually writing things down, orders for beer, shipments of...

0:43:01 SC: Some things don't change.

0:43:03 SG: Yeah. I mean, I say that semi-seriously, because one of the first things that we actually have in Cuneiform are beer orders. Anyway, it takes place because there are now large numbers of people living together. Uruk was the first city in the world, first mega-city, and that meant you were encountering people you didn't know personally in your community. So it helped to spur the idea of actually getting things somehow recorded somehow or other. The Incas do it with those little knots, but people in Mesopotamia did it with these little marks in clay. And certainly up to that point, for sure, the one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that the stories that existed, existed because they were in circulation orally. Then at that point in that part of the world, and at that point, a somewhat later moment in which things get written down in first in Phoenician and then in Greek, the first stories that we have are almost certainly the stories that are circulated orally. So the Iliad and the Odyssey are oral tales that... But written down in the first earliest moment, the thing we talked about with Shakespeare in the theater, the moment at which there's a new technology.

0:44:29 SG: And often what's interesting, again to return to something we were talking about before, that moment, of incandescent moment of a new technology precipitates remarkable works. So, Gilgamesh in Mesopotamian culture, then the Iliad and we could say, then the Bible. What's interesting about all of those three documents, we of course don't know the relationship of the documentary traces of that, and the oral tale, we know from various forms of analysis, that there's an overwhelming likelihood that these are oral tales before they're written down. But how much changed when they were written down? To take your novel question; how much happened when the person, let's make his name up, "Ezra," 'cause some people thought it was the prophet Ezra who wrote down the Bible. It's very unlikely or to take what religious people believe, Moses wrote it down or when Sunalaki or whatever his name was from Mesopotamia wrote it down or whoever we mean when we say Homer. How much was actually value added by the writer who wrote it down? We don't know. There's an interesting relation, we can hypothesize that, between the remarkable people and remarkable geniuses who actually recorded the thing and the stories that were circulating.

0:46:04 SG: In the case of the Bible, it's trickier, or at least we can feel the trickiness more manifestly because it is now, unless you are a pious believer in divine inspiration, it's reasonably clear to virtually all scholars that there are multiple texts that are being stitched together, and that's actually what we think of Homer as well, that Homer was what was famously called a stitcher of songs, someone who stitched these things together. And an example for that in Genesis is the fact that there are two different accounts of the creation of humans, one that involves a separate creation of a male and a female, and one that seems to involve the creation of the two together, male and female.

0:46:51 SC: And I've heard the claim made that in Near Eastern literature at the time the idea of a text being completely contradictory to itself was no big deal. That was just how we talked. It always seemed weird to me that the two stories were naively at odds.

0:47:03 SG: Yes, well, people, of course, for a very long time, didn't think it was naive at all. They thought it was a mystery that needed explanation, because intellectuals are good at this and have been good at it for thousands of years, there are lots of interesting explanations for what appears to be a tension between the two different accounts. If you believe that the work was dictated by an angel or by the Holy Ghost to Moses, then you have to, and you think it's inerrant, it can't possibly have a mistake, then you can't say it's naive, or contradictory, you say that it needs explanation, it needs interpretation. And people like me come along and say, oh, now I have an interesting account of how it worked.

0:47:45 SC: The first [0:47:46] ____, yes.

0:47:46 SG: Exactly.

0:47:47 SC: And... But unlike Homer, let's say, or I don't know enough about Gilgamesh, but there was this sort of political cultural context, the Hebrews were a small people surrounded by bigger peoples.

0:47:58 SG: Yes.

0:48:00 SC: And the Bible had this political didactic purpose explicitly in mind, sort of setting an agenda of who we were and where we came from.

0:48:07 SG: Yes, we were created by... Not by Marduk, we were created by Yahweh, and Marduk is nothing, Marduk is an empty wind or Marduk is the demon, but Yahweh is the sole creator of the universe, so we're already, as it were... Now, the Bible doesn't say Marduk feh, Yahweh yes, but the Bible very clearly says that in the beginning, God, Yahweh, created the heavens and the earth, And that's a polemical statement, it means that the other competing gods who claimed to be doing, who claimed to have done this... Abzu, as they say Marduk was the creator of humans, or whomever, Tiamat and so forth, these weren't the creators. This are done by people who aren't springing up like mushrooms out of nowhere, they are aware of a world that they're living in which there are competing claims.

0:49:14 SC: Yeah, and is it amazing to you that despite all of these sort of reasons why these texts were written, they managed to come up with one of the world's great stories, or tell a story that has resonance for us down through many centuries.

0:49:29 SG: It's simultaneously amazing and inevitable to me, Sean, amazing because these stories are so powerful, and they still reach us, and in this case, the story of Adam and Eve in the garden with the magical trees and the talking snake is a story that everyone knows thousands of years later, even though it's a wildly implausible story of human origins, as most stories of human origins are; nonetheless it's, A, a gazillion people still believe it and B, even if you don't believe it, a little New Yorker cartoon that shows two naked people in the garden with a tree, everyone knows...

0:50:07 SC: What that means.

