Roland Boer, Monash University

Abstract

Debates on the relation between culture and the Bible are locked into two restrictive models: either the Bible is a source for subsequent appropriations, or it is the goal that one must attain through the thicket of those appropriations. In order to trouble this two-way street, I explore the words and music of Nick Cave, focusing on the way he controls interpretation of his work and where that control breaks down. At this moment Cave provides an unwitting insight into another way to view the relation of the Bible and culture, one that operates in terms of “strategies of containment.”

Introduction

[1] How might we understand the relationship between the Bible and culture? The question is of course not new, but I want to come at it from a particular angle–the tension between seeing the Bible as the source from which its interpretations and appropriations follow, or taking it as the destination that must be attained through those subsequent appropriations. On the one hand, the Bible is the original text that influences a host of subsequent cultural products. Our task is then to interpret how it does influence those products. On the other hand, we cannot read the Bible without two or three millennia of interpretation and appropriation. It is always already read, and we can only access the text by wading through those interpretations first. If we look at the problem from the perspective of culture, cultural interpretations thereby become either the result of the Bible’s influence or the gateway through which we approach the Bible. I should point out here that by “culture” I mean in this paper the various appropriations–turned over, twisted and spat out again–of common readers, artists, poets, novelists and, of course, song writers like Nick Cave.

[2] This, then, is the problem this essay considers for a while. And it will do so in three stages: first the essay situates this problem within the context of method. At this level I explore a certain hunch concerning biblical interpretation. Secondly the essay considers the problem in light of some recent key positions on the Bible and culture, and finally it engages with the music of Nick Cave in order to explore the methodological question of the influence of the Bible on culture.

Hunch

[3] Firstly, then, let me lay out a tentative proposal concerning biblical interpretation within which we might reconsider the question of the Bible and culture. It seems to me that biblical interpretation involves three moments or levels: text, afterlives and metacommentary. The level of text involves all of the textual, literary, historical, social scientific, archaeological, theoretical and whatever other questions we have become accustomed to throw at this ancient text. These questions are of course myriad, but the underlying drive has been and remains the need to understand an ancient text in its various contexts. There is nothing particularly outrageous by suggesting that this remains the dominant understanding of biblical studies. While I would defend the need for this focus on the text–after all, I have spent a good deal of time acquiring and exercising the linguistic and methodological skills required to work with the text in such a way–I also find it a peculiarly truncated understanding of biblical studies. Questions such as whether King David actually lived, whether Paul was gay, the literary structure of the book of Ruth or locating the subversive voice of the books of Samuel are all vitally important, but remain somewhat limited. You may have noted that I have in fact lumped together what is often taken to be the major divide in biblical studies, between what very roughly may be called historical critical and literary approaches. It seems to me that this is a false distinction and that many efforts to understand, say, the text of Genesis 1-3 from historical, archaeological, social-scientific or literary perspectives are largely involved in the same task.

[4] But let us now shift gear and move to another level entirely–what we might call, following Walter Benjamin, the “afterlives” of the biblical texts.[1] Here it is useful to divide the level of afterlives and then divide again. The first division: culture as the result of the Bible or as gateway to it. And the second: Wirkungsgeschichte, impact or effect history, and Rezeptionsgeschichte, or reception history. The second is in fact a refinement of the notion of result, in which cultural appropriations derive from the Bible as a source. However, the German distinction–one that derives from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Method of 1960[2]–between Wirkungsgeschichte and Rezeptionsgeschichte adds some welcome sophistication to the idea of source. Rezeptionsgeschichte, then, marks the active task of interpreting, appropriating and applying a biblical text, whether in scholarly work, religious observance and sermons, conscious cultural re-readings in literature or film or art and so on. By contrast, Wirkungsgeschichte designates a more passive and unwitting effect of the text on society and culture, especially in the way the Bible shapes the law, art, politics, social values, prejudices and preconceptions.[3] Often the two are blended in discussions of the Bible’s influence,[4] but it is a useful working distinction. Yet, both Rezeptionsgeschichte and Wirkungsgeschichte still assume that the text is in some way original, the pad from which both trajectories launch themselves forth.

