He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Fictions of God: English Renaissance Literature and the Invention of the Biblical Narrator, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Fictions of God at the University of Chicago Press website.foregrounding alternatives, Cowley emphasizes the “conjectural,” artificial element of his narration.Page 99 of my book, Fictions of God, comes from the chapter on the mid-seventeenth century English poet Abraham Cowley’s unfinished biblical epic, The Davideis; here, I am discussing Cowley’s descriptions of visual art and music within his own poem; through these descriptions, he meditates on his own fictive reimagining of scriptural material. Cowley is hyper- aware that as he reads through the dense thicket of critical debates in the commentaries on the biblical books of Samuel, he makes interpretive choices that reflect his own literary needs and interests; often, he invents his own, fictional material. By representing art-making in the Israelites’ world (tapestries depicting earlier scriptural events, music played at the New Year festival, and so on), he finds models for his own artistic practice.
As he foregrounds the arbitrary, possibly mistaken exegesis that undergirds his own narration, Cowley also lards the passage with evocations of music, such that his ekphrasis 0nally serves an oral, auditory art form associated more closely with narrative poetry. Where the Jewish sources on the New Year speak simply of sounding a horn, Cowley imagines an all-day music festival, with instrument played “From op’ening Morn till night shuts in the day” (II.228). Similarly, he writes that the Jews think that Abram, “whilst the Ram on Isaac’s fire did fry, / His Horn with joyful tunes stood sounding by” (II.238–39). Though the association between the ram’s horn, the binding of Isaac, and the New Year is indeed, as Cowley’s note says, “the common position of the Jews,” he adds the (comical) image of the relieved father instrumentally accompanying the barbecue. In the note, Cowley bristles at the Jews’ suggestion that consequently only “Rams Horns” may be played on the New Year; that would ruin the orchestral, entertaining performance he is imagining. This performance becomes the auditory motivation for the tapestry sequence, which concludes with the ram burning “while on his Horns the ransom’ed couple plaid, / And the glad Boy danc’d to the tunes he made” (II.328–29). The dancing boy evokes the dancing David, connecting this episode to the meta-poetic, musical performances that run throughout the Davideis. Cowley frames his ekphrasis by pointing up its fictional construction and amplifies a musical motif at the expense of the visual artistry.
The musical element is more salient because, besides naming their origins on a “Syrian loom” (a sly nod to his importation of a classical trope), Cowley does not describe the tapestries at all as visual art. They are instead excuses to tell biblical stories. Most strikingly, while the first nine images record speci0c moments, the tapestry depicting the binding of Abram is a visual impossibility: Can an image capture how, say, Isaac “sometimes walk’d before / And sometimes turn’d to talk” (II.30:–8), or Abram “mount[s] slowly,” then cries, lifts the knife, smiles as he hears the angel, and so on? Perhaps we are to imagine the tapestry as a graphic novel, but no effort is made to “story-board” the narrative into scenes. Rather, the ekphrasis functions as an impersonal device of narration, a repository not of images but of a told story. Comparing this scene to the Christiad’s ekphrastic scene discussed in my introduction, one notices how, unlike Vida (or, for that matter, Virgil), Cowley ignores the viewers, who are introduced and then disregarded. Because the physicality, visuality, and sense of scene disappear, the ekphrasis resembles one of Cowley’s other “digressions,” passages in which
Surprisingly, this page decently captures the book as a whole. Fictions of God is all about how early modern commentators and then imaginative writers saw in the Bible not an authoritative foundation of truth but a model for fictional invention. They came to understand scriptural stories as told by human, characterized narrators, each with a limited and specific perspective—and each of whom is thus potentially unreliable. Page 99 offers a tiny example of many of the book’s big arguments: that writers like Cowley encountered the Bible not as a singular, clear text but as densely mediated, externally through scholarly and theological commentaries, and then internally because they understood apparently third-person, impersonal narration to reflect specific human perspectives. My book thus offers a prehistory of an idea readers today mostly take for granted (the distinction between authors and narrators), which, I show, emerged during and through the turbulent, early modern process of secularization. (The piece of the book not represented on page 99 is this broader, social and political context: state formation, disciplining religion, suppressing enthusiastic popular movements inspired by claims to direct divine revelation, producing new confessions and churches, and so on.) A coincidence also helps this page do representative work: it contains a sharp contrast between Cowley’s poem and an earlier biblical epic I discuss in my introduction (Vida’s Christiad), which exemplifies my argument that the seventeenth century witnesses a massive increase in narratological sophistication in poetry written using biblical themes. I even considered putting the material on page 99 in my introduction for that reason, but ultimately decided it was too technical to belong there.
--Marshal Zeringue
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