'The Keeper of the Bed': Unpacking the complex history of eunuchs

Charles Humana's book The Keeper of the Bed: The Story of the Eunuch (1973) is a curiosity that is worth a look by anyone who is interested in how eunuchs were depicted throughout history. Born in Nottingham, England in 1921, Humana – born Joseph Jacobs – was a human rights advocate who authored several books and died in London in 1992. "Keeper of the Bed" strikes a confident tone, but it will leave the careful reader with many questions.

Humana quips that the eunuch is often thought of as "a human pterodactyl or dodo," that is, as "one of the extinct creatures of the earth". He emphatically rejects the common assertion that they were a "third sex," although he does not fully explain what he means by that. His only elaboration is that it is more correct to perceive them as "deprived men" rather than as transformed beings.

The text demonstrates that Humana is well-read in his subject matter. He drops many key references and provides a bibliography. For anyone who wants to begin studying the history of eunuchs, this book is a good selection, insofar as it provides excerpts of important works and thus can almost be counted as an anthology. The reprinted works include: Giacomo Casanova's memoir of Bellino; six tales from Richard Burton's "Arabian Nights"; G. Carter Stent's essay, "Chinese Eunuchs"; and some of the "Persian Letters" by Baron de Montesquieu. There are also lengthy quotations from Charles Ancillon's Eunuchism Display'd and from travel writer Paul Rycaut.

Humana recognizes that eunuchs are the victims of much misunderstanding. Although he writes that "historians from Herodotus to Gibbon, in sharing the common prejudice, have fallen short of their usual objectivity," he does not escape employing this prejudice himself, insofar as he makes many generalizations. He observes from the outset that "writers from Xenophon to Burton, from Juvenal to Montesquieu, contradicted each other," but his book winds up simply citing anecdotes and publishing long passages without the level of critical analysis that could resolve these contradictions. In short, he sees prejudice and falsehood, but doesn't answer either.

"Historians and writers, court officials and ordinary people, were almost unanimous in regarding them as monsters and freaks," he writes, "their mutilation seldom accepted with the sympathetic concern shown to those who had lost legs, or arms or sight." He points out that the ancient world treated eunuchs as comic figures on the stage, but never as weighty tragic figures with deep human motivations. He acknowledges Montesquieu's fiction as having been "distinguished by treating the eunuch as a human being rather than as a totally evil creature."

He calls Richard Millant's Les Eunuques à travers les ages, published in 1908, "the most recent comprehensive work," yet says it is "nevertheless misleading since it is one of a study of sexual perversions." This is confusing. If he believes that Millant's book grossly misidentifies as a sexual perversion what should be properly understood as the product of war, slavery and sacrifice, how could he possibly call Millant's book "comprehensive"?

At the beginning of "The Keeper of the Bed," Humana identifies three reasons for castration. The first reason is war, or more precisely, "vengeance on a fallen enemy." The second reason is slavery, because castrated slaves were preferred for their "practical advantages" in certain roles; namely, in societies that segregated men and women, castrated men filled critical gaps as messengers and guardians. The presence of eunuchs enabled a particular institutionalized form of segregation. The third reason is ritual sacrifice, usually of one's own body or sexual urges, to appease a god.

This short list of reasons is manifestly incomplete because, later on, the book acknowledges many other reasons for castration. Retributive violence is not always confined to war. The theologian Abelard was castrated as punishment for having married illicitly, the eunuch Hermotimus took vengeance on his castrator and the man's sons, and slaves could be punished for any number of transgressions. Slaves may, of course, have been castrated for reasons unrelated to their service; not all were deliberately castrated for the purpose of serving a particular role.

Furthermore, some slaves were castrated to groom them for sexual roles (as was Nero's concubine Sporus), purposes that are not quite covered by the term "practical advantages." Some men were coerced by poverty or family pressure into seeking employment as eunuchs, as was common in China. Some wearied of married life or sexual urges, independent of any religious belief. Some were castrated by illness or accident. Some were guinea pigs for the Nazis. Some were castrated by doctors who more genuinely believed that this treatment would ameliorate their physical or mental problems. Overlapping with this category are individuals who identified as women and elected castration (or were pushed toward it) as an attempt to address their gender identity. Of these, Humana drops just one example at the end of the book: a Norwegian adolescent in Johan Bremer's book Asexualization (1959). Humana, however, rolls this case study into the category of "homosexuals" mistreated by doctors, and he does not tease out any further implications about gender identity, even though the quoted passage indicates that this person said he felt more like a girl and requested to be castrated.