[5] Let me now return to the first division–culture as result of or gateway to the Bible. These two base terms actually name a problem, one that is of course the central problem of this paper. But now we see that it is part of a larger one concerning the nature of biblical studies. And at this level, we seem to be locked into a forward-backward schema. Either the text influences all that follows it, interpreted by a host of subsequent readers who bring the text to life once again, or the Bible can be approached only through those interpretations. The text is always already read, and we must read it through the thicket of appropriations. We are still caught on a two-way street; either we move forward from the text to all the secondary interpretations, or we move backwards to the text through those and many other re-readings. Either the Bible or culture is prior. Part of my agenda will be to question this two-way street of result or gateway. I want to ask whether we can break out of the straightjacket of this either-or situation, whether there is some other way of accounting for the many cultural, political, legal and social resonances of the Bible.

[6] By now we have two levels of interpretation, what I have called text and afterlives. But before we move to the last and in many respects widest level, let me stress that both text and afterlives together constitute the task of biblical interpretation. We ignore one or the other at our peril, leaving ourselves with a poor shadow of what biblical criticism might be. The same point applies even more insistently to the third level of my proposed method–metacommentary, a term that comes from Fredric Jameson.[5] It is, if you like, commentary on commentary, or more specifically commentary on the methods of biblical criticism. Let me come at this level by means of a story with which we are no doubt familiar: I happen upon a method, say deconstruction or Marxism, or some archaeological or anthropological discovery, that gives me an insight into a particular text. And so I come to that text, perhaps even a central one like Genesis 1-3, and feel that I have the methodological key that unlocks the secret of that text. “Eureka!” I cry and leap out of the bath and run down the street, excited by my discovery. Implicitly or explicitly, I assume that my method is better than all the others that have been used in the millennia of interpreting this text. So I can quietly dispose of them in some dark alley, occasionally firing off a polemical sentence or two at those now discredited methods. And I can get on with my task of exploiting my new method in order to interpret the text, for my method is, after all, far better than all the other methods that have gone before.

[7] In many respects this is how biblical studies currently appears to many of us, a methodological battlefield in which much energy is devoted to defending one method and attacking others. This is where metacommentary comes into its own, as Fredric Jameson reminds us, for it enables us to take a step back and survey the methodological market-place. And if we do this, we may begin to see what is at stake with all these methods. Each of them will turn out to be local and limited strategies, arising from particular social and economic situations and answering distinct cultural questions. They will have clear benefits that we would do well to consider, but they will also be marked by the limits of their situations. Such recognition is a crucial step to incorporating such methods within our own task of interpretation.

[8] As well as widening biblical criticism to include both text and afterlives, I would suggest that any biblical interpretation worth its salt requires the occasional moment of metacommentary, a way of accounting for the other methods that have been used in the history of interpretation. But each act of interpretation does not necessarily have to incorporate all three levels at once. One may come at these distinct moments from a variety of angles: one may be more concerned with the text (as, for instance, a study of the political economy of Ancient Israel that is slowly rising to the surface of my mind); or with one or another aspect of “afterlives” (this essay is an example); or, and this is one of my favourites, via a methodological tension concerning a text that then brings me to a dual reflection on method and text.

Result, Gateway and Sundry Variations

[9] In light of this broader context of method, let me focus now on the second level–where result and gateway battle it out for supremacy. What I want to do here quite simply is consider three important recent efforts to deal with the problem of the Bible and culture. The first is Richard Walsh’s recent book, Reading the Gospels in the Dark: Portrayals of Jesus in Film.[6] Walsh takes a series of Jesus films, from The Greatest Story Ever Told to The Passion of the Christ, and interprets them as crucial tools in the construction of a distinctly American religious culture. He calls this a “Protestant metanarrative,” a narrative that begins with God’s election of the chosen people from the beginning of the world to their salvific role at its end. Walsh traces the permutations in this narrative from the depiction of America as the righteous empire of the early Jesus films, through the failed efforts to present a human Jesus, to a current tension between two positions. One is apocalyptic: Jesus will appear out of nowhere and fix everything up. And the other is gnostic: what Jesus was really concerned with was a private, otherworldly faith that is beyond this world. What is attractive about Walsh’s work is that he emphasises how so often in the West, “film” actually means Hollywood, as though it were the only film industry on the globe. These films, he argues, are more about American self-identity than anything else. Recently, he has written an article on Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ and one of his main arguments is that such a film was so popular so recently because it actually reflects, prepares and desensitises audiences in the United States for a renewed bout of imperial expansion and violence.[7]

[10] Walsh’s book is one of the most eloquent examples of “result.” More specifically, the Bible is reinscribed through film: not only does the Bible influence the films by being interpreted and appropriated, but it also continues to influence societies through being reinscribed in those films. If Walsh is concerned with the influence of the Bible as re-inscription in film, then Yvonne Sherwood persuasively espouses a position of gateway.[8] Focusing on the book of Jonah, she follows the myriad ways the story has been reread, appropriated, overturned and alluded to since the story was first told and written down. Not interested in the history “behind” the text (the linguistic, cultural, or economic factors that may have led to its production), nor in traditional commentary, Sherwood traces how this “mongrel text”[9] continually reproduces itself, within and outside of the Bible, in a wide variety of written, graphic and even televised texts.

