I would like to focus on the interesting religious motif at play in Grass. Tepper constructs her book to cover human existential anxiety, and I found in Grass a fascinating interplay between Judeo-Christian biblical beliefs and interacting with the other, be it other species or people. Religion is pervasive throughout the book. I would argue that the Tree City of the Arbai is pretty much an allegory for the Garden of Eden. It is pure, untouchable, protected and free of evil. “In the Tree City of the Arbai two religious gentlemen set in the mild breezes of evening, eating fruit which had been brought from the surrounding trees by the foxen…” (492).
Yet for all its splendor and peacefulness, the Arbai were all destroyed, completely wiped out of existence. The most ideal form of living according to the bible did not make it Tepper’s tale.
In Marjorie’s revelation, when she is knocked unconscious, God reveals to her that the Arbai, perhaps the symbol of a Judeo-Christian ideal, were a complete failure; “I failed completely with that one. Tried something new, but they were too good to do any good, you know?” (429) This statement confronts the “do-good” sentiment many religions try to amplify in our experience in life. God explains, “Too good is good for nothing. A chisel has to have an edge…otherwise it simply stirs things around without ever cutting through to causes and realities…” (429).
According to this vision then, human temptation and “evil” is not sinful in the biblical sense – the casting out of the Garden of Eden is not a bad thing. Indeed, as Marjorie reflects in the end this sharpness in our nature is what pushes us in the process of “becoming,” evolving. Before leaving the metaphorical Garden of Eden at the end to enter an Arbai transporter, she writes “change must come. Risk must come. Very small beings are important, not individually but for what they become, if they become...” (537-538). The implications of this assertion are vast, and I look forward to discussing them in class – there is so much to unpack in the book it would take weeks of analysis.
Some questions I have are – what are the implications of this message for manifest destiny? For violence? What is Tepper saying about how we should treat the other? Certainly the foxen respected us when Marjorie looked after the horses, a “lower” life-form. It seems to me the point is we have to stick up for ourselves – religions and world systems such as Sanctity can keep us down individually and as a species. We have to continue to push and to grow, that is what God or whomever intended for us – not to be controlled by religions or by the Hippae, but to break free of constraints and “boldly go where no (hu)man has gone before.” (Star Trek)
I was also struck by the religious motifs in Grass. One of the most interesting scenes in this respect is Father James's monologue about humans being a virus God engineered to heal the universe on page 178. "perhaps God has done his intervening by creating us. Perhaps He intends us to do what we keep praying He will do. This scene exposes some aspects of the theme that ties into our Manifest Destiny readings.
ReplyDeleteManifest Destiny, in its early forms, was thought of as God's intention to give a "promised land" or "new Israel" to Americans. Grass uses this scene to deconstruct nationalist feelings of destiny. Marjorie goes from a society ruled by an ineffective religious bureaucracy to one governed by hypnotized, isolationist aristocrats. Both these institutions are characterized as extremely chauvinistic. Male dominated hierarchies and politically dominant religious organizations are shown to be ineffectual and self-harming. The Hippae are shown "jousting," Marjorie's horse is named Don Quixote, and the only sport practiced on grass is the upper-class chauvinistic "hunt." The humans allow beasts to impose an American isolationism on them, as well as a social structure where the strong dominate the weak. Tepper's future seems to be one where social progress stalls while technology advances.