Again, Humana acknowledges all these stories within the book – he just fails to analyze them, and therefore never knits together a complete list of all the reasons for castration. He explicitly provides a partial list and implicitly provides the rest.

Even his title, "The Keeper of the Bed," is a misnomer, because the book does not solely examine the Persian and Chinese harems. The book includes, for example, Italian singers. His repeated stylistic reference to "the eunuch" is a misleading generalization, because obviously there was more than one kind of eunuch.

A recent critical reaction to "The Keeper of the Bed" can be found in Gary Taylor's book Castration (2000) in a footnote to page 17. Taylor groups Humana's book with similar histories: Peter Tompkins' The Eunuch and the Virgin (1962) and Victor T. Cheney's A Brief History of Castration (1995). Taylor complains that these three books "were all written by amateur scholars with sometimes peculiar agendas." Humana, he complains, "included sixteen (mostly soft-porn) illustrations, uncritically accepted the universal validity of Freud's castration theories, and began and ended his book deploring 'the certainty' of vasectomy becoming 'compulsory in a future era', thereby producing 'dull generations of future sterile males' and 'submissively sterile' husbands. There is, of course, no evidence that vasectomies produce dullness or submissiveness." These sorts of books, Taylor goes on, "pay little attention to current scholarship on the texts they cite or the cultures they describe; they are essentially sensational and anecdotal."

The anecdotes in "The Keeper of the Bed" are divided by theme: "The Eunuch Through the Ages," "The Eunuch as Fantasy," "Eunuchs of East and West," and "Heaven and Earth Eunuchs." Humana wrote introductions for each part, but he did not write conclusions, nor a conclusion for the book as a whole.

One of his skimpy, faulty analyses appears in his claim that "In all societies the eunuch was involved in homosexual relationships. Those who were castrated before puberty…were the delight of paederasts, while those who had full-grown organs…offer their favors to both men and women. One can therefore conclude…that both passive and active castrati had opportunities of leading busy sex lives." The first comment is ambiguous: surely some, but not all, eunuchs had sex with men. The second comment is unduly restrictive: why should the age of castration determine whether someone is capable of heterosexual feeling and behavior? The third comment is tautological: to speak of "passive" or "active" in this context is to describe a kind of sex behavior, and if the person had a sex life, then of course he had the opportunity to have a sex life. (Never mind that, for slaves, some of these "opportunities" were compulsory.) A more meaningful paragraph would have acknowledged broad possibilities of sexual diversity, including celibacy.

"The Keeper of the Bed" is surely not the last word on historical eunuchs. Only half of its interest value lies in the anecdotes about the eunuchs themselves, while the other half lies in the meta-analysis of the authors' attitudes and assumptions. For those who are interested in both, the book provides ample fodder.

Originally published to Helium Network on July 25, 2013.

‘Glory in the task of it’: The life of a fictional eunuch in Iran

Like many other books that feature eunuch characters, "Equal of the Sun" opens with a description of the main character’s castration. The eunuch narrator in this instance recounts his story for a princess, upon her request.

Yet this story differs significantly from other books that employ the same gambit. Equal of the Sun, set in mid-sixteenth-century Iran by novelist Anita Amirrezvani and published in 2012, is one of the deepest and most complex treatments of a eunuch character in modern literature.

The story is narrated by a young man of noble birth. Distraught that his father has been fingered as a traitor and summarily executed, he promises himself that he will ferret out his father’s persecutor, but to do that, he needs access to the palace. So, at seventeen years of age, he voluntarily submits to castration and applies to the palace as a eunuch servant. He is accepted as the personal servant of the quick-witted Princess Pari, daughter of the Shah, who privately declares the eunuch to be her “chief of information.” He is taken under the wing of other high-ranking eunuchs who give him his palace name, Javaher, meaning “jewel.” His mentor is Balamani, who came from India as a child slave and who is second in command to the chief eunuch Anwar, who came from Africa.

Javaher feels a close bond with his princess, whom he often calls “the lieutenant of my life.” She tells him, “How curious it is that you were sent to me: I would never have expected to feel such kinship with a eunuch.” And he thinks to himself: “I began to feel, when we were alone, that we were not just princess and servant – we were hamrah, companions on the same road.” Smarter than her brothers, the princess wishes to rule alone and thinks of Javaher as her “acting vizier.” She even presents him with a religiously engraved, gilt steel dagger in a leather scabbard as a symbol of their pact.

She reflects on their bond: “My job is to mother my country, not bear children. Yours is the same.” In silent response, Javaher thinks: “How different we were from ordinary men and women!” Reconceiving his personal mission as the “grand and strange” goal of leading the country to a brighter future makes him feel hopeful.