[11] Sherwood’s greatest debts are to deconstruction, so she argues that even though the appropriation of a text comes later than the text, yet it “overwhelms, eclipses, and always precedes the biblical ‘original’.”[10] In the end, she says, we cannot interpret a text like the Bible without all these interpretations influencing and determining how we read. While this is not a new point in itself, what Sherwood does with it is intriguing. “Mainstream” readings, she argues, have seen Jonah either as a Christ figure or as the stereotypical Jew, but in either case these anti-Semitic readings seek to appropriate the Old Testament into the New. The alternative interpretations, the “Backwaters and Underbellies,” appear on the margins. Mostly Jewish and popular readings, they are more playful and diverse, outside the control of religious orthodoxy. I must confess to preferring these readings, as does Sherwood, although, as she points out, both mainstream and peripheral interpretations influence one another in a perpetual play. But what Sherwood is really after with her book is a new form of commentary (the genre that began, after all, with biblical criticism). She wants a postmodern commentary that, instead of controlling and domesticating the text as traditional commentaries do, liberates the text from all canonical and other orthodox constraints, producing a “mutable canon.”[11]

[12] Result as reinscription or the precedence of the gateway–are we doomed to play the two off against each other? Before seeing how Nick Cave might help us here, there is another approach that recognises the impasse and attempts something of a resolution–juxtaposition. Although we find it in some postcolonial criticism (Musa Dube) and in the work of George Aichele on popular culture, let me focus on Erin Runions’ recent book How Hysterical.[12] Less interested in the films that actually represent biblical themes, she prefers those with no apparent biblical content or contact. Biblical texts and cultural products are thrown together for mutual illumination, revealing aspects of each that only show up in light of the other. In particular, Runions searches for the means of resistance to dominant ideologies in both film and biblical texts. By putting a series of films together with biblical texts, she finds that they bring out the truth of each other on this double theme–the mechanisms of domination and violence that are used against people in terms of race, class, gender and sexuality and the ways both films and biblical texts show us how “we” might effectively resist such domination. Runions prefers films out of the “mainstream,” such as Three Kings, a parody of the American involvement in the First Gulf War (remember that one?) and Paris is Burning, a docudrama about drag queens in New York. Since Runions is after the patterns of domination and the possibilities of resistance, she reads these films over against biblical stories such as the conflict between Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, or the rebellion of Korah in Numbers 16.  For Runions, we can see in these stories the modes of domination, particularly in terms of punishment for rebellious acts, but also resistance: if we focus on alternative moments, side with the victims and see in their resistance a glimpse of hope then we begin to see another way of being and living.

[13] Even though I also have worked with such a mode of juxtaposition at various times, it seems to me less a solution than the recognition of a problem. Although it steps somewhat outside the tension between result and gateway, it is more a negation of the problem–neither result nor gateway–than an effort to account for it and move through it.

Nick Cave

[14] And that is precisely what my fellow Australian may well help us to do. Cave’s perpetual and troublesome engagement with the Bible is of course well known. But my concern with Nick Cave enters this whole discussion at the second level of interpretation where the tension I have been tracing manifests itself.

Autobiography

[15] Two elements of Cave’s work jump out at us–autobiography and the dominance of the word. Typically, biographical depictions of Cave’s life tend not to focus on the influence of the Bible,[13] while on the other hand his autobiographical output is somewhat Bible-obsessed. Of course, autobiography constitutes a singularly effective form of control. Whenever Cave writes, sings and speaks about the Bible, he is very keen to control how that engagement is interpreted. And the first sign of that control is the autobiographical narrative, the authorial “I” that appears time and again.

