Interviews

Creative Immersion: a Conversation with Joan Taylor

by

Robert Glenn Plotner

(note: this piece was previously published in Art Nouveau Nagazine) 

Joan Taylor is a historian, the author of several books and numerous articles on early religion including Christians and the Holy Places (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), winner of an Irene Levi-Sala Prize, The Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism (Eerdmans, 1997), and Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria (Oxford, 2006). She has also written on the true story of a remarkable adventurer, Henry Timberlake. The Englishman, the Moor and the Holy City: The True Adventures of an Elizabethan Traveller (Tempus, 2006) follows Captain Timberlake as he journeys to the Middle East and befriends a Moor who will prove instrumental in rescuing Timberlake from imprisonment and death. Her television and radio appearances have included the History Channel's In Search of John the Baptist and In the Footsteps of Jesus. A native New Zealander, she is an Honorary Research Fellow of the University College London, Department of History/Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies; and Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Joan Taylor is also an accomplished poet and novelist. Conversations with Mr. Prain (Melville House, 2006) about a young, unpublished writer, Stella, courted on numerous levels by an older, established publisher was praised as "a novel of manners and of intellect, of passion and calculation, of negotiation and compromise, of winning and losing, of love and sex."  She serves on the organizing team for poetrywivenhoe, an avenue of public reading for both local and well-known poets in Wivenhoe, England where she resides.

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Robert Glenn Plotner: In your novel Conversations with Mr. Prain, there is an analogy made between the writer-publisher relationship and the dalliance of the powerful publisher Edward Prain with the young writer Stella. There is an inevitable courtship that takes place between flattery, interest in the artist's work, and the will of the publisher to train the artist in a direction deemed presentable, market ready, to the publisher's own ends. As an artist, is compromise between the imaginal and the practical anathema or is it a judgment of degree?

Joan Taylor: Stella - the creative spirit - is very naive but during the course of the 'game' she wises up. Some writers remain continually messed with and exploited, and others can be very sure of what they want and what they are prepared to accept. There are people who stay completely true to their vision and happen to press the button of the popular zeitgeist, even when published by a small, independent press. I was very lucky that Melville House Publishing wanted Conversations instantly, and that they have a real passion for literature as art, so they asked for very few changes. But in granting me my vision they have not had an easy time marketing it. You can't put a sign on the book saying, 'Don't even think about reading this novel unless you're interested in the fraught relationship between art and commerce.' Some people have absolutely loved Conversations, and I feel like hugging each and every one of them, because they are my people, they are the ones I was writing this for. Others have picked it up on the basis of the 'erotic mystery' marketing tag and just thought, 'Boring, boring -this is not a sexy whodunnit.' I've irritated them.

RGP: How does one escape manipulation while still being able to utilize the potentially focusing lens of an external perspective?

JT: If the focusing lens really focuses you then it is fantastic! But in a mass-market industry like commercial publishing you need to be clear about the difference between comments on quality and comments on saleability.

This is so different from academic publishing, in which you get a contract on the basis of a quality assessment of your work by your peers, and saleability is not such a significant factor. As novelists we don't get assessed by other novelists, we get assessed by agents - who are usually concerned with saleability - and readers for editors whose jobs sometimes depend on selling enough of their chosen titles. Incidentally, agents now have a category for 'offbeat/quirky', which means publishers have identified this as a genre type they can sell to a particular market group. So then you get a particular avant-garde cover to attract alternative readers. Perhaps this is progress.

RGP: In your own work, have you faced the problem between the purity and intensity of personal vision and the need to communicate one's vision to others?

JT: Ah, such a sensitive topic! Sadly, Melville House Publishing have not wanted to publish my new novel (This Jerusalem - a romance that turns into a violent drama as the personal intermixes with the political), as it was not right for their tastes, and here I feel I have failed to communicate my vision to people I greatly respect. But in the long run this has been a good thing, because it has made me cut, re-imagine and re-sculpt the piece, and I've realised I probably need a New Zealand publisher for this work, to ground myself in my own cultural identity.

RGP: Is intensity vs. communicability an extension of the tension between the artist's often unbridled will to create, to express, and the restraint of craft?

