Disgressed

“Have you been reading the Bible?” asked Katharine suspiciously.

“Well, not reading it exactly. I was just checking a couple of things.”

“Looking for loopholes?”

“Yeah, yeah. Did  you see that they’ve found a tablet which suggests that the Ark was actually circular?”

“But that’s not in the Bible.”

“No, well I was also checking what the KJV says compared to that Crumb Genesis – you know? The comic book thing? Anyway, how did you know I was looking at the Bible?”

“I noticed it had moved.”

I got a copy of Robert Crumb’s comic-book interpretation of the Book of Genesis over Christmas; incidentally I also re-read Joseph Heller’s “God Knows” which is sort of the story of King David in the style of Catch-22.

There’s been a lot of fuss about Crumb’s version of Genesis – he’s always been popular and over the last decade or so has been taken increasingly seriously as an artist, a trend epitomised in Robert Hughes’ notorious comparison with Breughel (something Crumb himself disavowed). There’s always been an undercurrent of dissent from those who object to his nastier images, so maybe a Biblical subject is calculated to add respectability, though this being Genesis there was bound to be plenty of sex and violence.

I do think Crumb outclasses most of his peers in talent, style, and hard work, and it shows again here, with some striking images. He points out his own strict adherence to the material; not for him the interpolated passages and omissions of other cartoon Bibles. Even the ‘begats’ are dealt with in little groups of portraits.  But reviews sounded a bit disappointed, and I can see why: overall, I’m afraid Genesis exposes Crumb’s limitations more clearly than they have perhaps been exposed before:  in two main ways.

First, while doing things straight is a virtue, lack of imagination is not; but some of the most noteworthy challenges offered by Genesis are sadly muffed. “And there was light” – what could an artist do with that? Crumb gives us a white blob on a black background. The Tower of Babel? A realistic spiral minaret in a low-lying Middle-eastern town. Yes, realism is good, but if you weren’t going to do anything more than this with it, why bother?

Second, it becomes disappointingly clear that at the end of the day Crumb is a cartoonist; albeit a cartoonist who can rise to painstaking bits of graphic art at times. The mark of a cartoonist is that instead of drawing things, he represents them; this particular squiggle represents a nose, that one an ear. One result is that cartoonists sometimes struggle to make their characters look different. Here I’m afraid a lot of the beardy old men are at times hard to distinguish, and the same goes for many of the stout, big-breasted women. Fair’s fair; Crumb conscientiously tries to throw in a thin woman (Hagar) or one with unusual cheekbones once or twice, but for the most part we are dealing with small variations on the well-known Crumb Ideal Woman with huge legs, buttocks and breasts, (and a mouth not quite big enough for the inordinate number of teeth she seems to have). In the begats, it’s a different matter; we have a series of portraits of distinct individuals; but it seems these are copied from Hollywood stills taken from old Biblical epics. Even the range of facial expressions seems to lack something – there’s an awful lot of wide-eyed staring going on.

All in all, it seems that Crumb is not only not the Breughel de nos jours; he isn’t even the Gillray. Gillray’s Genesis – now that would have been an altogether livelier, funnier, and dare I say, probably ruder piece of work.

I remain a bit perplexed, because I’m sure Crumb could have done better. Is it, could it be, reverence that holds him back – or is it actually boredom, old age? The comparison with God Knows is instructive: Heller adopts a breezily anachronistic manner and language which, in my view anyway, work much better. Heller has King David refer in passing to Sarah, ‘who laughed and lied to God. I got a big kick out of that’. Crumb, naturally, portrays the episode in detail; we see the laughing and the lying, but it’s never half as vivid as in Heller’s David’s throwaway remark.

Maybe I’m dwelling unfairly on the negatives, and maybe it’s the high expectations that mainly cause the disappointment, but I’d still say don’t do Exodus.