[16] Two examples: in the plural, multiple autobiographies that run over one another we find roughly the same narrative. Thus, in the widely copied introduction to the Gospel of Mark that was published by Canongate (the Authorized King James version no less), the online interview with Jim Pascoe (originally in Kulture Deluxe Magazine), and the BBC talk “The Flesh Made Word” for BBC radio on 3 July 1996, Cave quickly links his reading of the Bible to stages in his life.[14] Here we find the childhood choir in Wangaratta in country Australia, the insipid Christ peddled by the Church, the Church itself as a manipulator of the Bible for its own ends, reading the vengeful Old Testament in his twenties, the softer New Testament later, and the identification of Christ as a human being who struggles over questions of faith and life. What strikes me above all is the way he moves from the Old Testament’s appeal to an angry drug-crazed young man to Christ’s call in the New. If the Old Testament empowered him to “walk out on stage and open my mouth and let the curse of God roar through me,”[15] the New Testament brings out the dim, sad light of Christ knocking on the door of his heart as in the Holman Hunt painting. This Christ speaks to him with a “softer, sadder, more introspective”[16] voice, calling to him outside the damaging control of a church for which he has no time. This situation stands out even more sharply when we realize that Cave does not restrict his engagement with religion to the Bible. He writes and sings about faith, God, the church, the history of saints and so on. But in these cases there is minimal autobiography, for only when he turns to the Bible does autobiography come to the fore.

[17] The second example comes from the music. Let us follow Cave’s own lead for a moment and take his autobiographical word as it stands: he states that The Boatman’s Call (1997) is an unmediated–as far as that is possible–narrative of crucial events in his life when he was in a very important relationship that he knew would not last. It is the album in which Cave wears his heart on his sleeve. And here in the music we find the intersection of autobiography and bible. The album is replete with biblical allusions (the boatman calling from the lake, the hand that protects me, turning the other cheek), hymn-like songs such as “There is a Kingdom” or the more sardonic “Idiot Prayer,” and theological paradoxes, such as that of faith, or the Pauline tension between sin and the desire to do good, or Cave calling on the interventionist God in whom he does not believe in to do precisely that, intervene. Like John Donne, the Bible evokes Cave’s inner, especially his sexual, life like no other.

[18] Thus in “Brompton Oratory” we find the lines, “The reading is from Luke 24 /Where Christ returns to his loved ones.” Cave apparently is attending a Pentecost communion, sips the communion wine while smelling the woman on his hands, and it is not clear whether the invocation of the beauty impossible to define, believe or endure refers to the woman in question or God. Indeed, neither God nor the devil can have the effect that she has had on him–to bring him to his knees. Yet what makes me sit up and notice is a little slip, an elision between Cave himself and Christ: exhausted by his lover’s absence, he would like to return to her, just like Jesus.

[19] Other biblical passages follow the same line. Thus, “He who seeks finds and who knocks will be let in,” spoken by the “man who spoke wonders though I've never met him,” becomes the intense bodily expectation of a lover in the song “Are You The One That I've been Waiting For.” Finally, in the song “Far From Me” biblical words become Cave’s words to his lover:

For you dear, I was born
For you I was raised up
For you I’ve lived and for you I will die
For you I am dying now…
Did you ever
Care for me?
Were you ever
There for me?

[20] The first four lines come directly from the words directed at the child at baptism– “for you, little child, he was born,” etc.; the second four are a gloss on the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:44. By now you may be alert to what is going on. Not only does Cave’s life become one with the biblical texts, but there is also a far more interesting substitution taking place: in the first four lines I quoted Cave simply substitutes “I” for “He” (Christ), and in the second lot of four lines the “me” becomes Cave himself in place of Christ.

[21] Two angles come together here–one from Cave’s other texts and one from his songs. The first is the clear connection that Cave makes between the Bible and his autobiography. The second, however, is more intriguing: when his songs do invoke the Bible, they do so not merely in an autobiographical fashion, but also with a christological focus. Bible, autobiography and christology come together in a potent mix.

[22] Now, we might attribute this to the well-known line from the song “Nobody’s Baby Now”–“I’ve searched the holy books, I tried to unravel the mystery of Jesus Christ, the saviour”–but this is a rather soft option. The BBC talk from 1996 is far more revealing. In this talk the underlying theme is no less a comparison between Cave’s own relationship with his father and that between Christ and his Father, the God of the Hebrew Bible. And in the same way that Jesus came “to set right the misguided notions of his Father,”[17] so also Cave sees himself realising the thwarted literary and creative energies of his own father. Just as God evolved in Jesus the son, so also Cave’s father evolves in him, for “like Jesus, there is the blood of my father in me … Like Christ, I too come in the name of my father, to keep God alive.”[18] With statements like these, as well as the claim that God speaks through him, music critics began to worry about Cave’s mental and spiritual health–perhaps all that heroin and speed was finally catching up with him.

