Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature created by human beings comes out of an historical and cultural context, and drawing connections between art and its context can be illuminating for both. Today's guest, Stephen Greenblatt, is one of the world's most celebrated literary scholars, famous for helping to establish the New Historicism school of criticism, which he also refers to as "cultural poetics." We talk about how art becomes entangled with the politics of its day, and how we can learn about ourselves and other cultures by engaging with stories and their milieu. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Stephen Greenblatt received his Ph.D. in English from Yale University. He is currently Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He has specialized in Renaissance and Shakespeare studies, but has also written on topics as diverse as Adam and Eve and the ancient Roman poet Lucretius. He has served as the editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Norton Shakespeare, and is founder of the journal Representations. Among his many honors are the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation. His most recent book is Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. Web site Harvard web page Wikipedia Amazon.com author page Online courses at edX Talk on Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

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by storytellers who are basically telling us through the mouths of their characters. There are no people more powerful in the world than us. But still, I'm sympathetic to the quote. You know, there are individual people who do things, people who have more power, instruments of power, whether technological or otherwise, but these are often motivated by the stories people are telling themselves and each other about why they're here, why they're acting in certain ways. And a wonderful person to comment on the role of stories.

in our culture and our world is today's guest Stephen Greenblatt. He's the John Cogan University Professor of Humanities at Harvard and a very well-known Shakespeare scholar and literary historian. He's one of the founders, probably the main driving force between the New Historicism School of Literary Criticism that takes both the literary text and also its context and the historical resonances all together as part of the analysis of that text. So Shakespeare has been Stephen Greenblatt's main focus of research over the years, but he's also won the Pulitzer Prize in the National Book Award for a book on Lucretius.

The book is called The Swerve, How the World Became Modern. And Lucretius, of course, is one of my favorite ancient poets, author of Dererum Natura on the Nature of Things, which tells a cosmological story for ancient atomists who didn't want to just give God all the credit for everything. and Greenblatt has also written about Adam and Eve, the origin story of the Christian and Hebrew Bibles. So this is a wonderful opportunity to talk about how we think about the world,

which is something we do on Minescape every week, but in the context of the stories that we tell about the world, which is what we're doing all the time, whether we know it or not. So let's go. This June, the world comes to Los Angeles. Kick off FIFA World Cup 2026 at the FIFA Fan Festival of the iconic Los Angeles Memorial, Watch matches live on giant screen.

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Pleasure to be here. We don't usually have Shakespeare scholars on the podcast, but you've written a book about the book of Genesis, about Adam and Eve in that story, and also a book about Lucretius, who wrote this wonderful poem about the universe back in ancient time. So I begin to get the feeling that maybe you're secretly desiring to be a cosmologist, just as much as a literary scholar.

I'm not a cosmologist, but I am interested in the origins of things, the origins of the world that we live in, of the ideas that we have, and I'm particularly interested in the role that the human imagination has played in our fashioning a world for ourselves. Yeah, and I think, you know, since the audience is probably not used to topics like this, why don't we just start with the very biggest picture? And, you know, when you're at cocktail parties or stuck in airplanes and people say, explain to me what you do, how do you explain the role of a literary scholar?

I'm not at cocktail parties that often. people don't invite me to explain what I do very often, but I suppose if they do, I say I'm a writer and a literary historian. I sometimes say I'm a Shakespearean, since that covers a lot of ground, but not, as you say, all the ground. And if you ask what a literary scholar does, it's in general to try to immerse themselves and their students in this astonishing thing that survived,

that continues to survive from human beings, which is that we, over a long period of time, actually from the beginning, as a species, have tried to register and leave traces of our experience, which is an odd thing to do. I mean, other animals in general don't do that. So already 35,000 years before the present, people drew things on the walls of caves and recorded what they thought or dreamt that they thought around them. And they also signed those objects, as you may know, by putting their hands up against the walls of caves and blowing the pigment around them.

So you see these handprints, if you've ever been fortunate enough. go to those astonishing caves. So the little thing that says Picasso or Rembrandt is a very old idea. And in addition, again, if we're going to stay there, since we're starting to talk about origins, and cosmology, I suppose, in those same caves, archaeologists have found flutes made out of bare bone. so that obviously the creation of music goes back basically to the beginnings of what it means to be homo sapiens. So we have art, we have music,

and then in the oldest of the caves, I mean the oldest of the surviving ones that we know in France, there's from the very beginning, in that case there's a figure very few human figures but in that instance there's a figure that is the legs of a woman and then the head of a bull

and if we who knows what that means but if we among other things what it has to mean is that something that we would call myth making a storytelling also goes back to the beginnings

homo sapiens aren't that old as a speech So this is the very, these are among the earliest traces we have of our species life. So we have, we have art and music and storytelling. And to be a literary critic, to be interested in any case in the humanities or the arts, is to be interested in this fundamental series of things that we do as a species. And it's interesting you went to ancient history right away. I mean, sort of your angle here has been what has been called New History, or I guess you've called it cultural poetics.

I don't even want to try to define it, but maybe you can put it into words, bringing together the history and context of things with the text themselves. So the first thing to say, Sean, is that whatever new historicism or cultural poetics is the first thing to say is that the reason I go back to the beginning is that the humanities,

unlike, let's say, neuroscience or geology or medical treatments, there's no charting of a history of progress. And that's very strange. We have to take in how strange that is. If I go to a doctor, I don't actually want to be treated with the therapies that were current in 1980.