JT: Craft is the body of the imagination, but when you have finished you have created a product. You offer that to the world in humility, knowing that you are ultimately just one dot in the big picture of humanity. We all do our individual things, but I actually feel a strong collectivist sense about artistic enterprise, and if people don't want what we offer then so be it.

RGP: Speaking of communication, is there an artist who speaks to you more personally than others?

JT: Probably the New Zealand poet James K. Baxter, and not just his poetry but his whole life journey. I've used his Jerusalem Daybook as a basis for themes in This Jerusalem: the struggle for meaning, freedom and poetry, the recognition that we stuff up, the need to resist what society expects and to find your own way, the destructiveness of colonialism and racism, the path of true spirituality, love. He was hugely celebrated as a poet and a counter-cultural voice, but there is also a deep sadness in his work: he was conscious of being a damaged, alcoholic sinner, and just wanted to strip himself down, raw.

RGP: Is reflectivity or projection more important to your work? That is, does self-examination or imagination, a projection of the possible, more occupy the core of your creative life?

JT: Both are important but so is examination of material 'out there'. Creativity goes into my studies of history and archaeology, to imagine the world of the past. I've only really allowed myself to expand on that dimension in non-fiction in The Englishman, the Moor and the Holy City, and play with 'what if?' and 'it would have been like this' in a popular history book. But creativity is everywhere in academia, in fact, because you are struggling to see things better than anyone else has done before, and to make connections no one else has made. You take what is 'out there', hold in your head a colossal framework of facts, theories and proposals, and you build your thesis on it.

RGP: The sacred and art have had their own intimate relationship throughout human history. We live today in very disconnected time with cynicism dominating popular culture. Is the ineffable still relevant to art?

JT: Yes, truly, there is a cynicism that baulks at anything 'deep', fearing pretentiousness, yet real pretentiousness to me is insisting that the trivial is significant. Art surely needs to delve into the meaning and underlying presuppositions that shape our lives, whether these are 'sacred' or 'profane', whether grand theories of causation or the highly particular and personal.

RGP: Jewish thought is often highly allegorical. There is a tradition of secret teaching carried in the subtext of the literature, even within the letters of the Hebrew alphabet itself. Philo wrote of the Therapeutae of whom you write in Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria, "For they read the holy scriptures and draw out in thought and allegory their ancestral philosophy, since they regard the literal meanings as symbols of an inner and hidden nature revealing itself in covert ideas." In your view, was Jesus part of this symbolic, contemplative tradition or did he break with it?

JT: That's a very interesting question! There were a range of different interpretative traditions in Jesus' time from the allegorical/symbolic to the highly literal. Jesus designed parables to explain the value and meaning of the Kingdom of God, as - I think - a state of love and compassion within community. So he used the allegorical in his work. Jesus was an artist. His stories are among the most powerful ever composed - think of 'The Good Samaritan' or 'The Prodigal Son'.

RGP: Is there a misreading of symbolism as literalism in contemporary religion?

JT: Absolutely. Biblical literalists do not understand literary genre. When the Gospel of John tells us at the beginning that the Logos is essentially the human life spirit, you know you're reading an allegorical piece, not reportage. The date of the death of Jesus is even moved to fit the allegory of this Gospel.

RGP: Christian thought on the subject of heaven can morph between the literal, the physical, the metaphysical, and the metaphorical. The physical placement of heaven as being "up there" was perhaps forever altered by Copernicus. Was there a consensus view on heaven in early Christian thought and can it be reconciled with a more nuanced understanding between "up there" and "in here"?

JT: I don't know about consensus. The literalism is reflected in the Ascension stories, in which Jesus goes up to the sky like a rocket. The allegorical tradition definitely went for a more esoteric view of heaven; the soul should ascend to heaven, not the body, and both the Alexandrian tradition and the Gnostics continued this line more than the Roman church. In the second century you get mainstream 'literalist' (materialist) Christians like Justin Martyr insisting that people who believed your soul would go to heaven when you died were not really Christians at all; you had to believe you'd dwell in heaven when heaven came to earth and there was a physical resurrection of the dead, and judgement. But there was always a more spiritual kind of Christianity around that viewed heaven as belonging to the dimension of spirit.

RGP: In your studies of early religion, what is the most important, perhaps unexpected, insight that has occurred to you?