[23] I suspect that Cave’s mental and spiritual health is a good deal better than many of ours, so there are no worries on that score. However, I do have some misgivings about such a christological focus. Not only does it provide Cave with an authorial screen, granting him significant authority, but it also lets the full logic of christology come forth. In short, only through the logic of the God-human, that is Christ, does it become possible to raise another human being to divine status. In other words, precisely because God becomes a human being in Christ (if we push the divinity far enough we end up with the very human Christ and vice versa), can a human being become God. Statements like “In Christ the spiritual blue-print was set so that we ourselves could become God-like”[19] take on a rather different sense in this Christological light.

The “Word” of Cave

[24] Thus far we have a complex and comprehensive effort to control interpretation–a songwriter who invokes the Bible only in an autobiographical, even christological mode. I did, however, signal a second dimension to such control, namely the word itself. That there is now a trail of Christological associations following behind any reference to the “word” should hardly come as a surprise.

[25] It is not just that so many of us trained to interpret written texts gravitate to lyrics–and I include myself in that “us”–but that Cave himself plays up the role of his words. Not content with writing lyrics for songs, he tries his hand regularly at poetry, has written a novel, and one doesn’t need to look far to find all of this available in a variety of media. The lyrics were sent to me via the internet, but you can also find them, along with poetry, some short plays, the text of radio talks, facsimiles of Cave’s own scribblings from his notebooks, and so on in the double volume King Ink.[20]

[26] Yet Cave is above all a songwriter, and–to state the obvious–these songs are performed and sung with his band, The Bad Seeds. But what happens when we listen to what is now a substantial opus? Most of the time we can understand the lyrics rather clearly. In other words, when it comes to the mixing room, the lyrics are mixed way up. The concerts are of the same ilk: Cave’s microphone is always placed and mixed so that the lyrics are as clear as possible. And Cave tends to sing them relatively slowly and clearly, just in case we may be a little slow or hard of hearing. But what we find if we listen closely is that most of the biblical references in the songs are often no more than allusions, passing references before Cave moves onto another image. The songs I considered above from The Boatman’s Call are in this category: there is no sustained contact with the Bible there. But what happens when we look for that contact, for songs that engage more extensively with the Bible, perhaps even exegete the odd text or two? There are a couple of songs that tie themselves in more closely to biblical texts, such as “The Good Son” that draws on and plays with both Cain and Abel (Genesis 4) and the Prodigal Son (Matthew 21 and Luke 15), and the flood from Genesis 6-9 in “Tupelo.” Here the lyrics are relatively clear, but even in “Tupelo” the lyrics take on the eerie feel of the novel Cave was writing at the time, And The Ass Saw The Angel.[21]

[27] By far the greatest concentration of songs that work closely with the Bible comes from the album Tender Prey (1988). But there is something very curious about this album: most of the lyrics are mixed down, so much so that it is often difficult to decipher what Cave is in fact singing. Let me focus on two songs–“Mercy Seat” and “City of Refuge.”

[28] “The Mercy Seat” still shows all the signs of a Christological autobiography, while in “City of Refuge” all of this slips away with the lyrics into the background. But even “The Mercy Seat” shows up the tension within itself, between the dominance of the “word” and its disappearance. The chorus on the one hand is quite clear, largely due to a repetition in which music and words mesh to drive the same message through time and again, but on the other the two verses are not at all clear for they are muttered sotto voce. But let us see what we can understand:

And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I’m yearning
To be done with all this measuring of truth.
An eye for an eye
A tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
And I’m not afraid to die.

[29] There are fifteen repetitions of this chorus over a track that lasts seven and a quarter minutes, albeit with variations as the electric chair heats up and cooks its victim–his head and then the seat burns, glows, smokes, melts, while his blood boils in successive versions of the chorus until we return to the version I have quoted above. And of course the biblical references are there before us, the one from the high point of the Yom Kippur ritual when the blood of the bull is sprinkled over the mercy seat while incense wafts over it in Leviticus 16:11-19 (overlaid with the holocaust in Leviticus 1), and the other from the law of blood guilt, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

[30] But if we want a closer engagement with the Bible, then it comes in the only other

words of the song that are legible:

I hear stories from the chamber
How Christ was born into a manger
And like some ragged stranger
Died upon the cross
And might I say it seems so fitting in its way
He was a carpenter by trade
Or at least that’s what I’m told…
In Heaven His throne is made of gold
The ark of his Testament is stowed
A throne from which I’m told
All history does unfold.
Down here it’s made of wood and wire
And my body is on fire
And God is never far away.

