William Blake’s Cain and Abel

Cain By José Saramago, Harvill Secker, Rs 499

The Romantic tradition that made a hero out of Milton’s Satan also went dewy-eyed over Cain, who murdered his brother, Abel, and so first confirmed for his poor parents, Adam and Eve, the presence of death in their midst. Byron wrote a closet drama, Cain: A Mystery (1821), where the eponymous hero sits in his dark corner bawling against the injustice of birth in a fallen world: “I sought not to be born: nor love the state/ To which that birth has brought me.” And in Shelley’s poem, “Adonais” (1821), the last to join the procession of mourners for the dead Keats is one “frail form”, who, given his moanings and tremblings and tears, is probably the poet himself. On being asked about his identity, this stranger bares his “ensanguined brow” which is “branded” like “Cain’s or Christ’s”. Thus Cain the murderer is fused with Christ the saviour in the Romantic imagination probably because the former is seen as being more sinned against than sinning — the original wandering Jew who is “neglected and apart;/ A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter’s dart”.

So long before José Saramago wrote his novel glorifying Cain, the latter had already been seen as the doomed rebel who is condemned to suffer because he dares to question. Only in Saramago, Cain is less a swooning Romantic than a rationalist or rather, a communist like his author, since he is a confirmed believer in the dignity of labour and in the advantages of classless society. Trained as a farmer, Cain gives up agriculture after god rejects his burnt offerings, preferring Abel’s lamb steaks to Cain’s fried corns. Struck by the sense of god’s partiality, Cain murders Abel, since, as he says, he cannot kill god. Later he will earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, working tirelessly to give his mistress, Lilith, undreamt-of pleasure, and eventually, a son.

In Saramago’s novel, the questions Cain asks god when the latter comes to curse him for Abel’s murder are pertinent, bringing out the illogicality in the Biblical story. For instance, does god have a penchant for putting his created beings to test, or why did he, the omnipotent one, allow the killing of Abel to happen when he might as well have stopped it? With such piercing arguments, Cain is established as a rationalist for whom god is clearly no match — on being challenged, god blusters about his undisputed lordship, and strikes a deal with Cain, offering him protection while putting the damning mark on his brow. It is good to find god being beaten by human intelligence, yet one wonders whether there is anything novel in all these fervent questionings.

Milton, who, unlike Saramago, was justifying the ways of god to men, had made his disgruntled, post-lapsarian Adam voice similar doubts about divine justice. Within the Bible, Job’s lamentations follow an analogous pattern. This is not to say that Saramago’s Cain is not interesting, but that it poses no challenge to the reader, unlike, say, Paradise Lost, notwithstanding its overarching theology. And then, in an age where religion itself has become an empty shell, the thrill of heresies is lost as well. They can be resurrected with adequate atmospheric effect, as Umberto Eco accomplishes in The Name of the Rose. But Saramago’s flat style, which calls a spade a spade with a vengeance, would never allow this to happen.

The explanatory, dilatory style is also responsible for the remarkably bad sex in the novel. The scene in which Lilith’s slave women work Cain’s organ up could be a lesson in how the dull catalogue of common things can unweave a rainbow. “The slave-women appeared to be in no hurry and were concentrating now on extracting the last drops from cain’s penis, which they took turns to raise greedily to their lips with the tip of one finger.”

But Saramago also shows how this style can sometimes be used to advantage, especially to describe momentous events with a straight face, producing spots of humour. In the literally earth-shattering scene of god’s wrath in the garden of Eden after the Fall, the lord speaks thus: “you, eve, will not only suffer all the discomforts of pregnancy, morning sickness included, you will give birth in pain, and yet you will still feel desire for your husband, and he shall rule over you” and then “Poor me, said eve, what a bad beginning, and what a sad fate will be mine”. Cast out of Eden wearing “stinking animal hides”, “adam and eve resembled two orang-utans who had stood upright for the first time”. So the curse is a boon since evolution is on. At the same time, the incurable inner and outer desolation is conveyed through such simple sentences as: “Outside of the garden of eden, the earth was arid and inhospitable, the lord was not exaggerating when he threatened adam and eve with thorns and thistles. As he [god] had so rightly said, the good life was over.” This might well compare with “The world was all before them, where to choose/ Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:/ They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,/ Through Eden took their solitary way” (Paradise Lost, Book XII, lines 646-9), or remind one of Masaccio’s moving fresco of the expulsion.

If one of Saramago’s intentions in this novel is to challenge the Biblical god’s dictatorship, then he succeeds in his aim more through such potent words thrown here and there than through all of Cain’s ratiocinations. When the kind-hearted angel, Azael, tells the exiled Adam and Eve to seek out travellers who might help them find work, the Biblical story of creation as the creation myth falls through in an instant. Adam and Eve are not the first man and woman — even as they had frolicked in the enclosed garden of Eden, other humans created by other gods had led parallel lives in other parts of the world, which cannot, therefore, have been made by the Biblical god alone. This revelation fells the supremacy of the Bible at one go, and the truth is later driven home more strongly when god goes on his killing sprees through his agents, massacring all those who would not accept his authority. He is not God, but merely the god of Israelites, and what matters to him is not the protection of the entire mankind, but the preservation of a tribe he has chosen, rather arbitrarily, as his own.

Paradise Lost — which constantly needles the reader in subtle ways to choose dull divine logic over charming devilish sophistry — posits the good angels as the models of human conduct. By definition they are intelligent beings, yet they never use their intelligence to disobey god. So they are often seen doing things meaningless to themselves except that they have meaning as the will of god. While Saramago’s purpose in writing Cain could not have been more different from Milton’s, here too the angels seem to perform a similar function.

Azael feels a tinge of desire on seeing the naked Eve, but all that he does is gently touch her breast (much to Eve’s delight), and then arm her and Adam with valuable practical advice. The worker angels assist Noah in building the ark at god’s command, take pleasure in the physical labour, and then with “characteristic simplicity” return to their barracks “with no expectation of any medals being handed out”. In this they are much like Cain’s prized donkey, on whom Saramago heaps paeans of heartfelt praise. Not unexpectedly then, when Cain at last has his revenge on god, a new utopia is created that is neither socialist nor edenic — it is populated entirely by animals.