And I certainly don't want to be treated with the therapies that were current in 1680. So that we actually do, sometimes we're deceived or disappointed, but we expect that there's some kind of history of progress. But in the case of the arts, if you go to the caves at Lascaux, you absolutely, you wouldn't say that those paintings are better than Broigel or Rembrandt, but you also would be very hard-pressed to say they're worse.

Yeah, they can hang with a present-day part of us. And that's astonishing, weird. Think how weird that is. And so the first thing to say, putting whatever approach, you have aside is that there's no clear history of progress. There are individual little histories of progressions within technologies, representational technologies, but there's no history of progress. And I think we have to let that, especially in our current culture, we have to actually take in how odd that is. And one of the things that it means is that we can be in

strangely intense and direct contact with people who lived a very long time ago in circumstances and places that we can barely understand and in cultures that we have almost no other access to. I say that way because it puts the project of historicism, putting new historicism aside, It puts the project of historicism in a peculiar light. You could say that historicism traditionally, the historical study of the humanities has tried to recreate the and understand and explore the cultural, historical, social circumstances that led to the production of the works of art that we care about.

And I think that's important insofar as you can do it. But A, you can't always do it. And B, so what? What if you do it? You have to start, in my view, with the other thing, which I've talked about, the astonishment, that we can still be in touch with this without actually almost any contextual understanding whatsoever. It's as if we found a random yellowed letter in a desk in a city, in a hotel, in the city that we've never been in before, and we opened the letter, and it's addressed to us. by someone who's been dead for hundreds of years. So take that in and start there.

The trouble with old historicism is that it tended to suppress that fact, I think that's weird fact about our encounter with the ghosts of the past. However, the other side of this encounter is that we can, even if we can't think about what's moving us or reaching us from the history or culture of the past to take one of those caves, for example, where we have almost no understanding of what that culture was like, or only the most rudimentary and primitive understanding, we actually know something about ourselves, and we can think a little bit about why we're responding so powerfully to things or what it's speaking

to in us, hence the new and newer source system, that we start to think about the historical circumstances or the social and cultural circumstances insofar as we can understand them of the past, but only in relation to what we're feeling in the here and now, to the questions that we're asking, to who we are. I say that because all the historical work in the world done by people like me and people much smarter than me, trying to understand what Shakespeare or Homer or Joyce or anyone was about that produced these astonishing works, that kind of historical explanation can never answer magically the power of those works. The works reach you independent, as it were, of the historical understanding. But it remains fascinating to try to grapple with

the meanings of the past, with how these works were produced, and above all, how works that were not produced in our world still address us. Well, I mean, it's interesting because what you seem to be emphasizing there is the A-historic, of some of these texts in the sense that there is a universal aspect to them, to the good ones anyway, maybe. Well, at the very least, I would say, I'd start with saying, yes, the funny thing about the new and new historicism is it also is a slightly anti-historicism. It's against the idea that used to be carried when you said, look, you don't understand

anything unless you go back into the past and understand what the circumstances are. I mean, I'm very sympathetic to that account, but I think that it has great limits. And the other side of what I'm saying is that there is a history that we do have access to, and it's our history, and that to be aware of our history and to bring it to bear on whatever historical traces we're encountering seems to be part of the project. I pulled down a book when we were getting ready for this interview because I thought this question would come up and I wanted to suggest how it works. Yeah.

So a very long time ago, 1980, I published a book called Renaissance Self-Fashioning. And even before then, I had written this particular passage I'm looking at about Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe and about the strange, violent and disturbing. imagination of Marlow and the works that he produced in the 1580s for his late 1580s for his contemporaries. But in the beginning of this chapter, in this old book of mine called Renaissance Self-Fashioning, I begin the following way. On June 26, 1586, a small fleet financed by the Earl of Cumberland set out from Gravesend for the South Seas. It sailed down the West African coast, citing Sierra Leone in October, and at this point we may let one of those on board,

the merchant John Saracol, tell his own story. And what follows as a quotation, which I'll read. The 4th of November, we went on shore to a town of the Negroes, which we found to be but lately recently built. It was of about 200 houses and walled about with mighty great trees and stakes so thick that a rat could hardly get in or out. but as it chanced we came directly upon a port which was not shut up, where we entered with such fierceness that the people fled all out of the town,

which we found to be finely built after their fashion, and the streets of it so intricate that it was difficult for us to find the way out that we came in at. We found their houses and streets so finely and cleanly kept that it was an admiration to us all, for that neither in the houses nor streets was so much dust to be found as would fill an eggshell. We found little in their houses except some mats, gourds, and some earthen pots. Our men at their departure set the town on fire

and it was burned for the most part of it in a quarter of an hour, the houses being covered with reed and straw. Okay, that's the passage. And I go on to talk about Marlowe's plays and about the strange current of violence in Marlowe's work, the peculiar blend of almost incomprehensible admiration and violence and so on,

and a way of opening up plays like Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus and so forth. But the reason I read the passage is that probably not for you and probably not for most of your listeners, but for me and for my generation, that passage, which comes from the past, had a very specific resonance when this was published in 1980 and when I wrote the essay back in the 70s. And the resonance has to do with a scene that had burned its way into our consciousness, which was shown on television, CBS, I think, when Morley Safer was then a young reporter, recently died after a distinguished career as a reporter, was in Vietnam and did a It showed a famous clip.

