Memory lends context to what we are and what we see. In one of the last books of the
And here, close to the springs, lie washing-pools
scooped out in the hollow rocks and broad and smooth
where the wives of Troy and their lovely daughters
would wash their glistening robes in the old days,
the days of peace before the sons of Achaea came
Past these they raced. [trans. Robert Fagles]
Past these they race still.
Art and Blasphemy
“I shall do nothing of the sort,” said the Mouse, getting up and walking away. “You insult me by talking such nonsense!”
“I didn’t mean it!” pleaded poor Alice. “But you’re so easily offended, you know!”
READING IMAGES CAN BE A perilous enterprise. No one ignores that in 2005 the publication of several caricatures of Muhammad in a number of periodicals around the world (first in Denmark, as a joke, then in other countries, as an act of defiance) ignited the furious protest of various Islamic groups. History repeats itself: faith, which is supposed to be the unmovable pillar of a true believer, seems to shiver and shake when confronted with a mere artistic creation, with a brushstroke or a few scribbled words, while, in the name of the Supreme Being, His followers announce the imminence of a fit of divine temper.
That a cruel or violent act might infuriate the Creator of the Universe (or His Prophet) is understandable, since no author (with or without a capital A) enjoys seeing his work mangled or destroyed. To kill, to torture, to humiliate, to abuse a fellow creature is no doubt a crime in the eyes of God, and I suppose that believers have every right to see in the fact that a new Universal Deluge does not take place every month proof of the inexhaustible divine patience. That creatures such as Augusto Pinochet, George W. Bush, and Osama bin Laden are allowed to lead a comfortable existence shows that God certainly possesses a most inhuman patience.
But to declare, at the same time, that a cartoon, a joke, a play on words might offend Him for whom eternity is like a day, or His blessed elect among all men, seems to me the greatest of blasphemies. We, feeble human beings, may feel bothered by someone making fun of us; but surely that can’t be the reaction of a being we imagine supreme, incorruptible, omniscient. Borges suggested that of God’s literary tastes we know nothing; it is difficult to imagine that Someone who knows everything and whose generous aesthetic sense led Him both to the creation of the poetic antelope and the tasteless joke of the hippopotamus, would ban from His night table the works of Denis Diderot, of Mark Twain, of Salman Rushdie. Muhammad was all for laughter: “Keep your heart light at every moment, because when the heart is downcast the soul becomes blind.”
The great religious figures of the past, because they were also intelligent human beings, did not lack a sense of humor. Christ (in Jerome’s Latin version) made fun of Peter with a silly pun. “Your name is Peter