Immortality in The Country Where Nobody Ever Grew Old and Died and the Garden of Eden - Essay Example

The Theme of Immortality/Temporality in “The Country Where Nobody Ever Grew Old and Died” and the “Garden of Eden” William Maxwell’s story, “The Country Where Nobody Ever Grew Old and Died” takes place in the late eighteenth century, as the allusions to the historical figures like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and William Beckford reveal. The narrator tells the story of a country, where people did not die. The third person narrator, whom we have no knowledge of, might be a historian; since he/she narrates the pseudo-historical events of a hundred and fifty years ago and his style is highly descriptive and impersonal. The narrator’s account is mainly based on William Beckford’s Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents. He/she claims that the story is in the Leipzig edition of the book; however, Beckford’s book does not have any reference to the case that told in the story. The major theme of the story, as its title also implied, is the question of immortality/temporality. In that sense, the story reminds “Garden of Eden” in the Bible. The aim of this paper is to compare how the theme of immortality/ temporality is interwoven into the fabrics of both stories. Firstly, a brief account on the theme of immortality in the “Garden of Eden” story will be given. Then, the stories’ differences in regard to the theme will be discussed. Before proceeding to the comparison, the question of immortality raised by the “Garden of Eden” story must be discussed. The question of what death is and whether Adam was made mortal holds a crucial place in biblical studies. The question of mortality/immortality is significant in a sense that it puts the authority of God in question while raising a suspicion that whether the snake was right. In Genesis 2: 15-17, God makes an arrangement with Adam and tells him that he will die if he eats of the tree of the knowledge: The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” It is very clear from the above passage that if they disobey God’s command, they will be punished by death sentence. On the other hand, when the serpent and Eve converse (3:1b-5), the serpent says to the woman “You will not surely die” and contradicts God’s commandment of “You shall surely die”. However, although they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they did not die and God pronounces a different sentence in 3:14-19. The discrepancy between the threat and actual consequences led to the comment that serpent was more right than God. For example David Carr argues that “the ‘wise’ snake turns out to be more right than God: right about the humans not dying if they disobeyed and right about the knowledge that would come with eating the fruit” (590). John C. Collins, in Genesis 1-4: A Lingustic, Literary, and Theological Commentary wants to avoid the conclusion that serpent was right and explores the semantic range of the Hebrew word for death in order to prove that what God meant was a “spiritual death” , not a physical one. He argued that “the semantic range of ‘death’ that is present here is spiritual death, estrangement from God” (175). Nevertheless, although he provides sufficient linguistic evidence for such interpretation and the word death could also mean spiritual death; he fails to bring the necessary “literary” evidence from the narrative to prove his point. In other words, the narrative itself does not have literary cues to support this interpretation nor to invalidate it. It also does not make sense to assume that Adam and Eve died spiritually after they ate the fruit and they became soulless creatures like zombies. In fact, it is not necessary to avoid the claim which implied that the serpent was right, and make superfluous interpretations in order to prove that God was right. If we take the dimension of temporality into the consideration, both the snake and God can be right; which is the very trick of the story and also the serpent. As a matter of fact, it is possible to assume that the serpent makes a trick and omits the word “immediately” when it speaks with Eve. Of course, Adam and Eve did not die “immediately”, but they are sentenced to “mortality”; which meant that they will “eventually” die, since their access to the tree of life has been cut. This also explains why God placed the cherubim and a flaming sword to the east of garden to guard the tree of life. Thus, it is possible to deduce from the narrative that tree of life was the true source Adam and Eve’s “not dying physically” and by cutting their access God ensured that they will physically die “eventually”. It is difficult to make an assertion on whether Adam and Eve were made mortal or immortal at the beginning, however as explained above the tree of life can be interpreted as the source of Adam and Eve’s “not dying”. The only thing for sure that can be deduced from the text is that they ceased to be “not dying” after they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. I say “not dying” instead of immortality, because not dying does not automatically mean that they are immortal and actually they are “dieable” without an access to the tree of life. In fact, William Maxwell plays on the same trick in his story. He does not say the “country where immortal people lived”, instead he says “the country where nobody ever grew old and died”, since the immortality would entail eternity and an atemporal dimension, while the story takes place in a temporal dimension in which people learned how to die. Thus, Maxwell was well aware of the biblical