It was only a few minutes or less of a GI setting fire to a Vietnamese village with their straw roofs with his Zippo lighter, famous scene where a kind of meaningless, a random act of violence against people who are noncombatants. So newest Doris is my work, and the work to some extent of others and my generation has, had to do, yes, with excavating the past, but excavating the past is never a neutral activity. It has something to do with what we're interested in, who we are. So why this passage from John Zaracol, out of, if you actually look, I don't have it in this office where we're having this conversation, but if you look at Hacklett's voyages, there's volume after volume after there's huge bodies of this.

And I was particularly at this point in my life, a mad reader of those. Things just a kind of crazy grazer into the past that way. And I always trusted my unconscious, if that's what it was. When I would read and read, I would suddenly think, here, stop. What is this? Why is this reaching me from this enormous body of things that traces that survive from the past? And that passage from Saracal is a perfect example where just out of the enormous randomness. I wasn't particularly interest in Sierra Leone or the Earl of Cumberland or this

virtually anonymous merchant, but suddenly something leapt off the page for me. And I asked myself, why is it leaping off the page from me? And it was both because it spoke to my present and because it seemed to be a key that unlocked a door in Christopher Marlowe's work. It's not stuck there in the past, We recently just had Columbus Day a few weeks ago, and there's an ongoing argument about how to think about that part of the past. I was flabbergasted, by the way. I don't know if you read this is another piece of the historicism. I'm of a curious kind.

I didn't know this before, but I didn't know about the origins of Columbus Day, which was the one time, it was meant as a one-time event by the President Benjamin Harrison, who instituted it in the wake of the, lynching in New Orleans of 11 southern Italians who had been exonerated in a trial, accused of some nefarious crime or other, and then a crowd gathered, caught them and lynched them. And the lynching was actually, in this article about it, was weirdly approved of, even by

northern newspapers like the New York Times. why? Because southern Italians at that point, particularly southern Italians were perceived as black and were treated the way in the sort of mass murder mode of American racism, the way blacks were treated. So Columbus Day originated, if you think of it from that perspective, as an attempt to make Italians white, Southern Italians white At the expense of course Or we could say at the expense of blacks I mean that African Americans

I mean that to try to create the boundary around those whom it was okay to lynch Can you imagine? I never knew that I mean I was quite astonished by this There's an article in the New York Times that ran around Columbus Day I mean it speaks to the usefulness of remembering

some of that history Let me pause for a second to talk about Quip Electric Toothbrushes. I know there are people out there, probably in this audience, who actually enjoy brushing their teeth and generally keeping up with good dental hygiene. I'm someone who has to be coerced into doing it. I understand the benefits of it. It's crucially important, really, but I need a little nudge. And the nice thing about quip is it makes it easy to have good dental hygiene. The electric toothbrush, which is the centerpiece of the system, is very pleasant to use, very ergonomic, very stylish industrial design.

and it has an automatic timer that lets you know when you've been brushing for two minutes, which, believe it or not, is how much you're supposed to brush every day. But also, every three months, they're going to give you toothpaste, floss, and a fresh brushhead. And if you go to getquip.com slash Mindscape right now, you'll get your first refill free. That's your first refill free at getquip.com slash mindscape, spelled G-E-T-Q-U-I-P-com slash Mindscape. I guess you point out the idea that we can't understand texts in the past unless we dive into their history. That's probably wrong. That's probably too far.

But then there's the other idea that these texts are just supposed to be understood as works of art in some pure realm of aesthetic beauty. And if I remember correctly, you probably don't remember this better than I do. But in the 80s and 90s, your name was invoked in the culture wars, right? When people were talking about The Tempest and whether or not we should think of it as telling us something about colonialism somehow. And there were people who thought like, oh, no, no, that's not how we should be thinking about Shakespeare. Yeah, I had a brief moment of notoriety because George Will, who actually was a sort of interesting figure. I mean, often quite, I think, thoughtful. wrote something that said that people who, like me,

who said that the tempest was actually about colonialism were more dangerous than Saddam Hussein. That was a very implausible thing to say. But this was the passions of the moment. Look, two quick things about the work of art as pure beauty. Of course it's not true. Right. I mean, works of art are embedded in,

particular moments like everything is embedded. I mean, take place and make statements and have influences. On the other hand, the idea that works of art don't matter or that their works of pure beauty or that they have no relation to the society has served art well in various circumstances. For example, in repressive regimes that have allowed works of art to say things that would be punished elsewhere. So the idea that works of art are not engaged in political or social work,

but are purely about beauty, is itself an historical or cultural and political phenomenon with an enormous importance at various moments. in 1610, the English authorities under James I first decided to caught and decided to kill a Welsh Catholic, a Benedictine name, I think his last name was Roberts, John Roberts maybe, who was very popular, worked with the poor and had a kind of charismatic following. and the state in its general hostility to Catholics, which extended through the late 16th and early 70th century, decided to kill this guy. And when they had the execution,

they did the usual unspeakable things, and then they took his heart, the executioner took his heart out of his chest, held it up before the crowd and said, here's the heart of a traitor, long live the king. And the crowd was completely silent. So we know about this because the crowd's silence was surprising and upsetting from the point of view of the authorities

because authorities expected the crowd would shout, God save the king. So if you if you said anything other than God save the king, you could be in tremendous trouble in the circumstance of that kind. And the authorities of the time watched very carefully how the crowd was responding in events of this kind. Same year, 1610, the Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, is performed before 3,000 people in an afternoon in the theater in London.

