A ``distant'' (as opposed to ``close'') reading of the Hebrew Bible via a largely unfocused use of gender and other modern and postmodern analytical categories. Eilberg-Schwartz (The Savage in Judaism, not reviewed) speculates on the sociopsychological, theological, and literary implications for male monotheists of the Bible's apparently male God. Despite its provocative title, God's Phallus really is about the absence—which the author sometimes refers to as the ``veiling''—of male genitalia and other physiological characteristics in the biblical imagery of God. Eilberg-Schwartz nevertheless repeatedly overinterprets biblical and postbiblical texts so as to read into them a ``homoeroticism that was always latent in Israelite theology.'' He does so using a bouillabaisse of Freudian, Lacanian, feminist, gay, and other critical perspectives. He postulates a homosexual tension between God and men, but what the meaning is of this tension being ``latent'' (in the Freudian sense) the author never makes clear, often allowing his considerable gift for interpretive pyrotechnics to overwhelm a more considered approach to how the first monotheists actually thought about God and their religious texts. In addition, he focuses almost exclusively on the psychosexual aspects of the divine-human male relationship, too rarely acknowledging the larger emotional and religious context that includes feelings of awe, fear, dependence, and estrangement. Eilberg-Schwartz can be dismayingly literalist, seeing the ancient rabbis' and others' allegories on, and often fanciful interpretations of, biblical texts as having practical implications for male Jews when in fact they were often speculative explorations. Despite a few fine passages, e.g., a comparison of how genital injuries may have affected the lives of Jacob and Moses, Eilberg-Schwartz has produced an exasperating work. This is an object lesson in what can happen when a versatile scholar draws on the tools of critical theory too much and reflects on the actual texts—and their authors' premodern contexts—too little.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8070-1224-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
Like The Book of J, on which Rosenberg collaborated with Harold Bloom, this is a highly speculative theory about a biblical author—here, of the novella-like section on King David in 2 Samuel—plus a very free adaptation of that biblical narrative. Poet and critic Rosenberg hypothesizes that the author of the Davidic narrative was ``S,'' a member of the royal court during the end of the tenth century b.c., a ``companion'' of J's and also an ``aboriginal'' who was revising the poems and narrative of an earlier Canaanite culture. The problem is that Rosenberg never specifies what the aboriginal culture consisted of or how it interacted with the civilizations that migrated to Canaan. For that matter, he provides not a shred of evidence for his thesis from Hebrew or other ancient Middle Eastern texts. Further, his perspective on David's character and relationships is highly romanticized, utterly distorting the text, as in the claim that ``David and Bathsheva demonstrate an intimacy based on equality.'' Really? The biblical narrative plainly states that David lusts after Bathsheva, has her brought by his men to his court, and arranges for her husband to be killed so that he may possess her. As for Rosenberg's poetic and prose adaptations, they too often are clumsy, as in his rendering of 2 Samuel 13:2: ``Amnon is sick with a mess of feelings for his sister Tamar—she is a virgin besides- -and it is a forbidding task to imagine what to do with her.'' Finally, there is a long, tiresome, and often esoteric appendix, mainly written by Rhonda Rosenberg (the author's wife), condemning such biblical scholars as Richard Friedman and Robert Alter. Both Rosenbergs are so focused on pseudo-scholarly speculation, creative flights of fancy, and polemics, that for pages on end they almost entirely lose contact with the beguiling, ever-contemporary narrative that the author of the David story, whoever he was, offers.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-517-70800-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
For Ligotti fans and fellow pessimists, here’s affirmation that “their only respite is in the balm of bleakness.”
A writer of supernatural horror stories illuminates the darkest horror of all in this nonfiction affirmation of negativity.
An award-winning cult favorite, Ligotti (The Spectral Link, 2014, etc.) doesn’t write horror simply to scare readers. On the basis of this unsettling tract—which draws from philosophy, metaphysics, neuroscience, literature, and literary criticism—his horror fiction proceeds from a deep belief that existence itself is a horror show and that procreation is at best an illusion and at worst a crime against humanity. The author’s viewpoint is uncompromisingly bleak; he finds seemingly kindred spirits such as Nietzsche to be a little too sunny. “Existence,” writes Ligotti, “is a condition with no redeeming qualities.” He understands that most philosophers and readers will disagree with him and that his position that life has no meaning is impossible to prove, just as anyone claiming to have discovered the meaning of life is suspect. Yet he sticks to his guns throughout. Life is suffering, and “human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist.” And the sooner human beings cease to exist, the better. But why does he write this, and what is the “conspiracy” of the title? It all stems from the self-knowledge that we do our best not to acknowledge: the fact that we alone of all living creatures know that we are going to die. As with Eve’s apple or the snake in the Garden of Eden, “human existence [is] a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness—parent of all horrors.” In other words, we act as if we lack “the knowledge of a race of beings that is only passing through this shoddy cosmos.” Originally published in 2010, this reissue includes a new preface.
For Ligotti fans and fellow pessimists, here’s affirmation that “their only respite is in the balm of bleakness.”Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-313314-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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