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The Story of Jesus for Nonbelievers
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14994 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1988 |
2,712 Words |
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Whitney Shiner
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LAZARUS
Alain Absire
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
240 pp. $19.95
The story of Jesus lies at the heart of Western culture. Even in our own nonreligious age, believers and nonbelievers alike continue to find in the story powerful symbolism of the essential nature of the world. From the mild-mannered ethicist with his subtle religious sensitivity discovered by the liberal Christians of the nineteenth century to the fiery revolutionary created by the liberation theologians of today, portraits of Jesus have consistently proclaimed their creators' views of themselves, idealized and writ large as benefits a son of God.
Portraits of Jesus are necessarily subjective, and as long as he remains one of the central religious symbols of our culture, he will continue to attract the philosophical and religious fads of the times. Ever since Albert Schweitzer destroyed the depiction of Jesus pieced together by nineteenth century liberal scholars in his epoch-making Quest for the Historical Jesus, the difficulty of avoiding such subjectivity has led biblical scholars to shy away from such reconstruction of Christ's life.
While subjectivity may be the bane of scholarship, however, it provides much of the charm of art. Retellings of biblical stories are fascinating precisely because they provide insight into an author's view of the world. We expect that an author who approaches such a theme is at least trying to be profound, trying to say that his view of the world has some universal validity; and even when we deeply disagree with the author's view, we may still applaud the skill with which he presents it.
Alain Absire's Lazarus is a haunting tale of the meaningless and the absurd. It is haunting not because its view of the world is believable but because it is believed. One feels that he has laid bare the empty soul of an age unable to believe.
Built on the echoes
Lazarus, subtitled in the original French The Great Sleep, is Absire's seventh novel and the first to achieve commercial success. It is also the first to be translated into English. As in his earlier novel, 118, rue Terminale, Absire builds his tale on the echoes of a familiar subtext. In the earlier novel, Hitchcock's film Rear Window provides the outline of the plot and is the basis of recurring allusions. In Lazarus, the subtext is the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John. Absire, however, has added a bizarre twist: Instead of fully restoring the dead man to life, Jesus transforms him into a zombielike creature, not fully dead and not fully alive.
The outline of the plot will be familiar to all lovers of the meaningless and the absurd. Like Gregor Samsa in Kafka's story. "The Metamorphosis," Lazarus awakens one day to find he has been changed into a hideous creature. In this case, Lazarus is a walking corpse rather than a cockroach, but the effect is the same. He is cut off from his humanity and all normal social intercourse. At first he does not comprehend what has happened. Then he hopes for salvation. When his hope disappears, he seeks the reason for his suffering. Since no answer is given, he finds refuge in the dream world.
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