Forgetting Lot's Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship

Introduction

Introduction Anonymous In 1936, this unnamed poem appeared in A. E. Housman’s posthumous collection , More Poems: Half-way, for one commandment broken, The woman made her endless halt; And she to-day, a glittering token, Stands in the wilderness of salt. Behind, the vats of judgment brewing Thundered, and thick the brimstone snowed; He to the hill of his undoing Pursued his road.1 This laconic poem by a laconic poet encapsulates some of the difficulties of reading the figure of Lot’s wife. The nameless poem does not name its subjects , Lot’s wife and Lot; it requires that the reader recognize the ‘‘glittering token’’ and the man who pursues the road of his own undoing. This recognition is, however, the least of the interpretative difficulties the poem creates. We can name names: I begin this book, in the preface, with a reading and summary of the story of the family of Lot in Genesis, and I do this because I have found that the peculiar turns of the story are not part of the ready knowledge of many with whom I have spoken, any more than they were part of my own when I first became interested in the story’s details. Such iconographic literacy, however, leads only to questions; as commentators have long been aware, the story is very odd, and odd from the start.2 It takes on peculiar opacities in the twentieth-century revisions that are the subject of 5 6 Forgetting Lot’s Wife this book. If, to return to one of my epigraphs, Auerbach is right to say that the ‘‘Scripture stories . . . seek to subject us,’’ for the artists I discuss here the stories maintain their compelling force, and yet it is unclear what subjection to them would mean.3 Indeed, Lot’s wife’s disobedience is legible as the refusal of subjection. The opacities and lacuna in biblical stories that Auerbach describes so acutely invite endless retelling. They are also reminders that the further we read these stories, the more opaque they might appear. The story of Lot’s wife evokes things we may feel we cannot not know about—sex, remembrance, the spectacle of mass death—and yet it estranges them. Housman’s poem accentuates these opacities. The poem’s two quatrains pair the transgression of Lot’s wife with that of Lot; her ‘‘endless halt’’ and his ‘‘undoing,’’ the poem implies, somehow rhyme. To summarize the poem in this way is, however, already to rush past description into interpretation. Much depends on how one reads the poem’s first line. Does Housman write ‘‘. . . for one commandment broken’’ in order to stress the severity of the punishment, perhaps even to sympathize with this destroyed figure? A stress falls on ‘‘one,’’ and this stress might emphasize the paltriness of the transgression that brings down such a strange and fierce, unjust punishment. This emphasis could also, however, be quite orthodox, suggesting that one broken commandment alone inspires divine wrath. The poem is about something like a judgment, the instantaneous transformation of Lot’s wife; its own judgment of the events to which it alludes, however, remains shadowy. What is most remarkable here, perhaps, is that Housman does not name either Lot’s wife’s backward look or Lot’s sex with his daughters; he assumes but does not name these acts. The parallel between them does, however, have the intriguing result of producing a certain penumbra of agency around the stumbling and unaware Lot. The biblical text, so enigmatic about so much, carefully protects the patriarch when it comes to his knowledge of the incestuous schemes of his daughters: ‘‘That night, after they had plied their father with wine, the older one went in and lay with her father; he was not conscious of her lying down or her getting up’’ (Gen. 19:33); and with the younger, too, the following night, the text asserts again, he was neither ‘‘conscious of her lying down or her getting up’’ (Gen. 19:35). Whatever we may know of Lot’s wife, it seems, we know she knows she should not look back; whatever we know of Lot, we know we cannot blame him for the two incestuous nights he sleeps through.4 The conscious disobedience of Lot’s wife contrasts with the unconsciousness of Lot himself. Housman’s poem upsets this logic. What I have loosely called the ‘‘rhyme’’ between Lot’s wife’s backward look and Lot’s ‘‘undoing’’ in Housman...