And a character, the tyrannical king, says to a woman character named Polina who's enraged him, I'll have you burned. And she says, it's a heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in it. Now, if someone said anything of the kind, at that execution, it's a heretic that's making the fire.

It's a heretic that's executing the man, this guy is not a heretic, this victim. If someone said that at the scene of the executioner, or if someone said that in a tavern, they would have their ears cut off, the tongue cut out, or they'd be killed. But a character could say this before 3,000 people on an afternoon,

and neither the actor nor the play. The playwright, no, the company got in trouble for it. Why? Because it's a work of art. I mean, doesn't mean anything. It doesn't have any political life. I mean, that's what people, I think, what I try to make people understand, which is that saying these, that works of art are pure aesthetic experiences and have nothing to do with other aspects of life is itself a political statement that serves a particular purpose.

including an aesthetic purpose that allowed these things to go on. I mean, that, and it doesn't mean, in that sense, I don't want the walls to go away. I don't want all of us to be, us just to wink and understand that it's not true, but I want us to know that this is how it works. Yeah, it's true.

And it goes both ways, right? Knowing something about the culture and what was going on, helped us understand the works, and reading the works can help us understand the present moment. I think your most recent book is tyrant, is that right? Yes. And this is about all the different ways that Shakespeare talks about bad rulers taking over.

And did you learn anything by studying that particular angle in Shakespeare? I did. I actually felt I learned quite a lot. And as often happens, you learn in the writing, you learn in the doing. It's after all the basic principle of, of, It's why teaching is a gratifying act, because you don't know what you think. One says to one's students,

and I feel for myself, you don't know what you think before you actually sit down and try to think it and write it. And so in the course of writing that book, in thinking about the trajectory of Shakespeare's thinking about politics, I learned both about how he thought catastrophic leaders could arise, and I learned about how he thought, how he thought it

might be possible under different circumstances and he tried experimentally as it were different scenarios for thinking how to get rid of a disaster of this kind short of civil war since most often

the way these things end is through civil war and Shakespeare understands this to be as we all understand this to be a catastrophe but how else do you get rid of such a disaster are visited upon. First of all, he's interested in why would sane people who are self-interested a society that actually, after all, wants to function more or less peacefully and prosperously,

why would they allow themselves to fall into the hands of a catastrophic leader? And then, of course, why, when they get into it, how can they get out of it? Yeah. I mean, what is it about Shakespeare that makes him especially good at this in some way? You know, there's been many plays written, many books written about terrible rulers or about any other topic, but he does seem to have something interesting to say about just about everything. He does. I mean, I don't have a magical, I wish I did have a formula to explain this.

I mean, I have the usual evasions of an answer. He was a genius. He was an unbelievable genius. He's super bright. I mean, that he thought about everything. I mean, he had an unbelievable imagination. But this is just a way of saying, I don't know. I mean, that I don't know how did Mozart do what he did.

How did Bach do what he did? I mean, how did Jane Austen do what she did? People were a huge species with a lot of people in the population every once in a while. Someone pops up who was just astonishing. I mean, so, I mean, that's, as he say, dumb explanation, but I don't have a smarter one. I could say several other things. He came along by the accident of his birth at a moment at which his life. his language was exploding with possibilities and power.

He came along by the accident of his birth at a moment in which there was a new medium that had not been, whose resources had not been exploited. So like the first generation that, or the first generations that figure out how to make movies or how to make long-form television series. I mean, we're shortly after you start making long-form television series,

someone makes the wire. You think, God, how did that happen? It's perfect already. Yeah, that's fantastic. But it has to do with the medium being new and available, as it were, for experiments without a tremendous oppressive past. So that's a second explanation. We could say that it helped in a somewhat perverse way,

that he came along in a time in which this censorship, and he has to be thoughtful, careful, and cunning. about how he wants to, how he and his culture wants to talk about things that are not possible to talk about openly? Do you think that he was very often trying to make trenchant political observations but in a sneaky way? I do.

I do. I think quite often. I think, and not just trenchant political observations, but trenchant observations about what can't be spoken in other ways. What can you say about same-sex love that you can't say? openly in the late 16th century. What can you say about perverse family structures? What can you say about disobedience? What can you say about transgression?

As well as, of course, more directly political. Dogs obeyed an office. Shakespeare has a character step and say, you said that in the wrong place. You got in tremendous trouble in the late 16th or early 17th century. You mentioned that there's no history of progress in the creation of these kinds of art, but there are changes of style and so forth.