[31] Here the mercy seat, or ark of the covenant (Lev. 16:13), Christ’s manger and cross, his throne in heaven, and the electric chair all merge into one. But two items stand out: these verses are sung with exactly the same melody and musical sequence of the chorus  quoted earlier. Are they verses or chorus? They are sung with the melody of the chorus but their content is not at all that of the chorus. Above all, they can be clearly understood. Secondly, it is precisely when the lyrics are clear–here assisted by the music–that the references remain distinctly christological. Word and “Word,” if I may put it that way, remain tightly bound together.

[32] Everything comes apart, however, with “City of Refuge.” If “The Mercy Seat” holds its own against the tension that interests me, then “City of Refuge” brings it to the fore with a vengeance. On the first hearing or two, my impression was that the song was merely one long repetition of the refrain “You better run, You better run, You better run to the City of Refuge” (I have lost count of how many times it recurs). On repeated listening, I did detect a few verses, but the only way to make sense of them is … yes, to look at the lyrics. Like “The Mercy Seat,” “City of Refuge” is a close engagement with the Bible that warms the heart of a biblical critic like me. The key text is Numbers 35 where the legislation for the cities of refuge is laid out at some length: “When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall select cities to be cities of refuge for you, that the manslayer who kills any person without intent may flee there” (Num. 35:10-11). Various situations in which one might involuntarily cause death follow. The cities’ role is to short-circuit the bloodguilt–the need to avenge a death with another death. But echoes of the cities of refuge run through Exodus 21:12-13, Joshua 20 and 1 Kings 1:50-53; 2:28-31.

[33] As far as the song itself is concerned, the incessant repetition of “You better run” evokes the urgency of flight. A mournful mouth organ begins the song, and is then joined by an acoustic guitar when the first “You better run” comes through in a slow and soft voice. A crescendo of flight builds with bass, drums and chunky rhythm guitar joined by multiple desperate voices as the flight gains momentum. One can feel the massing chase behind the refugee, and at this point he or she may as well be a slave, an ancient Israelite fleeing blood guilt or indeed a refugee seeking safe harbour from a war-ravaged Middle East that suffers under the weight of Western imperialist forces out to secure dwindling oil supplies. Apart from the incessant chorus, the illegible verses evoke apocalyptic scenes of standing “before your maker” stained with the blood of crime and darkness, or facing the final “days of madness” when even graves will no longer be places of rest. But I have slipped into working with the “words” and neglected the question as to why these words are mixed down to illegibility. The overwhelming effect is the absence of lyrics: they are negated both by unceasing repetition and by sliding into the background of the music mix.

[34] But note what happens: when the words disappear, so do the christological references and autobiography. While we might attribute one or the other absence to the particular instance of the song, the loss of all three at once is rather spectacular, especially in light of the way they mesh so closely in much of Cave’s material.

Conclusion

[35] So what are we to make of this chink in Nick Cave's formidable armour? And what does this have to say about the whole tension between culture as the result of or gateway to the Bible? Cave overwhelms us with a potent mix of word, autobiography and christology, and it takes some time to find the break, the gradual unravelling that I have traced in Tender Prey. I have made it quite clear that I am less than comfortable with the authorial Cave, the Cave for whom the “Word” is central, who directs our interpretation via his christological autobiography.

[36] But rather than letting that discomfort determine my response, let me sit down with Nick Cave and discuss with him the implications of my analysis of his work for my tentative comments on method with which I began this essay. What might the results of that discussion be? To begin with, I would like to bring back the initial problem, namely that between culture as the result of or gateway to the Bible. How best might we describe Cave’s engagement with the Bible? I am not saying anything risky by pointing out that the overwhelming tendency is to see Cave’s work as in some way reliant on the Bible. That book is the source, the assumption goes, of much of his work. Do not the biographies emphasise his constant reading of the Bible, and does he not position it as one of his inspirations in his autobiographical narratives? All we need to do is sort out what he is doing with the text, how he interprets it – in other words, his work is an example of Rezeptionsgeschichte.

