Job

Job

1. Primal Story

I remember the Book of Job as being the best book of the Bible; I've never forgotten the impression it left me of it's primally horrific quality, and it's pithy, folkloric frame, which smoothly introduces the story and big theme. I recently went back and reread it.

Plot, in brief: we meet Job, a perfect and upright man, and his family; we see a bet between God and Satan concerning whether Job only believes in God because he has such a sweet life, and what Job would do if he lost everything; we see the most brutal, painful things happening to this good man. Of his calamities, the most visceral is the death of all ten of his children. After each terrible thing, Job praises God (The Lord giveth, and he taketh away). We see Job's friends come and sit with him in his grief and sit shiva. The audience wonders - Will he Curse God? This is the question of the narrative. Will his lose faith in the idea of divine order and perceive that creation is as injust as to to have a parent watch his all children die for a bet. Finally, Job does curse God, in a bleak poetic mode ("Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said a child had been conceived. Let all those days darken."), and in a dramatic setting where his dryly religious friends are eager to use their learning to prove Job's emotive assertion wrong. This mid section is incredibly long and dull, in that nothing new is much said in 20 pages, but, rather, we experience poetic variations of the same back and forth. (Essentially this: Friend: "Job, man, God is Just. How can you be more right then God? You must have performed some sin you know not." Job: "Fuck you.") Then a fourth, unannounced character, Elihu, pops up and monologues for a good few pages . But before we get to ask this who Elihu is, a whirlwind appears, from which speaks God.

Ah. Some action. This is good stuff.

Poetically vivid. God is pissed at Job for cursing Him. God's argument goes thusly: Who are you to question me? Did you create the world and all the animals? Are you as strong as me? Who was it that created the horse? Have you ever admired the horse? I mean, really admired?

Job repents. God chastizes the friends (we don't why). Job gets back wealth, has new kids, and lives... happily ever after?

As a studio exec, I'd have to say, all in all, it has a great premise, but fails to deliver. The narrative is cut up and jarring, moving from folklore to poetry, from religious argument to super-rational argument. The pacing is baggy, the ending - inedible.

I wonder whether the greatest stories are often imperfect? It seems to me subject matter of the Book of Job is too intense, too rousing for the bindings of logic and psychology. For psychological narrative. For folk narrative, for poetry even?

This great stories pose situational questions - but ones that can't have answers.

Any Theophany - appearance of God - suggests a break down of story as story (the conflicts of mortals, some amount of cause and effect), and a transformation into religious sermon. I think of Bhagavad Gita here.

When one is dealing with primal issues, such huge themes, any conclusion one gives will be smaller, and localized to the story, where the statement of the question is mighty and grand. The Book of Job can't answer this question, and resolves itself with a theophany.

I think here of Princess Mononoke - another story built around a big question about the coexistence nature and humanity, and the ending is also soft. Did the nature god spirit thing just die? Or will it come back?

I later learned that Miyazaki's understanding of his ending is more pessimistic than he would articulate in a film that kid's watch (Miyazaki is big into the idea of making artworks full of hope, which is at odds with his personal worldview). He felt that the story of Mononoke, which takes place at a specific historical moment in Japanese history, is about a that specific historical watershed moment in which Japanese society irrecoverably let technology and culture and society usurp feelings of reverence for nature. If he had been explicit in the movie, that would have made a stronger ending.

Job also fails at the end; the book is evidently a hodgepodge, made up of many hands, none having ultimate authority over what the story should be. The final editor, though, I can;t help but think had an ulterior agenda. In this reading of the Book of Job, in my most impassioned interpretation of it, which I know is probably false, I perceive the structural dissonance as intentional and necessary. The mind that looks at the universe with the belief that it is a fair place overseen by paternal good will, a place where a parent can witness the death of his children, with genocide and horrific disease and a whole list of things I won't say, will splinter and fragment when it encounters heart-breaking injustice and the cruelty of reality. The conception of God as just - goes against experience and reason. Which is to say, in my most impassioned reading of Job, I see its chaotic structure and it's terribly tactless ending as a signpost, hidden in the Holy Book, which announces the death of a kind of belief.

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2. Jung's Answer to Job

Jung reads and considers Jahweh as a coherent psychological person, as if Yahweh were a developed character in an epic Mythopeic novel instead of the jumbled deposit of many middle-eastern beliefs fallen through the sift the Hebrew people, which he is. Genesis establishes a certain famous Old Testament character. We are familiar with his "Do X [give me foreskins, invade this city, kill your son], or else" attitude, and his belief that "I am the deity and singular, despite the many other gods around here." In the Old Testament, though, are also traces of other elements of Yahweh that teh greater tradition has silenced. Who know about his consort, the female deity Sophia, or that had a great battle and killed Leviathan, the embodiment of chaos, before the creation of - creation. Is there a continuous Yahweh, is he an incidental synthesis of unintentionally related texts?

All this is to say, that the Old Testament is a rather messy stew text and culture fragments, and that Jung acts pretty boldly silly to propose two things: Yahweh is a cohesive entity, and that Yahweh is an entity that has a psychology. Silly though it is to me, reading Jung's essay is interesting, for a number of his ideas, but also because we get to see him psychoanalyzing God (as He is depicted in old book).

The arc of Jung's book is this: When Yawweh berates Job from his wrathful vantage in the Whirlwind, it is really, Jung explains, God acting out against a projection of his doubt. The faithful servant has expressed doubt about God, and so God, rather than perform a self-examination, suppresses the external source of doubt. Job provoked this doubt, and yet Job, mortal man made of dust, receives cosmic fury and threat of strength by from God. Yahweh is not fully conscious of himself, and is acting out. But the episode, by virtue of Job's integrity, forces Yahweh to see himself, to become self-aware. This self-awareness, and presumable shame, instigates the next big chapter in the epic cycle (from the Christian cantage) of The Lord of the Jews: namely, Jesus. Jesus is God's attempt to make amends with Man by becoming Man, and suffering as fully as Man can suffer. And Jesus himself softens the laws, promising a loving God. A change has happened.

I got bored reading the book, largely because of a fallacy I suspect Jung of: Submitting his attention and belief in something as true because of it's status, as myth or otherwise famous. In other words, I think that Jung thought The Book of Job has an elevated status, and that necessarily implies that every written ambiguity, dissonance, and paradoxical thinking is intended, as a form of secret knowledge. Secret knowledge, and that this knowledge has been hidden in the great stories and philosophies, and can only be unpacked by a scholar, seems demonstrative of a man who needs to see the world that way. I suspect that he saw so much secret knowledge in every old fragment he read. An example of Jung's stretching it is when God in the Whirlwind says to Job "Who is it that darkens my counsel," Jung says the God is not referring to Job but is actually referring to part of himself, which is Satan.

Jung's life project was, of course, the development of this idea of hidden knowledge, in the form of dreams, myths, literature, and the collective unconscious. He has paved the way for how so many of his think and feel, to varying degrees, of dreams and myths. Much of his writing is interesting and inspiring, and his Red Book is one of my favorite objects. Kudos immeasurable to him. But Jung was secretive, too, and careful to present himself as he wanted to be seen. His public writing depends on the authority of a scientific style of writing, and the authority of his status as doctor, and his authority of experience. In this ways, it seems he is often trying to create a distance between him and the reader, and almost trying to hide his ideas. I can't help but that part of reason for this was that he knew that, despite being a revolutionary mind that changed the world, some aspects of his project were a hoax.