Do you see if you teach Shakespeare, your students respond to it differently now than they would have decades ago? I should quickly say there may not be history of progress, but there are some artists who are greater than other artists. That's the premise of what we're saying. I mean, so there are astonishing things that happen. It's just that you don't want to say that Shakespeare, I think it's, not interesting to my thing, to say that Shakespeare is a greater dramatist than Sophocles or, I mean, what does that mean? I mean that these are both great dramatists, but it doesn't mean that Shakespeare is not better

than the person who wrote, crack me this nut, or, I mean, there's tons of miserable plays that survived from the late 16th or early 70th century. So we know there are, there were bad people at their game as well as good people. So now I've lost the train of your question. How the students respond to it over time? Yeah, I mean, you know, students are the same as us, as it were, and that they, depending on what's going on in their lives and in their world, some things have reached them more powerfully than other things.

So it's certainly the case now that if I teach Othello or I teach Hamlet, the race issues or the gender issues are registered in a different way now than they would have been when I was a student. Certain things can be spoken. No one said when I read Hamlet for the first time, you know, God, what happened to Ophelia? Why was she treated this way? Shouldn't we think of this as Ophelia's tragedy or Gertrude's tragedy? that what does it mean to to block that out

and so for now it rushes in so and likewise with lots of these plays that Shakespeare is very good at writing very uncomfortable plays I once saw this BBC televised production of Shakespeare

where Othello was played by a white guy and there was this long intro like sort of excusing it or apologizing for it So am I correct in thinking that was just a crazy thing to do? A crazy thing to do it by a white guy or a crazy thing to? They made the case that as far as we know, Othello could easily have been white. That sounds very wrong to me. Well, there's several different things.

I'm not having seen this, I'm not sure what they were up to. The play was always long, long performed until actually I think the first time was in the 19th century. When it wasn't, it was performed by white actors in various. forms of black face or darker face. So it's certainly true that the play was written for Richard Burbage, a white actor, and it was performed by white actors all the way through. No, they were trying to really make the case of all this language of the Moors and so forth could just have been, you know, Southern Europeans.

Yeah, well, it certainly was the case that in the 19th century, particularly in America, when the idea that a white woman could fall in love with a black man, one way of was disgusting and outrageous from the point of view of the racial codes of the whites. One way of arguing about the play, to justify the play, was to say, well, he wasn't really a black man in the sense of a sub-Saharan black man. He was a more slightly swarthy or whatever, but not. So maybe that's what they were up to. Yeah, it's not crazy.

It just happens to be racist as an argument. But and the, or oddly or odd, I mean, that's, I don't know, I shouldn't accuse the people. It's a uncomfortable, disturbing thing to claim, depending on what the nature of the claim was, because, as they say, it has an ugly history of being invoked as a way of justifying what was otherwise, what was otherwise to the racist audience unjustifiable. Do you have a particular way of thinking about, you know, the plays of Shakespeare's that we now cringe at a little bit? Taming of the Shrew or the Merchant of Venice where the sexism or anti-Semitism seems to us to be a little bit different maybe than it would have been at the time. I mean, there are people who say, no, it's really not anti-Semitic or sexist, and other people who say, well, this is an illustration.

We should look at it closely. Yeah, I think this is an important issue. And certainly it's an important issue now because of the nature of height of. awareness and sensitivity especially in universities. But I think it always should is an important issue for historical reasons

both in the past but certainly for ourselves. Merchant of Venice post-Holacost is not Merchant of Venice before the Holocaust. And that doesn't mean it's irrelevant. Holocaust is irrelevant. It means, as I started to say, this is our experience. How can you watch this play without thinking a little bit about what happened in the 1930s and 40s.

I mean, you can't. And that's not only because we're importing a completely irrelevant thing. It's because what happened in the 1930s and 40s is not completely unrelated to what was already expressed in the late 16th century, which was the use of the figure of the Jew as the... as the mortal enemy of the Christians. You tell that story enough and powerfully enough, nasty things happen.

And so I don't mean that Shakespeare is responsible for the Holocaust. I just mean that it is not. But I think that the tropes of anti-Semitism that the play actually explores in a rather profound way, but not in a clean way, are, very much involved in the way in which the subsequent history. As we could say, the way we started by talking about Adam and Eve, the way Eve is represented in Genesis is not innocent in the long-term treatment of women.

I mean, it's not the whole story. It's not responsible solely for that, but it's not innocent. Cultures are not innocent. The greatest artists are not innocent. I mean, they reflect the values of their world and their, time. They think about them the great ones that we care about. Shakespeare's a perfect example. Shakespeare's not an Enlightenment artist. He's not writing to try to make people who live in 02138. People like myself feel great about every one of their opinions being validated. He's living

in a different world. The Taming of the Shoe is a very disturbingly misogynistic play. Merchant of Venice is a disturbingly anti-Semitic play. I have no desire to whitewash it and say, No, no, they're not at all. But on the other hand, because he's a great artist, he actually manages to explore and to unsettle the very things that he seems to be also exploiting. There's something worth appreciating about it, something worth understanding.

Yeah, appreciating, entering into trying to understand. How else do we enter into them? How else do we understand this world, which continues in the case of misogyny and anti-Semitism, to have a contemporary life. How do we get back into how do we ever enter into this consciousness if it happens that it's not ours? How do we ever take some critical distance toward it?

But simply denouncing it and saying let's get rid of it, imagines that getting rid of it will just simply eliminate the phenomenon itself. It won't. When people turn to telehealth or weight loss, they're looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderly meds.com. Orderly meds connects you with real doctors and access to proven GLP1 medications like semaglutide and terseptatide. No guessing, just a more supportive experience and all ship directly to your door in discrete packaging.