difference between not dying and immortality. Moreover, he also questions the assumption that “not dying” meant immortality: “One might have supposed that in a country where death was out of the question, morbidity would be unknown” (Maxwell 328). William Maxwell repeats the same plot pattern found in the “Garden of Eden” story, at first people did not die, then after having an access to the tree of knowledge, in this case the information given by a man stolen by the gypsies, they began to die. Knowledge and death are strictly correlated in both stories. In Maxwell’s story, a young man attempts to learn the secret of suicide, after the secret of how to die revealed death makes its appearance in all over the country. Here, the knowledge of good and evil corresponds to the knowledge of death. While in the biblical story the knowledge of good and evil leads to mortality, in Maxwell’s story the knowledge of death itself leads to death. Only after when people learned how to die, they began to die. However, while he repeats the plot pattern; Maxwell reverses the setting and the direction of the plot, in other words the realms of divinity and humanity. While the “Garden of Eden” takes place in the atemporal realm of God and ends with Adam and Eve’s expulsion from that realm, Maxwell’s story is set on earth, in a temporal realm. Nevertheless, Maxwell’s puts the temporality of the country in question. In contrast to the title of the story, people seems to be growing in the story, albeit extremely slowly. There are newborns, young people and adults. However, the narrator states that “most people appeared to be on the borderline between maturity and early middle age” (328). In that country, “all the arts flourished except history”. The country, which located on earth, is different from other countries and, as it appears or pretends to be atemporal and ahistorical within the realm of temporality. Maxwell’s story also seems to be going in the opposite direction. In the “Garden of Eden” Adam and Eve do not actively seek knowledge or death. Their act is neither deliberate nor intentional. Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the snake for their actions. Their action results in their involuntary transference from heaven to earth. However, in Maxwell’s story, the young man wants to commit suicide and actively seeks this information. After the secret revealed, people seemed to be following his lead as the last sentence of the story reveals: “Shortly after this, the gravestone, the wreath, the arm band and the smiling undertaker, so familiar everywhere else in the world, made their appearance here also, and the country was no longer unique” (330). In contrast to Adam and Eve, their action seems to be deliberate and voluntary since they start dying only after learning how to die. However, it is not clear from the story what their motivation was. It might be possible to claim that they sought to be re-transferred to the realm of divinity through physical death by disobeying God’s command that “thou shalt not kill”. Maxwell might be trying to reverse the movement. Nevertheless, it will be difficult to support this thesis. It should also be noted that the story probably takes place in the Ottoman Empire, since both Lady Montagu and William Beckford visited that country. There is also an archeological speculation that the Garden of Eden located in Gobekli Tepe, Turkey. The orient is used to be portrayed as a “timeless” place by Western orientalists like Montagu and Beckford. “Timeless orient” was the favorite notion of the orientalists. As the European travelers together with the imperialists explored the East, the modernizations of these countries have also begun. It is an interesting parallel that the modernization of the Ottoman Empire began in the late 18th century at the height of European imperialism. Thus, these countries’ modernizations begun as they were explored and exploited by the West and they ceased be timeless and Eden-like places in the Western imagination, which meant that “they were no longer unique”. To sum up, both stories play with the notions of immortality and temporality. Since the “Garden of Eden” story puts the very question of immortality/temporality into the question, the researchers are confused whether Adam was mortal or immortal at the beginning. In this paper, it was argued that the tree of life was the source of their “not dying”, which is not the same with being immortal. In line with the “Garden of Eden” story, Maxwell’s story also puts the same paradox forward. People who did not die, but not necessarily immortal either, died in the end after they learned how to commit suicide. It is implied in the story that people did not die, only because they did not know how to die. In the “Garden of Eden” story, knowledge and death are also interrelated. Adam and Eve are expelled from the atemporal realm of God, since they dared to know. It is also noted that Maxwell’s story brings an additional layer to the question of immorality by making allusion to the Orientalist knowledge-power relation. William Maxwell relates the pursuit of knowledge/ power with the colonialism as well as the loss of immortality. Works Cited: Carr, David. “The Politics of Textual Subversion: A Diachronic Perspective on the Garden of Eden” Journal of Biblical Literature 112. 4 (Winter 1993): 577-95. Print. Collins, John C. Genesis 1-4: A Linguistic, Literary and Theological Commentary. New Jersey: P & R Publishing, 2006. Print. Maxwell, William. “The Country Where Nobody Ever Grew Old and Died”. All the Days and Nights. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Read More