0:50:10 SG: That's remarkable, inevitable because that's how human beings in culture produce and transmit their deepest ideas. That's why I'm in the business that I'm in, because the idea that this is mere decoration, flowers on the table, is that's the naive idea, that these stories, storytelling, image-making, this is what is at the very heart of what it is to be a human being and to produce culture, generation after generation, to transmit it.

0:50:51 SC: But even when I was a kid going to Sunday school, the thought that the really bad thing was eating fruit from the tree of knowledge rubbed me the wrong way like that. I didn't quite know what message I was supposed to be getting from that.

0:51:03 SG: Yes, it rubbed people the wrong way 2000 years ago, that's you were just... You weren't just being impious, you were responding to the story. Because that's the disturbance of the story. Stories are, if they're powerful, they're disturbing. And that was... And mystifying and troubling, that was in a much more modern way, as I wrote elsewhere, that was Shakespeare's... If you study Shakespeare in relation to his sources, what you find is that Shakespeare finds a powerful story, he identifies what the motive or the explanatory principle of the story is and he throws it away, and then he starts to work, so he does that again and again.

0:51:49 SC: So what's an example of that?

0:51:51 SG: Well, an example of that would be Hamlet in the... Source, Shakespeare's source for Hamlet, little Hamlet's father is killed when Hamlet's a little boy, it's in Scandinavian culture where it's expected that a son, the murder takes place in public, and is known, it's expected in this culture that a son will have to avenge his father if the father's been murdered, if the murderer is known.

0:52:20 SG: But Hamlet is a little kid. So the question is, how is he going to survive till he's old enough to kill the person who killed his father? And the answer is that he pretends he's insane. Yeah, drools, shits on himself, or whatever. Everyone in the court thinks that little Hamlet is mentally deficient, and sort of funny at that. And so they keep him around as a kind of harmless mascot. And he was able to keep that going until he grows up to be big enough to actually kill his father's killer. Shakespeare takes the basic plot, but he has Hamlet be a late adolescent or a young man, perfectly capable of taking revenge, when the ghost of his father comes and tells him what's happened. And then Hamlet pretends to be... He says, "I'm gonna assume an antic disposition," he says, "I'm going to pretend that I'm mad." "Why? Why pretend that you're mad?" It actually is the worst possible thing to do because it calls attention to yourself.

0:53:30 SG: And then it becomes the beginning of a, like the irritating grain of sand in an oyster that begins to produce this extraordinary pearl and you start worrying about why he's... Everyone starts worrying in the play. Why is he [laughter], and then we start worrying as an audience, why is he behaving this way? And I can show you this again and again, in King Lear, in Othello, this is how Shakespeare works. And so to go back to the problem of eating from the... Why would you ever tell someone not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? And particularly, why would that be the principal prohibition? Because if you don't know the difference been good and evil how would you know whether to obey the prohibition?

[laughter]

0:54:12 SG: So people... All I can say is that 2000 years ago, they dug up... In the 1940s they dug up some texts that were buried in the sand in Egypt by a so-called gnostic group, a group that was trying to understand the mysteries of the faith, and the gnostic group thinks that the hero of that story must be the snake, or the woman, one or the other. Because actually, it's of course, knowledge is the thing that we must have, and that the god, a god who tells you not to know must be a wicked god.

0:54:51 SC: But then the sects that had that claim got stamped out. They lost.

0:54:54 SG: They got stamped out, yes, they lost, and that's why the stuff was buried for several thousand years.

[laughter]

0:55:00 SC: Lucretius is a very different origin story in many ways, but there's some similarities, right? In Adam and Eve we get kicked out of the Garden of Eden; in Lucretius he's an atomist, he's a naturalist, I think it's safe to say, in the sense that he's not a theist. So there's a worry in Lucretius, or for the readers of Lucretius that it's disenchanting, that it takes away some of the romance of the world. What is your feeling about how people responded to the poem? Actually... I love Lucretius, and I write about it in all my books, but maybe we should tell the audience what his poem is.

0:55:37 SG: Well, he's... He was a, Lucretius was a poet and philosopher, follower of the Greek philosopher, Epicurus and the atomist tradition that Epicurus himself represented. But Lucretius is writing around 50 BCE, and he writes a long Latin poem, a remarkably powerful and beautiful poem. And the survival of that poem is itself important and surprising. Because most of the texts by Epicurus, by Democritus, by Leucippus, by the whole Greek atomist tradition disappeared. And very few things survive.

0:56:31 SC: Literally some aphorisms.

0:56:33 SG: Some aphorisms, some accounts of what... Piece of a letter, accounts of what his philosophy was, in a historian, an ancient historian of philosophy who recorded some of these things, but most of the work is gone. Some more recently have been discovered by the new technology that's able to read, not by Epicurus, but some by followers of Epicurus that's able to read the shard, the scrolls found in the ruins of Pompeii.

0:57:10 SC: How many years between Epicurus and Lucretius?

0:57:13 SG: Oh, centuries.

0:57:13 SC: Yeah.