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Those are probably the top two. And like you said, Adam and Eve as a story influence not only how we treat and think about women, but many other things. Yeah, nature, for example, which should be the dominant species, which is what seems to say at the beginning of Adam and Eve. But is that a good way of thinking about what we are

in relation to the rest of the natural world? That we're somehow the top banana? Well, it happens that was accurate, it. We did, this was, after all, a text written when humans weren't principally responsible for the great die-off and so forth, but we would become that. And that text is not innocent of our becoming. On the other hand, it doesn't produce that. I mean, doesn't make us. But it helps to make us what we became. Or at least it comes from a common source, right? There's something that makes us and something makes Adam. And we could then, because it's written in this form, as is indeed, the transgression that begins with Eve's eating of the fruit

it enables us to start thinking about where we come from, who we are. We started this conversation by talking about my interest in origins and I think that literature, not only super old literature like the book of Genesis, but all literature enables us to

get down into the places that we come from and to look and to look at them in a way that we can't ordinary look at them because we just, we don't normally think that way about ourselves, that represent ourselves as we're doing things unless we're very neurotic. In your book about Adam and Eve, you go through a lot of, you know, how it was interpreted over the years, but tell us a little bit, because probably many people are not familiar with how the story was written or, you know, the original way in which those first couple chapters of Genesis came to be.

I mean, we don't know, of course, for sure. We don't know. The story certainly preceded the first time it was written down. It was probably written down in the wake of the Hebrews' return from exile in Babylon. I would have to now remind myself of what the date was when they returned under Cyrus from their exile. But the story must have originated long before that almost certainly is an oral tale. It has the form of an oral tale. so that it wasn't someone who sat down with a pen in hand and wrote the thing down,

but probably a story that had been endlessly told and retold in various forms. Is it safe to think that most fiction that was written down, or I shouldn't say fiction, most stories that were written down at that time did start orally and then got written down, or were there novelists? Did such a thing exist? I mean, not novelists, but some things certainly were, once writing Cuneiform was originated what about 3,500 B.C.

I think. These are, we don't know for sure. We won't that check, don't worry. No, but we don't know for sure in any case when someone had the idea, but in Uruk, in Mesopotamia. So someone has the idea of actually writing things down.

Orders for beer, shipments of... Some things don't change. Right, yeah. I mean, I say that's semi-seriously because one of the first things that we actually have in Kenea form are beer orders. Anyway, it takes place because there are now large numbers of people living together, or was the first city in the world, first megacity. And that meant you were encountering people you didn't know personally in your community. So it helped to spur the idea of actually getting things somehow recorded somehow or rather the Inca's

do it with those little knots, but people in Mesopotamia did it with these little marks in clay. And certainly up to that point, for sure, the one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that the stories that existed existed because they were in circulation orally. Then at that point, in that part of the world, and at that point, a somewhat later part of a moment in which things get written down in first in Phoenician and then in Greek. The first stories that we have are almost certainly stories that are circulated orally. So the Iliad and the Odyssey are oral tales that, but written down in the first earliest moment,

the thing we talked about with Shakespeare in the theater, the moment at which there's a new technology. And often what's interesting, again, to return to something we were talking about before, that moment of incandescent moment of a new technology precipitates remarkable works. So Gilgamesh in Mesopotamian culture, then the Iliad, and we could say then the Bible.

What's interesting about all of those three documents, We, of course, don't know the relationship of the documentary traces of that and the oral tale. We know from various forms of analysis that there's an overwhelming likelihood that these are oral tales before they're written down. But how much changed when they were written down, to take your novel question, how much happened when the person, let's make his name up, Ezra, because some people thought it was the prophet Ezra who wrote down the Bible. it's not very unlikely. I mean that, or to take what religious people believe, Moses wrote it down,

or when Sunilecki, whatever his name was from Mesopotamia, wrote it down, or whoever we mean when we say Homer, how much was actually value added by the writer who wrote it down? We don't know. There's an interesting relation. We can hypothesize that between the remarkable people or remarkable geniuses who actually recorded the thing and the stories that were circulating. In the case of the Bible, it's trickier, or at least we can feel the trickiness more manifestly,

because it is now, unless you are a pious believer in divine inspiration, it's reasonably clear to virtually all scholars that there are multiple texts that are being stitched together. and that's actually what we think of Homer as well, that Homer was what was famously called a stitcher of songs, someone who stitched these things together. And an example for that in Genesis is the fact that there are two different accounts of the creation of humans,

one that involves a separate creation of a male and a female and one that seems to involve the creation of the two together, male and female. And I've heard the claim made that in Near Eastern literature at the time, the idea of a text being completely kind, contradictory to itself was no big deal. That was just how we talked. It only seemed weird to me that the two stories were naively at odds. Yes, well, I mean, people, of course, for a very long time didn't think it was naive at all. They thought it was a mystery that needed explanation.

And because intellectuals are good at this and have been good at it for thousands of years, there are lots of interesting explanations for what appears to be a tension between the two different accounts. If you believe that the work was dictated by an angel or by the Holy Ghost to Moses, then you have to, and you think it's inerrant, it can't possibly have a mistake, then you can't say it's naive or contradictory. You say that it needs explanation, it needs interpretation. And people like me come along and say, oh, no, I have an interesting account of how it worked.

