Challenge 173

The Primordial Challenge

Please read “Fall Silent” first.

At Bewildering Stories we have a number of unofficial mottoes. One of them is: “We’re not always Halloween, but we are Halloween all the time.” And yet that motto inexorably implies another: “We’re not always Christmas or Easter, but we are Christmas and Easter all the time.” And as our exchange with Deep Bora shows, that “motto” is only an example: other observances are welcome, as well.

Ian Donnell Arbuckle’s “Fall Silent” takes up a challenge that is both literary and existential: how to portray the meaning of a historical event? Ian uses a kind of negative image approach by constructing a counterfactual story: what if Judas had reversed his historical role and tried to save his friend? Would he not be acting on a humane impulse that we, too, might share?

And yet, as “Fall Silent” demonstrates, Judas — and we — are caught in an impossible dilemma: if we save Jesus, we miss his point. Judas fails the words quoted in the passage from Matthew and, like Pontius Pilate, remains crucified by alternate history as well as actual history. At a literary and historical level, then, the challenge becomes: what happens without Good Friday?

“Fall Silent” joins a long tradition of works that attempt to wrest meaning from history. That tradition began with the first gospel writers, who — always partially but at times brilliantly — set about to capture the meaning of the events. From the very beginning the Ancient equivalent of an ad hoc system of blogs or even Bewildering Stories appeared: so many gospels were written to support so many different sectarian viewpoints — or even to provide what amounts to gossip — that the church was practically forced to make an “editors’ choice” of the most “catholic” and establish a canon.

In science fiction, Michael Moorcock’s “Behold the Man” — in the original; the expanded version is quite ill-advised — depicts the accidental creation of an alternate history. A British scholar time-travels to the year 28 in order to meet Jesus in person. He discovers that the man he expected does not exist and that he, himself, must become the Jesus of history or there will be none at all.

Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ gives a lengthy account in a realistic mode. Kazantzakis seems to have an artist’s view of alternate history: what if Jesus had shunned his calling and been content with mediocrity?

Other, contrarian mainstream novels might include Simon Mawer’s The Gospel of Judas, which has nothing to do with the 2nd-century Gnostic gospel discovered at Nag Hammadi. This subgenre is overtly anti-Christian but does no favors to anyone else, including the authors.

Until now, Bewildering Stories has had almost no “Jesus stories.” Before “Fall Silent,” the only precedent I can think of is my own “Don’t Get Noticed,” a “seasonal story” that appeared in issue 76. Among the points it makes is that time travelers may change the past, but they’ll have to live with it by themselves in the world they create; their own timeline counts them as missing in action and continues unchanged. The logical corollary is outlined by the history students in the story: find out what you can and work with what you have.

Challenge 173 is Ian’s suggestion: take up any part of the gospel stories, imagine it in your own way, and see where it takes you. But, I would add, heed Judas’ pathetic suggestion at the end of “Fall Silent”: you may not want to go there.

Can Good Friday be averted? “Fall Silent” implies a counter-question: What would be the point? The late American historian Bruce Catton has already responded to that in simple and yet powerful prose poetry in a chapter of his autobiography:

Life’s dimensions are infinite. It reaches from the abyss to the heights, and it touches the truth at each extreme... The worst and the best visions are true, and the ultimate truth that embraces both is fantastically beyond comprehension.

— Bruce Catton, Waiting for the Morning Train

The cross is not merely a symbol of Roman power or even the Christian religion: it is a symbol of humanity itself at the intersection of its best and worst visions. And after Good Friday there is no place to hide: we have to choose our own.

Responses welcome!