“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
—Genesis 2.7
The 19th century had an unfortunate passion for novels in verse. I have tried to read some of the more celebrated, notably Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (which Virginia Woolf somehow found delightful), and never made it through to the end. George Eliot’s Middlemarch may be the best novel ever written in English, but her novel in verse, The Spanish Gypsy, is a soggy bore.
What Frederick Turner has now proven, with Genesis, is that the problem was not poetry but the poets who used it—and the way they used it. For instead of tackling epic subjects with epic approaches, as Milton and Vergil and Homer once did. Browning and Eliot tried to reduce poetry to narrative. That is, they seem to have taken the novel to be the true form and poetry to be, on the whole, a kind of pleasant accident, a grace note with which to decorate the holy sanctuary of prose. Browning’s heroine, for instance, describes her father like this: “My father was an austere Englishman, / Who, after a dry lifetime spent at home / In college-learning, law, and parish talk, / Was flooded with a passion unaware, / His whole provisioned and complacent past / Drowned out from him that moment.”
Turner breaks this dull mold into bits. From the first moment, we hear the urgent voice of the verse storyteller, the true epic voice, which melds poetry and narrative into an inseparable, swiftmoving whole:
Listen! I must tell of the beginnings.
Of corpses buried in the walls of worlds.
Of how those men and women worth a story
Burn and consume the powers they’re kindled by . . .
Turner is plainly a very good poet. But so, too (though not quite so good) was Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The difference, plainly, is that Turner in no way condescends to his form: he means to write an epic because what he wants to say, and the way he wants to say it, require epic dimensions. Perhaps that is indeed the key word: “dimensions.” The boundaries of Genesis stretch—literally—to the farthest stars. This epic contains more than multitudes, it offers us complex people of epic character, performing deeds of truly epic size. And it gives us the tale of these people in flexible, clear verse that knows how to soar, just as it knows how to modulate downward without turning flabby. In a true epic, even straightforward description must sing:
By noon he’s come into a waste of hills,
Barren horizonless, smelling of darkish resins;
Each summit shows a further slope of stones,
Squat black holm-oak, rosemary and thorns.
This simply can’t be said in prose. The music of poetry, here, is as deeply wedded to the story being told as are the characters and the settings.
And those characters are fiercely real. This is not a medieval saint’s tale, in which the central figure glows in the dark and can do no wrong. Everybody in this epic can and does do wrong: that is one unmistakable mark of their humanness. When Chance, the old hero, is accompanied on a supposed vacation trip by an implacable warrior, Tripitaka, he quickly realizes that the younger man is his destined assassin. He does not war with the inevitable (though when the moment comes, he fights for his life as hard as he can). Nor does the murderer-to-be, who does not want to kill this man of all others. “By the last light Chance shares the food he’s brought / With his quiet young executioner.” Turner draws out the scene beautifully. “The two men wake together, look / At each other shyly as they stretch, / Like bride and groom on that first changed morning / Of the honeymoon.” The actual death scene seems to me perfect:
Chance is a strong man. He attacks at once.
Gets in one blow. But Tripitaka spins;
His left heel smashes Chance’s knee, his elbow
Crushes the ribcage, and Chance coughs up blood.
Horribly clumsy work. The rising sun
Strikes on the altar. Chance struggles up, smiles.
For after all he is there in the world
As happy as he always was; attacks again.
Then Tripitaka breaks his neck and throws
His body down the dewy chasm of night.
These characters are not simply true to life; they successfully embody verities that the whole of Genesis seeks to both portray and activate. Chance is neither sentimental nor stupid; neither is his killer. But both live by those ancient verities, and each expects to die by them. When it is Tripitaka’s turn to die, like Chance he makes no fuss:
He feels too the ancient vigor flow
From the cold navel into thigh and armpit.
And if his tree should not have fruited, nor
The saintly promise of his birth be kept.
And if his mother’s sacrifice be vain,
And if his first command be but a feint
To draw the enemy from greater prizes;
Yet like those breeds of peony or peach.
Or flowering cherry or the bitter plum.
Those beauties hybridized by cruel arts
To be infertile while they feed the soul.
He will now blossom into deathly spring,
The barren glory of a pointless end.
This is part of a battle scene—and novels have no battle scenes like it, for prose simply cannot handle what Turner is up to.
Turner has written (and published) prose fiction. He knows how that form works, and knows that it is not capable of lifting the half-mythological, half-science fiction banner he wants to float. His earlier attempts at verse epic do not entirely wrench free of prose molds: there are prosaic moments in his 1985 The New World. But there are magnificent moments, too, anticipating Genesis:
This has become a tale of sicknesses.
Consider, though, that in the act of increase
All creatures are most naked to decay;
Corruption riots in the spawn and milk
And branched tubules of fertility.
All of these lesions of the commonplace,
All the torn folk that die into these lines,
Are necessary to the immortal spasm
By which the new world will come into being.
The ideas and even the words of science are raised to new heights in this poem. They take on a literary glow that no contemporary poet has ever achieved: in this respect too Turner’s achievement is unique.
For Genesis is an ecological poem, a science fiction epic built on a solid scientific foundation. James Lovelock, the biologist who wrote Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, has coauthored The Greening of Mars, a sober, factfilled analysis, cited in Turner’s prefatory remarks, of how the red planet might be brought to life. Turner takes these and other equally informed speculations and transforms them into an epic of risk-taking and adventure, of faith and betrayal, of noble visions and ignoble deeds. It has often been noted that true narrative purity, in our time, seems far easier to find in the pages of perfectly ordinary science fiction novels than in the contemporary works of literature that critics praise and students are obliged to read. The reason, plainly, is that science fiction is in fact concerned with exactly such timeless basics. Contemporary “meta-fiction” has put aside these concerns for what it thinks more important ones. But it is Frederick Turner who is right:
If I could read the pattern’s meaning, read
The light-swift scribble of Your fractal line
Whose denser filling of Your inexhaustible
Interstices constitutes being in time,
I’d be among those heroes that I sing.
A century ago, Anton Rubenstein mocked Joseph Haydn, saying that he should now be called Grandpa rather than Papa Haydn. But mere modernity is empty: Haydn strove for “truth,” and lived humbly no matter how grand others may have thought him. His music remains equally timeless, while Rubenstein’s has been deservedly forgotten. People will be reading, and enjoying, and profiting from Genesis long after the last meta-fictionist has perished from the earth.
[Genesis: An Epic Poem, by Frederick Turner (Dallas: The Saybrook Press) 303 pp., $19.95 (cloth), $9.95 (paper)]
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