[37] This is precisely where the limits of such an approach begin to show up. Assuming he is making some active, conscious effort to interpret the Bible, then what kind of interpretation is it? It by no means falls in with any of the known canons of biblical interpretation, ranging from scholarly work in all its myriad ways through sermons to popular re-readings. He constantly alludes to biblical texts, but the way they enter his lyrics is much more of the nature of Wirkungsgeschichte: biblical language enters his musical creativity, almost unconsciously, in a mix with many other things. It is, if you like, part of the vast reservoir on which he draws when he writes. Even when he engages with a text more directly and draws back again to Rezeptionsgeschichte, as in “Mercy Seat” or “City of Refuge,” the connections run across other biblical texts, outside the Bible and back again. In the end, all we can come up with is that Cave is entirely idiosyncratic in his use of the Bible–in other words, an admission that we can’t quite place him.

[38] So let us shift the question and ask whether Cave’s work is in fact a gateway to the Bible. While this option might at first seem counter-intuitive, it is worth pointing out that many of those who listen to Cave’s music are not biblically literate. They encounter the Bible through the music and, above all, the lyrics. And I would hazard a guess that there are not too many of these fans who would dive for the Bible–if they had one–in order to track down his allusions and more extended engagements. In other words, the engagement with culture comes first and the Bible appears only in this context. But Cave too came to the Bible only after he became a musician–albeit back in the Birthday Party days. The Bible is by no means a source here, nor is his task as a musician the result of the Bible: rather, his experience as a musician, as an artist, is the gateway through which he approaches the Bible.

[39] And yet, this option comes up short too. For one thing, there is no need to go back to the Bible after encountering Cave’s music. I doubt many would, apart from the odd wayward biblical critic. Those who do recognise the biblical allusions or the more extended engagements tend to do so on the basis of some prior knowledge of the Bible. Such knowledge adds a resonance to the music, but it is by no means necessary. And it is far too simplistic to suggest that Cave’s own experience as a musician drove him into the arms of the Bible–there are more factors at work than this.

[40] The model, then, has come up short on both counts: understanding the Bible as the source of Cave’s music runs into problems, especially on the question of what he actually does with the Bible. Taking the Bible as the destination to which one might set out from that music is equally problematic, since it is hardly a necessary path to follow. It looks as though I may be stuck in a trap of my own making. This is where I would to invoke Hegel’s genius: rather than worry away at an unsolvable question, it is much better to move to another level and ask to what problem that question may be an answer. In other words, the problem is not solvable as such. It is actually the result (or answer) of a whole set of other problems. All we need is a little bit of lateral thinking. And in this case the real problem is not how to fit Cave’s music into the model of result-gateway, nor is it even the obvious limits of such an effort. Rather, the fact that there are limits, that there are whole realms of Cave’s engagement with the Bible excluded by that model, is the real problem.

[41] In order to make some sense of that problem, I would like to make use of an idea from Fredric Jameson, namely “strategy of containment.” Such a strategy is basically a comprehensive ideological effort at cohesiveness and control–hence containment. The catch is that such control relies on a bunch of items that must be excluded in order to maintain the impression of control and cohesion. For example, in the continual effort of capitalist societies to maintain the impression of social cohesion, any challenge to the dominant order must be labelled variously as criminal, mentally disturbed, eccentric and so on. To admit that it was actually organised opposition to social cohesion would be tantamount to admitting that there is no cohesion in the first place. As far as the interpretation of Nick Cave’s music is concerned, a strategy of containment gives a limited range of viable options for interpretation within which we can work, but it does so by blocking out other possibilities. Such a strategy sets parameters, opens up certain possibilities and closes down others.

[42] So let me see first how a strategy of containment works with Cave’s music and then how it operates in the impasse between result and gateway. As I argued above, Cave attempts to control interpretation of his engagement with the Bible by means of a potent mix of autobiography, the dominance of the (sung and written) word and christology. However, a chink shows up in this comprehensive control in those songs on Tender Prey where the lyrics by and large disappear behind the music. This break signals the limits of Cave’s own effort at control or containment. He gives the impression that everything that needs to be said about his work may be said within the confines of word, autobiography and christology. But at some point it will and does break down.

[43] Here comes the connection: in the same way that Cave’s effort at authorial control is a strategy of containment, so also is the methodological tension between result and gateway to the Bible. That is, these two options have their own limits, and these limits indicate the presence of a strategy of containment. Like Cave’s authorial voice, these two options attempt to control interpretation by giving the impression that they contain all possible options for interpretation. By indicating that we may either move from the text forwards, or from subsequent interpretations backwards, they give the impression that this is all we can do with the Bible. We can go one way or the other. All we have is a two-way street. But–to stay with the metaphor–this closes out the possibility of crossing the street, jay-walking, or moving in an unpredictable fashion.

