When I first read Buechner’s The Son of Laughter (1993), a novel that re-dresses the stories found in Genesis 12-50 in the clothes of modern fiction, I had two seemingly contradictory responses: on the one hand, I had a sense of the holy presence of God as he lovingly whispers to and guides the main characters; on the other hand, I found myself surprised by and disgusted with the many “dirty” details of the story. It is as if the narrator has a potty mouth and is, like a little boy, overly interested in the filthy and obscene. He mentions ‘dung’, for example, no less than twenty-seven times, ‘spittle’ or ‘spit’ nineteen times, and ‘urine’ or ‘piss’ fourteen times. Given that the book is only about 270 pages, this is a surprising a number of references to bodily excrement and fluids.
This is not the kind of language I was expecting to see in a Bible story. I expected to read about a holy God who creates a holy people, and holiness is a concept I usually associate with cleanness. After all, the biblical book in which God repeatedly commands ‘Be holy, for I am holy’ is the same book that contains laws of purity and cleanness.[1] It just does not seem like God’s holiness and human filth go together. This is a preconception, I would suggest, that Buechner challenges in his story-telling, and particularly in his The Son of Laughter. In this novel, he brings Bible stories out from where they have been enshrined in the ancient past, and he drags them through the mud and muck of the real world, into the lives of real people.
Rather than portray biblical figures as saints with halos, Buechner writes of frail people who sully themselves with sin. When Jacob lies to steal his brother’s blessing he is tormented with the knowledge that he has ‘fouled the Fear’s name with the filth of [his] lie’,[2] and he fears that ‘if someone had turned the stone of [his] heart’ they would only find ‘beetles’.[3] And when he has to speak his name to God, his name which symbolizes the sinful way he has lived, he has the taste of ‘mud’[4] in his mouth. These characters do not have a steady, unbroken relationship with God, but rather they struggle to see God’s presence in their lives. In Buechner’s version of Genesis 22, the biblical story in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Isaac is not privileged to the same knowledge of God as Abraham. Abraham sees and hears a divine messenger telling him to stop the sacrifice, but Isaac can only see and hear the face of Abraham as he holds the knife over him, and this experience traumatizes him. As Isaac tells this story to Jacob, we are told that ‘his words fell heavy and dense like cow dung. First a heap, then another heap’.[5] Later, when Jacob is an old man and his sons tell him that he must send his youngest son Benjamin to Egypt if he wants to buy food, he becomes like Isaac in his grief and tears, as he is unable to see the hand of God at work: ‘My father was right about an old man’s tears’, he says. ‘Like his urine, they come when they come. He cannot master them’.[6] Jacob focuses on the bodily experience of his weeping, saying, ‘I could feel the dribble of it running out of my nose. My gums were bared. My chin was shaking’.[7] Throughout the novel, Buechner repeatedly describes the characters as sullied and snivelling physical beings.
These are precisely the types of details that arouse the emotion we call “disgust.” Bodily fluids, excrement, genitals, swarming insects, slimy amphibians; things that are sticky or wiggly or curdled — all of these tend to evoke disgust, an emotion that motivates us to distance ourselves from and avoid whatever has provoked the feeling. Given that the normal response to something disgusting is to move away, it would seem that the emotion of disgust is at odds with the attractions and intimacies of love. However, in The Anatomy of Disgust, William Ian Miller suggests that disgust and love have more to do with each other than we might expect. He argues that disgust is a necessary part of love, for ‘love, as we know it, would make little sense without disgust being there to overcome’.[8] Miller observes that, while we tend to see bad breath as a ‘moral failing’ in a stranger, we pardon it in a loved one; while we tend to find excrement and vomit disgusting, we change baby diapers and care for sick family members; and while we tend to stay away from the genitals and the bodily fluids they produce, we nevertheless embrace these in the intimacies of sex. In this context, I believe the obscenities of Buechner’s novel become somewhat excusable, or perhaps even meaningful. For they demonstrate a faithful God overcoming the filth of the world.
In The Son of Laughter, blessing is God’s love overcoming disgust, his grace embracing the repulsive. When Jacob dresses up like Esau to steal the blessing, Isaac embraces him, and in words that are taken from Gen. 27:27, Isaac exclaims, ‘The smell of my son is the smell of a field that the Fear has blessed’.[9] What makes this exclamation surprising, however, is the way Jacob a little earlier describes the clothing he is wearing:
The goatskins my mother had decked me out in were still slippery on the inside with blood. The coppery smell of the blood was part of the heavy, sour, sweet-grass, dung-foot, man-seed smell that was Esau’s.[10]
As Isaac embraces Jacob we see a literal example of love embracing the disgusting. Commenting on this Bible passage, Buechner says that ‘the smell of [Jacob] is the smell of blessing because God … has chosen to bless him in spite of everything. Jacob reeks of holiness.’[11]
Jacob continues to experience God’s blessing this way for the rest of his life — it is an experience of God’s power at work in the earthly, soiled life that he lives. Jacob makes this clear with an extended metaphor that compares the blessed life to a rider desperately holding onto a camel that is running out of control. As he describes the camel, he includes what at first glance seem to be unnecessary and disgusting details:
Its hind parts are crusted with urine as it races forward. Its long-legged, hump-swaying gait is clumsy and scattered like rags in the wind. I bury my face in its musky pelt. The blessing will take me where it will take me. It is beautiful and it is appalling.[12]
But while this might seem like a strange — and somewhat revolting — description of divine blessing, it is a fitting example of the way the novel constantly juxtaposes God’s loving presence and Jacob’s dirty, lived reality.