Javaher is selected by the princess in part because he presents a well controlled demeanor at court. However, he is capable of passive aggression. While arguing with Balamani over how they will respond to news of a murder, his nonverbal language reveals his anger indirectly: “I lifted the blanket off my bedroll with so much force that it flew onto the floor.” He is not often molested, presenting himself as a force to be reckoned with.

Not all the eunuchs in the story are described in complimentary terms. Abteen the scribe is “sunken-chested” with “rounded shoulders,” humorless and bored by gifts. Fareed is a messenger who is never assigned to stay long because his botched castration causes him always to smell of urine. A nameless guard lolls in sleep outside the women’s chamber, enabling Javaher to sneak in. Seen in the eunuchs’ private bath, Anwar and his friend look like women with “pendulous breasts and flat pubic areas.”

Javaher, on the other hand, is described as more masculine in appearance because of the relatively late age at which he was castrated. He retains sexual interest in women and manages to have an active sex life (which is described explicitly) despite the complete loss of all of his male organs. At first, while relearning how to urinate, it seems that “the vertigo was so great I feared I would slip into the latrines. Was I male? Female? What was I?” Yet soon he comes to feel that “my freshly healed wound had reinvented my capacity for pleasure.”

Javaher has a strong sense of self. He knows himself “as a man, not just as a eunuch. I was, after all, more than a mutilation, in my own eyes.” He finds inspiration in other eunuchs, including the Chinese eunuch Cai Lun who was said to have invented paper and Alexander’s lover Bagoas who “led the ancient empire of Iran, crushing even mighty Egypt,” whose names he invokes prayerfully. He sympathizes with other eunuchs, as when he throws stones to anonymously wake a guard so he will not be punished for sleeping on the job.

He is ambivalent about his situation. He fears that women will leave him as they graduate to marriages. “Most women crave children, and that was the one thing I could not provide,” he acknowledges. “Yet I was still a man, wasn’t I?” In a nightmare, a woman asks him in bed: “What are you?” Yet he is able to recognize that “something deep within me wanted to sacrifice myself for my father, just as he had given his life for us,” and this sacrifice lends meaning to his life choice and its consequences. When his princess writes a poem celebrating him and his “third sex” nature, he glows: “My birth as a eunuch had finally been recognized and recorded with as much fanfare as the moment a male child enters the world.” Just as he recalls hearing a blind poet who puts great feeling into each word, he finds that “there was glory in being half, not whole, glory in the task of it.”

For Javaher, this mythic “task” is not so much to be physically whole but to live honestly. After separate altercations with two men, Javaher explains to Balamani:

“I may pay the price of my life for my words, but at least I said them. I don’t care that I made an enemy. I don’t care that I may lose my posting. For once, I did not feel as if what was true in my heart as as different from what was on my lips as day to night. I became like hot white light, pure and clean. I felt as if my testicles had grown to the size of mountains and I had earned the right to shout out, 'I am a complete man!'"

In many novels, eunuchs are villains or objects of pity or scorn. Where they are supporting characters, they often have nearly non-speaking roles and are typecast in terms of their job functions rather than being allowed to convey a sense of self and autonomy. Anita Amirrezvani has bucked the trend by depicting a eunuch who is indisputably a full human being. She reveals that she began writing the novel with "six alternating narrators" until, unsurprisingly, Javaher "emerged as the most compelling of the bunch."

Originally posted to Helium Network on May 1, 2013.

In Equal of the Sun, the princess deliberately breaks a bowl like this 12th-century Persian one. Marie-Lan Nguyen (2005) © Public domain. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dept Ancient Near Eastern Art, online DB entry 140008703 Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling history and exotic fancy: ‘The Eunuch and the Virgin’

The Eunuch and the Virgin engulfs the reader in a cloud of heron and emu feathers and provides distraction from everyday life with tales of adulterers hanging from their guilty parts, jerid polo games, sacrificial victims allowed to bleed out into the sown fields, ambergris sherbet, ominous holes cut in sheets and scrotal relics like dried figs. A few sentences of Tompkins's purple prose frosted in French as the cord pulls round your neck and the knife gleams — and you are under his spell.

Peter Tompkins (1919-2007) worked as an undercover agent for the Allies in World War II and, in 1962, he published this fascinating volume about the lives of castrated men. Unfortunately, at least initially, it seems to have no animating argument. Tompkins culled an astonishing number of anecdotes from history and literature and plumped them with exotic detail. The result is something like a creme-filled pastry that has little nutritive value.