JT: I am struck by how our present leaders' perspectives on Islamist terrorists are much the same as the Roman and Judaean authorities' perspectives on the religious zealots who fomented insurrections and attacks in the period Jesus lived. I think the story of Jesus is a lesson on how a paranoid maintenance of security can lead to the death of the innocent. Jesus is a representative of all those who are incarcerated, tortured and killed unjustly by people in power who fear a loss of security in one way or another. I am actually working on a novel on this theme, a historical 'life of Jesus' with a view to our contemporary world. I am sure most publishers will run a mile from it, but it is something I feel very passionate about right now.

RGP: You juxtapose the purification rituals of the Essenes with those of John the Baptist in The Immerser: John the Baptist Within Second Temple Judaism, arguing their differences. What drove the need for purification in the early Christian sects?

JT: Purification in early Christianity - which started off as Judaic immersion for ritual impurity - rapidly became an initiation rite on the pattern of initiation into pagan mystery cults.

RGP: Does the desire for purification manifest itself in other ways today?

JT: I think we all need points of renewal and reckoning. John's 'immersion of repentance towards the forgiveness of sins' has a powerful resonance. It is possible to start again and make good what you have wrecked.

RGP: In Christians and the Holy Places you write of the pagan practice of pilgrimage to sacred sites as being absorbed by the Church via Constantine. The translation of pagan rite and ritual into Christianity has been remarked upon in many places. Would the Church be substantially different today without the influence of paganism?

JT: It would be a small Jewish sect.

RGP: Although it is sometimes confused with the gimmickry of soliciting outrage, controversy in art tends to arise when a given work pushes against a tired establishment. Does the same process extend to archaeology and religious scholarship through controversial conclusion?

JT: Yes, but with art to get a reaction of shock or outrage is an artistic result in itself. Controversial conclusions in history or archaeology or religious scholarship can be designed to attack religious ideology or tradition, in quite banal ways, or even to elevate scholars into media celebrities (with six figure book deals and documentaries). On the other hand, there can be proposals that seek to endorse the same ideologies or traditions, by finding sensational 'proof'. Hype is a terrible danger when it comes to clear assessments.

RGP: The recent "rediscovery" of the Talpiot tomb near Jerusalem has been the subject of controversy as it contained ossuaries bearing inscriptions consistent with a "Jesus family tomb." What is your take on the findings?

JT: I have already written (in Christians and the Holy Places) about a tomb not far away which had a similar constellation of 'early Christian' names. In that case the proposal that they were early Christians died away when everyone understood just how very common the names were in the first century. With the Talpiot tomb, if the 'Christian' wing of the family of Jesus took the body of Jesus from the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, and reburied it, they would surely not have written Jesus' name on the ossuary: writing effectively 'this is Jesus' when people were proclaiming a physical resurrection would have been unbelievably undermining. There were accusations from the Judaean authorities that the disciples took the body, so why point that out? A tomb is not that secret - people come and go all the time. Everyone else clearly went to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea to remember Jesus, because it was that tomb that was covered up by the emperor Hadrian when he was trying to quash Christianity. This is me looking at things partly as a historian and partly as novelist. As a novelist you have to think about what would be believable for a character to do, given certain motivations, fears, circumstances, and actions of others.

RGP: In your sweeping account, The Englishman, the Moor and the Holy City: The True Adventures of an Elizabethan Traveller, Protestant sea captain Henry Timberlake befriends a Moroccan Moor on his way to Mecca. The friendship bridges and transforms the divide between East and West within these two men, and yet in broader terms this divide is still persistent 400 years later. The solution seems to be cultural rather than militaristic, creative rather than destructive, but it is often a reaction to Western culture that sources Islamic anger toward the West. What is missing from the equation?

JT: I wrote the book because I wanted to present a positive true story of Christian and Muslim friendship, when history bombards us with stories about the conflicts. When people meet each other face to face and really get to know each other we discover a common humanity that is far more powerful than ideology. There is just so much understanding and friendship out there, actually, so much goodwill and mutual respect between people of different religions. But it's not 'news' - only the conflicts are 'news'. I saw in a documentary on Paulo Coelho a few years ago that he was hugely acclaimed and loved in Iran. That's something to remember when the western media presents Iran in the way they do. People respond to the truth in other people, and the storytellers that reveal it.