Spectrum Culture 6/25/2017 Compares St. Paul’s fervor to Philip K. Dick’s fictional and autobiographical immersions into altered reality...

In the early ‘90s, French writer and filmmaker Emmanuel Carrère attended Mass in a Swiss village. The words of the Gospel commanded his attention, and for a few years, Carrère took up Catholicism. But after his fervor waned, he resumed tai-chi, yoga and meditation as his contemplative pursuits and forgot about this period of faith. Or so he claimed. In his new novel The Kingdom, a fictional look at early Christianity, the author compares St. Paul’s fervor to Philip K. Dick’s fictional and autobiographical immersions into altered reality.

Carrère asks why a quarter of all people still profess that their Savior rose from the dead, and compares this to revelations from Dick’s life and works. The Kingdom charts the PKD-like “contagion” spread by a Jewish persecutor turned Christian zealot, and the “meme” transmitted to converts across Asia Minor, Greece and Italy. Imagining the spread of claims of Jesus’ resurrection to suit “my own purposes,” Carrère dramatizes a Greek-speaking, quasi-Jewish Macedonian Luke turned evangelist.

In his 2007 book My Life as a Russian Novel, Carrère experimented with a similar format, his mid-life crisis intersected with a quest to learn about his great-grandfather’s origins in Georgia during a film shoot set in a bleak Russian town. In numbing detail, he concocted a meticulous setup to entice a lover. Admitting his own ego and snobbery, Carrère uses Luke for what is in essence a second creative biography. In Limonov, Carrère spurned fact-checking in a riff on the semi-fictionalized memoirs of a Soviet cad, and here he similarly elaborates on historical records, dismissing more sober research when it comes to recreating Luke’s decision to join the early evangelists.

Among middling traders, workers and rural or small-town Jewish communities, the Gospel message transformed the mundane. For “rather than destroying faith, denying reality tends to reinforce it.” As Paul spurns the testimony of the Jerusalem community who knew Jesus in person, Carrère provides the analogy of a film critic who refuses to see a movie lest it upset his own views. In considerations such at this The Kingdom fulfills its aims as an innovative investigation into these denials which appeal to faith.

Yet Carrère repeats the faults he finds in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. While on the one hand he complains that, “the style is conversational: full of repetition, stalling, petty details, and shrill notes,” Carrère himself spends four pages describing a brunette’s masturbation video.

Although he may be troubled that 2.2 billion swear “a man came back from the dead,” Carrère still wants “to avoid thinking that, now that I no longer believe, I know better than those who do, and better than my former self when I believed.” Still, Carrère resists the Gospels’ imaginary events, their lack of “real-life models” and “too much piety.” Having recanted his Christianity, he turns back to those who grant that this life promises no eternal exit. Projecting his agnosticism upon Luke and biblical accounts, the author reaches a humble epiphany, averring, “that the little voice of the Gospel is right. And like the rich young man, I walk away, sad and pensive, for I have great wealth.”

Carrère explains that Buddhism and Stoicism welcome reason. They blame ignorance neither on sin nor refusal to capitulate to a divine power. Carrère champions his skepticism rather than Paul’s disdain for wisdom, but he fumbles a chance to properly examine Mark’s raw script about a “rural healer who drives out spirits and is taken for a sorcerer,” siding with the refined Luke. Whatever the authorized version of these tales of a miracle worker, the Church won, and Carrère admits that the “living organism” of Corinth’s nascent church grows old.

The Kingdom will likely be chosen by secular readers instead of Christians. Both factions may ponder the assertion of 19th century French scholar Ernest Renan, whose critical biography of Jesus prepared the bold path for modern searchers: that the best interpreter of a religion would be one who was once convinced of its veracity, and later was not.

This retelling of Luke, Paul and the birth of the first stages of Christianity lacks cohesion. Carrère conveys a chatty rendering of a testament which saunters off into self-absorption (based as it is on his journals and notes). Despite these shortcomings, The Kingdom concludes with dignity and honesty. In its ungainly shape and halting pace, it may speak with sensitivity to those who, like its author, veered between faith and doubt.

By: John L. Murphy

https://spectrumculture.com/2017/06/25/kingdom-emmanuel-carrere/