What is missing from the book

There are no illustrations in the book, which is not a problem — as the verbal richness is picture enough — and yet something deeper is missing. There is nothing about the political systems or social stratification that enabled castration on a large scale. There is no attempt to enter the mind of a castrated man and understand his psychological experience. There is no thread unifying the castration of boys and men for religious or secular reasons, for harems or choirs, in war or peace or in East or West. There is no justification of why these diverse occurrences can all be contained in the same book. He writes about castration itself and relatively little about its context. "The history of Byzantium reads from one castration to the next," he writes. Indeed, the entire world could be so enumerated, if that is how one chose to write history; the question is why Tompkins has chosen to do so.

Many useful books are long on catalog and short on argument; they are called encyclopedias. These, however, are systematically organized. Tompkins nearly made a small encyclopedia of eunuchs in "The Eunuch and the Virgin". The bulk of the text is separated into chapters by geography, but within these chapters there is no consistent chronology, such that one can never be sure what century it is when a new paragraph starts. There is no index of names. This format gives the reader no choice but to plunge into the book and enjoy whatever he or she may find along the way, and thereby creates an air of continual surprise and discovery for the enthusiastic reader. On the other hand, the wondrous, loosely connected details can frustrate the reader who desires not only a barrage of lewd and morbid titillations but a grand organizing thesis of the meaning of it all.

How 'The Eunuch and the Virgin' is unique

Upon his death in 2007, the Times of London published an obituary for Tompkins referring to "The Eunuch and the Virgin" as simply "an account of the Turkish harem tradition." It is far more than that. The book opens with an introductory chapter that surveys eunuchs in many cultures. Then there is a chapter dedicated to China, four chapters on Turkey (white eunuchs, black eunuchs, harem girls and the sultan), a chapter on the Italian castrati who sang in churches and opera houses, a chapter on the Russian Skoptzy who were a Christian sect, and a chapter on ancient Roman and Greek cults. In scope it exceeds the early eighteenth-century "Eunuchism Display'd" which only dealt with eunuchs in European history from ancient Rome through the castrati. Eventually, Tompkins does attempt a sort of conclusion across the final four chapters, but unfortunately it does not contribute to scholarship on either the history or the mythology of castration.

The first of the frighteningly rambling concluding chapters begins: "What on earth - or in heaven - could motivate human beings to act in such a fantastic manner?" This is a good part of what the inquiring reader wants to know, but it is not answered. Tompkins launches into mythological symbolism as explicated by Joseph Frazer and others regarding the cycle of seasons, the chain of being, the identity of Venus and the moon, and so forth, with the ultimate takeaway being unclear. Is the reader supposed to take this cosmology literally? How do the planets relate to castration more so than to other any human foible or endeavor?

In the second of the concluding chapters, he presents some of the fringe theories of the astronomer Velikovsky. Tompkins cites Velikovsky and Bellamy's claim that myth is a form of eyewitness report rather than a form of symbolism and, therefore, myth may be treated as history. In the third concluding chapter, his unscientific bizarrities increase to claim that "orgone," a non-existent form of energy proposed by Wilhelm Reich, makes the sky blue and that Ethiopians are dark-skinned because of the heat from a comet. "Having traced the Eunuch and the Virgin into the mist and myth of the antediluvian world," he writes, "the quest for the origin of castration now leads into the twilight of poetry and psychology, and beyond it, into the rarefied ether of the pneumatologist and mystic." In a breathless, incoherent, prolonged rant about dodecahedrons, cosmic eggs, sacred androgynes and horsemen of the Apocalypse, "the origin of castration" is never addressed.

Update, March 16, 2025: This just came to my attention: In Earth in Upheaval, Velikovsky quotes Charles Fredrick Wright about the "discovery" of the Nampa figurine. The quoted passage mentions G. M. Cumming by name.

Better sources

Although "The Eunuch and the Virgin" can serve as a starting point for gathering the names of eunuchs in various times and places, it goes without saying that serious historians would do better to go directly to Tompkins' sources: Carter Stent and Vincent Starrett on Chinese eunuchs, Barnette Miller and Norman M. Penzer on Turkish eunuchs. With this acknowledgment comes the disappointing realization that the immensely entertaining first half of Tompkins' book is infected by his strange methodology of giving every ancient anecdote equal weight as if it were literal truth. Yet somehow, this does not diminish the inimitable joy of reading his exquisitely exotified turns of phrase nor the excitement in his creative attempt to produce a cross-cultural compendium of castration.

This article was originally posted Aug. 30, 2011 to Helium Network.

Image: Advertisement for "Murad" Turkish cigarettes, Life Magazine, May 2, 1918. Uncredited artist. © public domain Wikimedia Commons.