The first 10-year literary professors, yes. But unlike Homer, let's say, or I don't know enough about Gilgamesh, but there was this sort of political cultural context, right? The Hebrews were small people surrounded by bigger peoples, and the Bible had this political-didactic purpose. explicitly in mind of sort of setting an agenda of who we were and where we came from. Yes, we were created by, not by Marduk. We were created by Yahweh.

And Marduk is nothing. Marduk is an empty wind or Marduk is the demon. But Yahweh is the sole creator of the universe. So we're already, as it were, now the Bible doesn't say Marduk. Marduk Fe, Yahweh, yes. But the implication, the Bible very clearly says that in the beginning, God, Yahweh created the heavens and the earth. And that's a polemical statement. It means that the other competing gods who claim to have done this,

Apsu, as they say, Marduk is the creator of humans, or whomever when Timnacht and so forth, these weren't the creators. These are done by people who aren't sort of springing up like mushrooms out of nowhere. They're aware of a world that they're living in which they're competing claims. Yeah. And is it amazing to you that despite all of these sort of reasons why these texts were written, they managed to come up with one of the world's great stories or tell a story that has resonance for us down through many centuries? It's simultaneously amazing and inevitable to me, John.

amazing because these stories are so powerful and they still reach us. And in this case, the story of Adam and Eve in the garden with the magical trees and the talking snake is a story that everyone knows thousands of years later. I mean, even though it's a wildly implausible story of human origins, as most stories of human origins are, nonetheless, it's a gazillion people still believe it. and B, even if you don't believe it, a little New Yorker cartoon that shows two naked people in a garden with tree, everyone knows what that means. That's remarkable. Inevitable, because that's how human beings in culture produce

and transmit their deepest ideas. That's why I'm in the business that I'm in. Because the idea that this is sort of mere decoration, flowers on the table, is it, that's the naive idea. these stories, storytelling, image making, this is what

is at the very heart of what it is to be a human being and to produce culture, generation after generation, to transmit it. But even when I was a kid going to Sunday school,

the thought that the really bad thing was eating fruit from the tree of knowledge rubbed me the wrong way. Like that, I didn't quite, know what message I was supposed to be getting from that. It read people the wrong way 2,000 years ago.

That's, you were just, you weren't just being impious. You were responding to the story because that's the disturbance of the story. Stories are, are, if they're powerful, they're disturbing. And that was, and mystifying and troubling. That was in a much more modern way, as I wrote elsewhere, that was Shakespeare's, if you've studied Shakespeare in relation to his sources, what you find is that Shakespeare finds a powerful story. He identifies what the motive or the explanatory principle of the story is,

and he throws it away. And then he starts to work. So he does that again and again. So what's an example of that? Well, an example of that would be Hamlet in the source, Shakespeare's source for Hamlet, little Hamlet's father is killed when Hamlet's a little boy. It's in Scandinavian culture where it's expected that a son,

the murder takes place in public and is known. It's expected in this culture that a son will have to avenge his father if the father's been murdered. The murder is known. But Hamlet's a little kid. So the question is how is he going to survive until he's old enough to kill the person who killed his father. And the answer is that he

pretends he's insane. Drew will shits in himself or whatever. Everyone in the court thinks that Little Hamlet is mentally deficient and sort of funny at that. And so they keep him around as a kind of harmless mascot.

And so he was able to keep that going until he grows up to be big enough to actually kill his father's killer. Shakespeare takes the basic plot, but he has Hamlet be a late adolescent or a young man, perfectly capable of taking revenge when the ghost of his father comes and tells him what's happened. And then Hamlet pretends to be, he says, I'm going to assume an antic disposition. He says, I'm going to pretend that I'm mad. Why? Why pretend you're mad? It actually is the worst possible thing to do because it calls attention.

to you yourself. And then it becomes the beginning of a, of a, like the irritating grain of sand in an oyster that begins to produce this extraordinary pearl. And you start worrying about why he's, everyone starts worrying in the play. Why is he? And then we start worrying as an audience. Why is he behaving this way? And so, and I could show you this again and again.

And King Lear and Othello. I mean, this is how Shakespeare worked. And so to go back to the problem. of eating of from the, why would you ever tell someone not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? And particularly, why would that be the principal prohibition? Because if you don't know the difference between good and evil, how would you know whether to obey the prohibition? So people, all I can say is that 2,000 years ago, they dug up in the 1940s, they dug up some texts that were buried in the sand in Egypt by a so-called Gnostic group.

group that was trying to understand the mysteries of the faith. And the Gnostic group thinks that the hero of that story must be the snake or the woman, one or the other, because actually it's, of course, knowledge is the thing that we must have. And that a God, a God who tells you not to know must be a wicked God. But then the sects that had that claim got stamped out. They got stamped out. Yes, they lost. That's why this stuff was buried for several thousand years.