Perhaps the clearest, and most striking, example of this juxtaposition can be found in the novel’s references to male genitals. The genitals are a part of the body that is widely acknowledged to evoke disgust; this is why they are usually covered by clothing, even when people are not wearing much else.[13] But in Buechner’s novel, the genitals are described as a symbol of God’s blessing, of life given in the present and promised for the future. The narratives in Genesis sometimes mention an oath-swearing ritual that involves the person who swears putting his hand ‘under the thigh’ of the person receiving the oath,[14] and this is usually interpreted as a euphemistic way of saying that the person swearing would grab the genitals of the other person.[15] In Buechner’s narrative, however, all euphemistic decorum disappears. Instead we have raw descriptions of men grabbing each other’s testicles, even in stories where the ritual does not appear in the biblical text.[16] Buechner also writes with explicit detail about the significance of circumcision to Isaac and his family[17] and describes a circumcision ceremony.[18] And in case we still haven’t gotten the point, Buechner emphasizes it by inventing non-biblical stories: when Jacob catches Reuben masturbating (a story certainly not found in the Bible), Jacob slaps him and chastises him, explaining that ‘his seed was Abraham’s seed’, the seed of God’s promise, and so should be treasured accordingly.[19] Why all this extra (and some might say excessive) mention of genitalia? Because God’s loving gift to the descendants of Abraham is a gift of life, a gift that can only be known in the bodily, earthly existence of broken humans.
Midway through the novel, when Jacob is middle-aged and has many children, he experiences a small epiphany in which he momentarily realizes everything I have been discussing. He is reflecting on the growth of his family, with his head spinning from all the noise and ruckus of the children playing (and fighting) in front of him, and as he looks at these children, his vision changes. He initially describes himself as ‘a man caught out in a storm’, explaining that the ‘children were the storm’, but then he suddenly starts to see ‘the truth of what the children were’:
One boy was pounding another boy’s head against the hard-packed floor. Another was drowsing at his mother’s teat. Three of them were trying to shove a fourth into a basket. Dinah was fitting her foot into her mouth. The air was foul with the smell of them.
They were the Fear’s promise. That is what I suddenly saw the children were. I had forgotten it. They were the dust that would cover the earth. The great people would spring from their scrawny loins. Kicking and howling and crowing and pissing and slobbering food all over their faces, they were the world’s best luck.[20]
This moment of epiphany can be better appreciated when it is contrasted with a similar experience described by the twentieth-century monk, mystic, and theologian Thomas Merton.[21] Merton describes a similar shift in his vision of people as he stood one day at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky, a corner that has since been called “Thomas Merton Square” to commemorate Merton’s epiphany. As he was looking at the people around him, he was struck by the sense that he and everyone else there were interconnected, linked by the glorious love of God. This realization led him to reconsider what, exactly, he was seeing in front of him as he looked on these human beings:
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our son-ship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.[22]
These two epiphanies — Jacob’s and Merton’s — are clearly similar: in both a man is looking at a kind of everyday busy-ness, a chaotic hustle and bustle, and in the midst of all this his vision shifts so that he suddenly sees the glory of God shining in and through the people in front of him. But what I find more interesting is the differences between the two passages. For Merton, everything — or more accurately everyone — begins to shine like ‘pure diamond’. The imagery is all of light and purity. For Jacob, on the other hand, God is present in the dirt and grime, in the human realities of his family. He mentions fighting, sucking on teats or on feet, ‘pissing’; he describes the ‘foul’ smell of the children, and says they have ‘scrawny loins’. But, as we have seen, it is precisely in these details, in the genitals, the saliva, the dirt, and the smells that God’s promise is made manifest and his presence known. For, as Buechner explains, ‘Holiness is not something hazy and elusive that we know apart from the earth but something we can know only as it wells up out of the earth’.[23] And if holiness ‘wells up out of the earth’, it is going to be filthy.
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Works cited:
[1] Lev. 11:44, 55; 19:2; 20:26; 21:8.
[2] Frederick Buechner, The Son of Laughter (New York: HarperOne, 1994), p.82.
[3] Ibid., p.80.
[4] Ibid., p.160.
[5] Ibid., p.12.
[6] Ibid., p.259.
[7] Ibid., p.260.
[8] William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p.18. He discusses this idea in more detail in pp.132-42.
[9] Buechner, Son of Laughter, p.84.
[10] Ibid., p.81.
[11] Frederick Buechner, Now and Then (1983; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), p.19-20.
[12] Buechner, Son of Laughter, p.95.
[13] See: Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, p.101-05.
[14] Gen. 24:2-9; 47:29-31.
[15] Kenneth A. Matthews, Genesis 11:27-50:26, The New American Commentary 1B (Nashville: B&H Publishing, 2005), Kindle edition, loc. 16802, n377.
[16] Buechner, Son of Laughter, p.27-8, 66.
[17] Ibid., p.45-6.
[18] Ibid., p.47-9.
[19] Ibid., p.140.
[20] Ibid., p.127.
[21] This connection was first suggested to me by my friend Jeff King. Merton’s experience is described in: Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1965; New York: Image, 2014), Kindle edition, p.153-55.
[22] Merton, Conjectures, p.155.
[23] Buechner, Now and Then, p.19.
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