R. Crumb's "Genesis"
by Robert Roper
JANUARY 11, 2010 TAGS:
The idea of Robert Crumb, the great underground comics artist, illustrating the Book of Genesis suggests a sublime mismatch – will God come out looking like Mr. Natural? Will the Biblical Jacob have the character of Fritz the Cat? What’s going on here, anyway? Is nothing sacred?
What’s going on is that a world-class talent, Crumb, has revealed the first book of the Bible as it is – transformed not at all, distorted not at all, only brought forth, in its real character. Genesis is about God the Father intervening in the affairs of men – creating men and women, for starters, but above all injecting a divine energy into earthly affairs. Crumb is an artist of the earthy, the sexual, the transgressive, the obsessive. The naked, the desperate, the ravenous – the human. He doesn’t do spiritual and sublime, or hasn’t heretofore. Maybe this is why he turned to the Book of Genesis.
Consider this depiction of the fire and brimstone that the Lord rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis:19):
These are human beings in a whole lot of trouble. They’re trampling each other to death. Someone’s backside is on fire, and someone else’s breast is exposed. They’re fleshy, they’re hairy, they’re screaming. Crumb has found a lot of death in Genesis, in this story and in several others. It’s always been there, but when embodied only in letters on a printed page the death can seem abstract – metaphorical. Maybe the authors of Genesis were thinking of spiritual death, this line of argument goes, of the agony of being cut off from God’s mercy. That could be what they were talking about.
No, Crumb replies, no, real death. That’s what they meant, beyond a doubt. The death that we all fear in our bones, in the bones of these bodies we have, bodies that will some day be no more. Look at the illustration again. It’s funny, it’s even sexy – change the expressions on the faces and we could be looking at a Crumbian orgy. But no, this is frightening, it’s awful. These people are losing their minds; they’re meeting their maker, and their maker is all-powerful and enraged.
This is the sexiest Book of Genesis yet drawn by man or woman. Crumb, with his rich carnality, reveals another central, maybe the central, theme of the first book of the Bible. That theme is men getting women pregnant, and alternately, women getting men to get them pregnant. Reproduction, in other words. When read only as words on a page, the Book of Genesis has a lot of begats in it, a lot of lineage-establishing, and women seduce men and men seduce and take women, and some daughters even get their father drunk and have sex with him, hoping thereby to conceive. It’s all crazy and compulsive and over the line, just the way sex is sometimes, but there’s a fundamental point to it, and that point is reproduction.
The Hebrews, as Crumb draws them, are people in sandals and shawls living in a harsh desert, scrabbling to raise a goat or two. They are this close to starvation much of the time, not to mention annihilation by enemies with swords and spears and chariots. Death threatens them, the real death of the body. And if you die before you reproduce, then you face not only death but also oblivion – you and your seed are gone, gone forever. You are as the dust, or even less than the dust.
The antidote to that outcome is reproduction, Crumb tells us. Sturdy hormonal sexual reproduction. The scenes of slaughter and extinction and vengeful murder in the Book of Genesis are balanced by the fun, the glamour, the sheer exquisite madcap of human sex – desire-driven sex that produces offspring. To look at the Biblical patriarchs mating with the Biblical matriarchs is, in Crumb’s rendering, to see people rolling around in joy. They are doing the wild thing, and they can’t stop smiling. Consider, for instance, this view of Isaac and his beloved Rebekah:
Another view of Isaac and Rebekah:
And Tamar, the daughter-in-law of Judah, son of Jacob, scheming to seduce her father-in-law after her husband dies:
And the result of that scheming:
Life is about mortality: This is the substance of the Book of Genesis, and in the unequal struggle against mortality we have two allies. One is God the Father, who has arranged things so that this vale of tears is not the whole story, and who puts his mighty finger on the scale for those he favors. The second is our own reproductive nature. God the Father promises Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that their lineage will become vast, that their offspring shall be beyond counting. “Look up to the heavens,” he says in Genesis:15, “and count the stars, if you can count them. So shall be your seed.” Do what comes naturally, in other words, and immortality will be yours – not real immortality, because nothing of this world escapes the final gleaning, but as close as man or woman might wish to come.
Harold Bloom, in an influential book published in 1998, wrote of Shakespeare as the inventor of the human. But Genesis, in Crumb’s vivid depictions, describes the original invention of our common nature, with its divine and chthonic elements, its ecstasies and terrors. On the faces of the evil as well as the good we read an astonishingly complete catalogue of the passions and states of being of the human animal, and the passage from mother’s womb to grave has rarely made so much sense, even if it is only comic sense. Yes, these are only comics, of course – they can’t be getting at anything deep, can they? Still, they do do something new, moving, and refreshing; somehow they give us the whole $&**$!!#@ story.