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In Lucretius, he's an atomist. He's a naturalist, I think it's safe to say, in the sense that he's not a theist. So there's a worry in Lucretius, or for the readers of Lucretius, that it's disenchanting, that it takes away some of the romance of the world. What is your feeling about how people responded to the poem? Actually, I love Lucretius, and I write about it in all my books, but maybe we should tell the audience what his poem is. Well, he was a, Lucretius was a poet and philosopher,

follower of the Greek philosopher Epicurus and the atomist tradition that Epicurus himself represented. But Lucretius is writing around 50 before the common era, and he writes a long Latin poem, remarkably powerful and beautiful poem. And the survival of that poem is itself important and surprising because most of the texts by Epicurus, by Democritus, by the whole Greek Adamus tradition disappeared. A very few things survive. Like literally some aphorisms. Some afforisms, some accounts of what piece of a letter, accounts of what his philosophy was

in an ancient historian of philosophy who recorded some of these things. But most of the work is gone. Some more recently have been discovered by the new technology that's able to read, not by Epicurus, but some by followers of Epicurus, that's able to read the charred scrolls found in the ruins of Pompeii. How many years between Epicurus and Lucretius? Oh, centuries. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's because this very full, remarkably full poem survives, that we know in a rich way what the theory is. And the theory is that we didn't begin in a magical garden. and that was made just for us and we could eat anything we wanted and life was beautiful until we fucked up. But that we began by accident. It's not all about us.

We weren't meant to be, you know, by God meant to be the dominant creatures and we didn't disobey a commandment. We began the way everything begins in a set of mutations. he wouldn't have said genetic mutations atomic mutations strange things like that

yeah fluctuations random events and it's certainly the case that that we as a species began the way all organic species begin in a ferocious struggle for existence and reproduction that's say if somehow the mutation led whatever thing that emerged

to be able to find food and reproduce then that that species had a chance to keep going. It won't go forever. We're not destined to go forever. No species goes forever because something, the circumstances change, the environment changes.

We won't get, our society will screw up in various ways. And something else will come along that will be more successful at getting the available food and reproducing and filling the world. But we for a while have been, though we certainly began in and have emerged only in a very long, difficult process. of, I say, random, beginning with a kind of set of purely random events. Yeah, I once wrote a little article calling him

the first quantum cosmologist. Yes, that's good. Because he did have this view of the world, and the fluctuations, the swerve was an important part of it. But also the uncompromising look at the implications of this, such as our species will end, and also our individual lives will end. We will not go to the afterlife and be happy forever.

No, no afterlife because the soul is made up out of atoms just as the body is made up out of atoms. Lucretius thought the soul was made up out of particularly fine atoms. But that's a reasonably good hypothesis, the way we think our consciousness is made up out of very, in a way, very elusive neural transmissions. And once we're gone, it'll all go. I mean, the way everything goes, so that the idea that there's going to be, now Lucretius thought this was good news,

because you didn't have to worry that you were going to be pushing a rock up a hill in Hades and would then roll down as soon as you get it up to the top of the hill. So he thought that the point about this is that you didn't have to be afraid of death anymore. that the fear of death or the fear of FMOs that sometimes call fear of missing out, you'll miss your children and so on and so on,

that this was, you know, absurd. You're not going to miss anything because you won't be. It'll all be over. And he represented this as part of his therapy, because this work of philosophy was meant as a kind of therapy to make you feel freed from the anxieties and obsessions that most human beings spend their lives in the grip of. But it wasn't found to be all that effective as a therapy.

And it hasn't been, this is in our whole world. What science has offered us has been, at the very least, a mixed message therapeutically. Of course, good. We managed to extend our lifespans extraordinarily as a result of science, but the deep questions, the anxieties and we only have to look around in our political world to understand that the anxieties and obsessions that have driven people for thousands of years are present live and kicking now.

Absolutely. So already when Lucretius, you know, when Cicero, for example, contemplated this message from Lucretian epicureanism that when you're dead, you're dead, you have nothing will continue afterwards. You're not going to have an afterlife. Cicero says, in effect, that's the good news. And that is vividly contemporary, right? We're still having this debate right now. I absolutely have this debate with people. And you have a thesis that when the play was read, when the poem was rediscovered, it had a professional. found effect on European intellectual thought.

Eventually. I don't claim that it was an overnight sensation. On the contrary, it seemed not even so much impious, though eventually it seemed impious, but at first

just interesting, interesting for grammar, interesting for its metaphors, interesting for its imagery and so on and so on. But insofar as it was a theory, it seemed crazy. Crazy cosmological theory. This was rediscovered 15th century?

It was rediscovered, yes, in the early 15th century. So it seemed in a world that believed precisely that we were the favorite creatures of a providential god. This idea that we were the result of a set of random mutations seemed mad.

and that the aspects of the theory still seem actually hard to get hold of, even though contemporary science thinks that more or less they're true. Take the idea. Lucretia says that your eyes didn't come into being in order to enable you to see. That there were just random mutations. And then it turned out to be useful to be able to see because you could pick up the food that you needed. But the idea that something, it's still very hard to grasp.

I mean, I find it hard to grasp. The idea that your eyes in all of their unbelievable complexity emerged in an evolutionary way without purpose, without clear direction, that seems impossible. The eye was exactly what William Paley used for his clockmaker analogy when he said that we had to be designed, right? And ironically, the eye seems to be one of the easiest things for evolution to discover. It's been evolved in different species over and over again throughout history. So, well, good. I mean, what happens when we die, you know, whether it's good to know things, how tyrants come to be? I think there's no question that these are all questions that have not gone away.

I think we have a lot to think about in the modern world. Yes, it's true. All right. Stephen Greenblatt, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thank you, Sean.