0:57:14 SG: Yeah, so it's because this very full, remarkably full poem survives that we know in a rich way what the theory is. And the theory is that we didn't begin in a magical garden that was made just for us and we could eat anything we wanted, and life was beautiful, until we fucked up. But that we began by accident. It's not all about us, we weren't by God meant to be the dominant creatures and we didn't disobey a commandment. We began the way everything begins, in a set of mutations. He wouldn't have said genetic mutations, atomic mutations, strange things that...

0:58:02 SC: Fluctuations and random events.

0:58:03 SG: Yeah, fluctuations and random events. And it's certainly the case that we as a species began the way all organic species begin in a ferocious struggle for existence and reproduction. And if somehow the mutation led whatever thing that emerged to be able to find food and reproduce, then that species had a chance to keep going. It won't go forever. We're not destined to go forever. No species goes forever. Because something, the circumstances change, the environment changes, we won't get... Our society will screw up in various ways and something else will come along that will be more successful at getting the available food and reproducing and filling the world. But we for a while have been... Though, we certainly began in... And have emerged only in a very long, difficult process of, as they say, random, but beginning with a kind of set of purely random events.

0:59:06 SC: Yeah, I once wrote a little article calling him the first quantum cosmologist.

0:59:10 SG: Yeah, that's good.

0:59:11 SC: Because he did have this view of the world, and the fluctuations, the swerve, was an important part of it. But also the uncompromising look at the implications of this, such as our species will end and also our individual lives will end, we will not go to the afterlife and we'll be happy forever.

0:59:30 SG: No, no afterlife... No afterlife, because the soul is made up out of atoms, just as the body is made up out of atoms. This is the... Lucretius thought the soul was made up out of particularly fine atoms, but that's a reasonably good hypothesis, the way we think our consciousness is made up out of very in a way very elusive neural transmissions. And once we're gone, though, it'll all go, the way everything goes, so that the idea that there's gonna be... Now, Lucretius thought this was good news because you didn't have to worry that you were gonna be pushing a rock up a hill [chuckle] in Hades and that would then roll down as soon as you get it up to the top of the hill. So he thought that the point about this is that you didn't have to be afraid of death anymore, that the fear of death or the fear of, FMO, as it's sometimes called, Fear of Missing Out. You'll miss your children, and so were [1:00:32] ____ that this was absurd. You're not gonna miss anything because you won't be, it'll all be over.

1:00:40 SC: And he represented this as part of his therapy, 'cause the work... This work of philosophy was meant as a kind of therapy to make you feel freed from the anxieties and obsessions that most human beings spent their lives in the grip of. But it wasn't found to be all that effective as a therapy. [chuckle] And it hasn't been, just as in our whole world, what science has offered us has been at the very least a mixed message therapeutically; of course, we managed to extend our life spans extraordinarily as a result of science, but the deep questions, the anxieties and we only have to look around in our political world to understand that the anxieties and obsessions that have driven people for thousands of years are present, live and kicking now.

1:01:43 SC: Absolutely.

1:01:43 SG: So already when Lucretius... When Cicero, for example, contemplated this message from Lucretian Epicureanism that when you're dead, you're dead, nothing will continue afterwards, you're not gonna have an after-life. Cicero says in fact that's the good news.

[laughter]

1:02:04 SC: And that is vividly contemporary, right. We're still having this debate right now.

1:02:08 SG: Absolutely.

1:02:09 SC: I absolutely have this debate with people. And you have a thesis that when the poem was rediscovered it had a profound effect on European intellectual thought.

1:02:20 SG: Eventually. I don't claim that it was a overnight sensation. On the contrary, it seemed, not even so much impious, though eventually, it seemed impious, but at first just, interesting, interesting for grammar, interesting for its metaphors, interesting for its imagery, and so on and so on, but in so far as it was a theory, it seemed crazy, crazy cosmological theory.

1:02:52 SC: This is was rediscovered 15th century?

1:02:54 SG: It was discovered, yes, in the early 15th century. So it seemed in a world that believed precisely that we were the favored creatures of a providential God, this idea that we were the result of a set of random mutations seemed mad, and that the aspects of the theory still seem actually hard to get hold of, even though science, contemporary science thinks that more or less they're true. Take the idea of, Lucretius says that your eyes didn't come into being in order to enable you to see, that they were just random mutations and then it turned out to be useful to be able to see 'cause you could also pick up the food that you needed. But the idea that something, it's still very hard to grasp. I find it hard to grasp. The idea that your eyes in all of their unbelievable complexity emerged in an evolutionary way without purpose, as it were, without clear direction, that seems impossible.

1:04:02 SC: Yeah, it was exactly what William Paley, used for his clockmaker analogy when he said that, we had to be designed, right?

1:04:08 SG: Yes, exactly.

1:04:08 SC: And ironically, the eye seems to be one of the easiest things for evolution to discover. It's been evolved in different species over and over again, throughout history, so... Well, good. What happens when we die, whether it's good to know things, how tyrants come to be. I think there's no question that these are all questions that have not gone away. I think we have a lot to think about in the modern world.

1:04:29 SG: Yes, it's true.

1:04:30 SC: Alright, Stephen Greenblatt, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

1:04:32 SG: Thank you, Sean.

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