What’s going on is that a world-class talent, Crumb, has revealed the first book of the Bible as it is – transformed not at all, distorted not at all, only brought forth, in its real character. Genesis is about God the Father intervening in the affairs of men – creating men and women, for starters, but above all injecting a divine energy into earthly affairs. Crumb is an artist of the earthy, the sexual, the transgressive, the obsessive. The naked, the desperate, the ravenous – the human. He doesn’t do spiritual and sublime, or hasn’t heretofore. Maybe this is why he turned to the Book of Genesis.
Consider this depiction of the fire and brimstone that the Lord rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis:19):
These are human beings in a whole lot of trouble. They’re trampling each other to death. Someone’s backside is on fire, and someone else’s breast is exposed. They’re fleshy, they’re hairy, they’re screaming. Crumb has found a lot of death in Genesis, in this story and in several others. It’s always been there, but when embodied only in letters on a printed page the death can seem abstract – metaphorical. Maybe the authors of Genesis were thinking of spiritual death, this line of argument goes, of the agony of being cut off from God’s mercy. That could be what they were talking about.
No, Crumb replies, no, real death. That’s what they meant, beyond a doubt. The death that we all fear in our bones, in the bones of these bodies we have, bodies that will some day be no more. Look at the illustration again. It’s funny, it’s even sexy – change the expressions on the faces and we could be looking at a Crumbian orgy. But no, this is frightening, it’s awful. These people are losing their minds; they’re meeting their maker, and their maker is all-powerful and enraged.
This is the sexiest Book of Genesis yet drawn by man or woman. Crumb, with his rich carnality, reveals another central, maybe the central, theme of the first book of the Bible. That theme is men getting women pregnant, and alternately, women getting men to get them pregnant. Reproduction, in other words. When read only as words on a page, the Book of Genesis has a lot of begats in it, a lot of lineage-establishing, and women seduce men and men seduce and take women, and some daughters even get their father drunk and have sex with him, hoping thereby to conceive. It’s all crazy and compulsive and over the line, just the way sex is sometimes, but there’s a fundamental point to it, and that point is reproduction.
The Hebrews, as Crumb draws them, are people in sandals and shawls living in a harsh desert, scrabbling to raise a goat or two. They are this close to starvation much of the time, not to mention annihilation by enemies with swords and spears and chariots. Death threatens them, the real death of the body. And if you die before you reproduce, then you face not only death but also oblivion – you and your seed are gone, gone forever. You are as the dust, or even less than the dust.
The antidote to that outcome is reproduction, Crumb tells us. Sturdy hormonal sexual reproduction. The scenes of slaughter and extinction and vengeful murder in the Book of Genesis are balanced by the fun, the glamour, the sheer exquisite madcap of human sex – desire-driven sex that produces offspring. To look at the Biblical patriarchs mating with the Biblical matriarchs is, in Crumb’s rendering, to see people rolling around in joy. They are doing the wild thing, and they can’t stop smiling. Consider, for instance, this view of Isaac and his beloved Rebekah:
Another view of Isaac and Rebekah:
And Tamar, the daughter-in-law of Judah, son of Jacob, scheming to seduce her father-in-law after her husband dies:
And the result of that scheming:
Life is about mortality: This is the substance of the Book of Genesis, and in the unequal struggle against mortality we have two allies. One is God the Father, who has arranged things so that this vale of tears is not the whole story, and who puts his mighty finger on the scale for those he favors. The second is our own reproductive nature. God the Father promises Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that their lineage will become vast, that their offspring shall be beyond counting. “Look up to the heavens,” he says in Genesis:15, “and count the stars, if you can count them. So shall be your seed.” Do what comes naturally, in other words, and immortality will be yours – not real immortality, because nothing of this world escapes the final gleaning, but as close as man or woman might wish to come.
Harold Bloom, in an influential book published in 1998, wrote of Shakespeare as the inventor of the human. But Genesis, in Crumb’s vivid depictions, describes the original invention of our common nature, with its divine and chthonic elements, its ecstasies and terrors. On the faces of the evil as well as the good we read an astonishingly complete catalogue of the passions and states of being of the human animal, and the passage from mother’s womb to grave has rarely made so much sense, even if it is only comic sense. Yes, these are only comics, of course – they can’t be getting at anything deep, can they? Still, they do do something new, moving, and refreshing; somehow they give us the whole $&**$!!#@ story.
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