[44] What those possibilities might be is the topic of another essay, but here I limit myself to a final comment concerning the second level of interpretation that I earlier named “afterlives.” Rather than limiting ourselves to taking the Bible as the source of cultural interpretations or as the destination we must attain through culture, it is much better to think of the category of afterlives itself in terms of strategies of containment. In other words, each appropriation of the Bible by culture, in whatever way it happens, is a strategy of containment in and of itself. Thus, each interpretation will provide some insights but it will do so only by excluding others. And this applies to whether we see culture as the result of the Bible, in terms of either Wirkungsgeschicte or Rezeptionsgeschichte, or as the gateway to the Bible.

Notes

[1] See Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings. Volume 1: 1912-1926 (edited by M. Bullock and M.W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996).

[2] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, vol. 1 of  Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: Mohr, 1990; original 1960).

[3] Many thanks to Christina Petterson for pointing this distinction out to me.

[4] And often confused, as with the new Blackwell Bible Commentaries series.

[5] Fredric Jameson, “Metacommentary,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, vol 1. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

[6] Richard Walsh, Reading the Gospels in the Dark: Portrayals of Jesus in Film (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003).

[7] Richard Walsh, "Wrestling with the Passion of the Christ: At the Movies with Roland Barthes and Mel Gibson," The Bible and Critical Theory 1,2 (2005).

[8] Yvonne Sherwood, A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[9] Sherwood, Jonah, 236.

[10] Sherwood, Jonah, 2.

[11] Sherwood, Jonah, 287.

[12] Erin Runions, How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film, Religion/Culture/Critique (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

[13] Robert Brokenmouth, Nick Cave: The Birthday Party and Other Epic Adventures (London: Omnibus, 1996), Maximilian Dax and Johannes Beck, The Life and Music of Nick Cave: An Illustrated Biography, trans. Ian Minock (Berlin: Die-Gestalten-Verlag, 1999); Ian Johnston, Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave (London: Abacus, 1996).

[14] Nick Cave, "The Flesh Made Word," in King Ink II (London: Black Spring, 1997), Nick Cave, "An Introduction to the Gospel According to Mark," in The Gospel According to Mark, The Canon Pocket Bible Series (Canongate Books, 1998), Jim Pascoe and Nick Cave, Awash in a Bleak and Fishless Sea (1997 [cited 3 August 2005]); available from http://www.jimpascoe.com/writing/nickcave.html.

[15] Cave, "The Flesh Made Word," 138.

[16] Cave, “Flesh,” 139.

[17] Cave, “Flesh,” 140.

[18] Cave, “Flesh,” 141-42.

[19] Cave, “Flesh,” 139.

[20] Nick Cave, King Ink (London: Black Spring, 1988); Nick Cave, King Ink II (London: Black Spring, 1997).

[21] Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel (London: Black Spring, 1989).

References

Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Volume 1: 1912-1926. Edited by M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996.

Brokenmouth, Robert. Nick Cave: The Birthday Party and Other Epic Adventures. London: Omnibus, 1996.

Cave, Nick. And the Ass Saw the Angel. London: Black Spring, 1989.

———. "The Flesh Made Word." In King Ink II, 138-42. London: Black Spring, 1997.

———. "An Introduction to the Gospel According to Mark." In The Gospel According to Mark. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1998.

———. King Ink. London: Black Spring, 1988.

———. King Ink II. London: Black Spring, 1997.

Dax, Maximilian, and Johannes Beck. The Life and Music of Nick Cave: An Illustrated Biography. Translated by Ian Minock. Berlin: Die-Gestalten-Verlag, 1999.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode. Volume 1 of  Gesammelte Werke. Tübingen: Mohr, 1990 (original 1960).

Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986. Volume 1. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Johnston, Ian. Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave. London: Abacus, 1996.

Pascoe, Jim, and Nick Cave. Awash in a Bleak and Fishless Sea, 1997 (cited 3 August 2005). Available from http://www.jimpascoe.com/writing/nickcave.html.

Runions, Erin. How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film, Religion/Culture/Critique. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Sherwood, Yvonne. A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Walsh, Richard. Reading the Gospels in the Dark: Portrayals of Jesus in Film. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003.

———. "Wrestling with the Passion of the Christ: At the Movies with Roland Barthes and Mel Gibson." The Bible and Critical Theory 1,2 (2005)