Scripture Picture

The Book of Genesis

Illustrated by R. Crumb

(W.W. Norton, 224 pp., $24.95) 

A certain amount of sensationalistic misinformation was circulated in the press last spring, here and in England, when word got out that R. Crumb had done an illustrated version of Genesis. Crumb was the leading innovative figure of the underground comics movement of the late 1960s and has enjoyed a devoted following ever since. His graphic work, always memorable, is often physically aggressive, raunchy, and sexually explicit. Against that background of countercultural tawdriness, the press reports suggested that Crumb’s Genesis meant to make a mockery of the biblical text, and that some of it verged on pornography. Even though the jacket of the finished book bears a warning in bold lettering--"ADULT SUPERVISION RECOMMENDED FOR MINORS" (the same may be said, in fact, about Genesis itself)--these scandalous imputations are entirely groundless.

The jacket of Crumb’s Genesis also announces, with the Crumbian emphasis of two exclamation points: "The first book of the Bible graphically depicted! Nothing left out!" It is unclear whether "the first book of the Bible" means Genesis or is a claim that this is the first time a book of the Bible has been graphically depicted in its entirety. If the latter is the case, it is, as far as I know, an accurate claim; and it is certainly worth pondering what is gained or lost by representing biblical narrative in graphic frames verse by verse, with images for virtually everything, including the begats.

I should add immediately that I have an indirect entanglement in this book. When Crumb began the project, he sent me the first few chapters that he had done, requesting permission to use my translation of the biblical text, with the stipulation that he would be free to diverge from it when the spirit moved him. Terms were agreed on in an amicable professional manner. The translation that appears in the completed book is for the most part mine, as Crumb duly notes at the beginning of his brief introduction. From time to time, though, he introduces a word or phrase from the King James Version or from another translation, and he also sometimes tinkers--always a little disconcerting to a translator--with my version. I should add that I have absolutely no financial interest in the sales of this book, and so whatever I have to say about it reflects nothing but my considered response to its images.

When some chapters of the book were published in The New Yorker in June, a few people with whom I have spoken about them expressed disappointment. Just the same old R. Crumb, they objected: he has not succeeded in developing a visual style that is adequate to the power of the biblical text. Such criticism does not seem to me justified. Crumb has always been an artist with a single style, a distinctive and emphatic one--in this regard as in others he is certainly no Picasso; and so it should neither surprise nor disappoint us that he has used his style to interpret the Bible. His women have always been broad-shouldered, big-breasted, thick-lipped, erotically energetic figures with the physiques of NFL linebackers, and that is how his biblical women, from Eve to Rebekah to Rachel, appear. The Crumb brand is certainly here; but in this signature visual idiom he has produced a frequently arresting interpretation of Genesis.

I stress that it is an interpretation, because the extremely concise biblical narrative, abounding in hints and gaps and ellipses, famously demands interpretation. (Gershom Scholem once observed that the imperative for interpretation is the hallmark of all canonical texts.) The process of interpreting Genesis began in the Bible itself--in passages from the Former Prophets that elaborately allude to it, in the Prophets, and in late biblical texts such as Esther and Daniel, which are, among other things, interpretive re-castings of the Joseph story. The Midrash, produced in late antiquity, is often an interpretive fleshing-out of the spare biblical narratives, an attempt to fill in the narrative gaps and read closely and imaginatively between the lines. And this is essentially what Crumb does graphically, with a special emphasis on the element of flesh.

His graphic representation sometimes brings alive the reality of the narrated event. Chapter 14, which is almost certainly from a literary source distinct from the three principal ones out of which the book is shaped, features Abraham (still known as Abram) in the anomalous role of warrior-prince. This martial Abraham is so different from the figure who appears elsewhere in the text that I suspect most readers glide through this military episode, this strange war against an alliance of invading eastern kings, without fully registering it. But Crumb’s depiction of Abraham, riding a camel and spearing a fleeing enemy soldier through the back, compels us to take in the violent action of the story. Similarly, Crumb’s image of Joseph flung into the pit by his brothers, lying face down on its rocky bottom, hands clutching the ground, tears rolling from his eyes, makes one recognize the terror and the desperation of the seventeen-year-old, where the spare narrative, silent at this point on Joseph’s reaction, merely says, "And they took him and flung him into the pit. And the pit was empty, there was no water in it." (Crumb is strongest in representing fear, consternation, dismay, rage, lust, and abjection, all of which are abundantly present in these stories, and he is less interesting in the portrayal of more nuanced emotional states.) Onan’s practice of coitus interruptus with Tamar--the term "onanism" is based on a misreading of this story--becomes perfectly clear in Crumb’s image of the two naked figures seen from the back (genitalia are never shown in the sex scenes), Onan obviously having withdrawn from Tamar and exhibiting what one must call an orgasmic facial expression.