The Nana Code
With summer fast approaching here in North America, it's time to think about those summer reads. And what better accessory to take to the beach than a delightfully irreverant blasphemy based on the oldest heresy in the history of conventional Christianity: a Jesus-porks-Mary-Magdalene narrative? A book so dangerous that the Vatican does its worst to undermine it. A book that brought controversy to Christendom in the aftermath of an incident that gave everyone the idea that Islam was the world's most intolerant religion.
I'm referring, of course, to José Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
Saramago's novel is both a monument to his distinctively playful style and a meditation on the very 20th-century subjects of silence and guilt in the face of atrocity. And Jesus porks Mary Magdalene in it. So when it was first published in 1991, the Vatican pressured Portugal into withdrawing it from competition for the European Union's Ariosto prize.
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is worth a look if you haven't read it already. It inspired me so much that I have even thought about writing my own Alterna-Christ novel -- except that it would be a very, very bad one. I have some ideas for how to do this.
I could base it around the theories of my late maternal grandmother. Though not widely-read, she was intellectually curious, particularly on the subject of religion. She was a fine exemplar of the lay tradition of popular Catholicism, filling in the blanks in Catholic theology. For those of you who don't know, there are many of these, and the official Church response to inquiry on them is always the same: "It's a mystery." Nana, however, would not settle for that. Several times she speculated in my presence that, since the universe is so vast, there must be other gods in charge of other parts of it, since it would be too big even for God.
This was scandalous heresy enough for me, but then there was the time that she tried earnestly to explain to me that Christ was the last name of Jesus. Oh yes, she said, Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary Christ. I remember that something about this did not sound quite right even to my 10-year-old ears. But would it work as a novel?
Let's assume for a moment that I were an aspiring fifth-rate writer with not so much as a tenth of José Saramago's talent, but with an overflowing, grubby-minded lust for filthy lucre. Let's assume further that I am capable of writing paragraphs as bad as this one:
"The curator looked down and saw the bullet hole in his white linen shirt. It was framed by a small circle of blood a few inches below his breastbone. My stomach. Almost cruelly, the bullet had missed his heart. As a veteran of la Guerre d'Algérie, the curator had witnessed this horribly drawn-out death before. For fifteen minutes, he would survive as his stomach acids seeped into his chest cavity, slowly poisoning him from within."
Note how this paragraph fairly begs to be made into a shlocky Hollywood movie. Note further the reference to la Guerre d'Algérie. It won't do to call it simply "the Algerian War." No, here you have to go for the worst kind of "snob appeal": the middlebrow kind, where they think they're in on something because they know that la Guerre d'Algérie refers to the war in Algeria, which they know about even though everyone else doesn't. Random bits of French in an English text make them feel like they're back in college again, reading the Cliff's Notes to War and Peace.
But I digress. Once I have the style down, I can come up with a plot based on spurious etymologies and harebrained theories drawn straight from Nana's periodic discourses on these topics.
On further reflection, though, I realize that this couldn't work. No one would fall for it. When I tell people that Nana thought Christ was the family name of Jesus, they just laugh. It would be as if someone went around saying that da Vinci was the last name of the Renaissance painter Leonardo, instead of a reference to the town where his father was born -- and if that someone made it into a whole book. Unfortunately, Nana's theories are not bestseller material. Who would buy crap like that?