Benefits of a eunuch disguise: What happens in ‘The Beacon at Alexandria’

Gillian Bradshaw’s novel The Beacon at Alexandria is set amidst events that occurred between 371-378 C.E. when Valens ruled the eastern Roman empire (although, as the author confessed in a preface, "I have somewhat distorted the chronology, and slipped in a couple of extra years.") Christianity was the religion of those in power, and the Nicene creed was dominant over the Arian heresy, which was dangerous for anyone to espouse.

Plot summary

The story opens with the noble family of Theodoros of Ephesus. Following the death of his wife long ago, he had purchased a nurse to look after his two children, the younger Theodoros (called Thorion) and the girl Charis. The children are now grown, and a brutal tyrant-in-training sets his eye on fifteen-year-old Charis who is beginning to be perceived as a debutante among the nobility. He tries to rape Charis and wishes to marry her, but she is strong-willed and stands up for her safety.

Charis does not wish to marry anyone. She is more interested in the art of medicine, which females are forbidden to study. It is risky for her to attempt to teach herself, as she is interested in scientific dissection, and mutilated animal carcasses could attract the charge of witchcraft. She resolves to run away from home, disguised as a eunuch (that is, as a castrated man), and seek a physician under whom she can apprentice. She adopts masculine adjectives for self-reference and also practices an Asian accent to help hide her identity, pretending she had originally been captured by the Persians from Amida in the East and is now free.

From Ephesus (which was a Greek-speaking city located in modern-day western Turkey), Charis – calling herself by the masculine name Chariton – sails a few hundred miles south across the Mediterranean to reach Alexandria in Egypt. One of the first people she sees upon her arrival is "a young eunuch in a Phrygian hat, sitting in front of a bronze begging bowl and singing a hymn to the goddess Kybele in a reedy voice; he glanced at me, then looked away again without interest." This is the only fellow eunuch she personally encounters in the book, but other characters seem familiar with eunuchs as a class, to the point where eunuchs are routinely stereotyped as Arian heretics.

In Alexandria, she apprentices under a Jewish physician, Philon. Years pass, and she learns quickly, becoming a full-fledged physician in her own right. It is only when she falls ill that Philon learns the secret of her true gender (although the local archbishop Athanasios has realized it all along).

It is not primarily the risk of being exposed as a woman, but political dangers associated with being falsely perceived as a "gelding heretic," that prompt her to leave Alexandria. She sails north, passing her childhood home and continuing on to Thrace in Greece. Here, still disguised as the eunuch Chariton, she encounters people in a military camp who initially complain of "some lisping Asian eunuch to treat the men, some girl-faced gelding with lily-white hands and a white liver too." But a man named Athanaric stands up for Chariton as "the only honest eunuch in the world." Chariton is allowed to tend wounded soldiers and is seen as a respected physician.

A fellow physician ambushes her in the bath, first intending to kill her (believing she was a eunuch) and then, having seen her naked, trying to rape her. In any case, she stabs him fatally, and the people she works with – believing her to be a eunuch – respect her for it. She enjoys her life there and ignores her brother Thorion’s request for her to return home.

The heroine's private gender identity is ambiguous. She is not particularly feminine, and she deeply values the freedom gained from presenting as a eunuch. On the other hand, she is desperately lonely, fearing she will never marry or have children.

When the Goths move into Thrace, the emperor is hopeful that they will settle in a Thracian wasteland, serve in the army, and pay taxes. But their arrival bodes less well for Chariton. The Gothic king Fritigern captures the alleged eunuch and recognizes the dual benefit of possessing this person who is at once a skillful physician and a famously long-lost noblewoman. Fritigern requires her to wear women’s clothing and tries to marry her off to a Gothic man, but she refuses.

Charis’s brother Thorion, who is by now the governor of Scythia, sends Athanaric to ransom her from the Goths. Charis has secretly loved Athanaric for years, but has never told him so, because he only ever knew her as Chariton. When Athanaric arrives at the house of Fritigern, he sees Charis in a woman’s dress and realizes her true identity. At this point, they are able to fall in love with each other.

Influence

Gillian Bradshaw’s story, published in 1986, apparently inspired a similar novel by Anne Perry called The Sheen on the Silk, published in 2010. Perry’s story also features a young Roman woman who disguises herself as a eunuch to become a doctor, although it is set 900 years later in Byzantine Constantinople.

Originally posted April 15, 2013 to Helium Network.

Philippa Gregory’s historical novel about Mary, ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’

Most people have heard of Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry VIII, who was famously beheaded after she failed to bear him a son. Philippa Gregory’s historical novel "The Other Boleyn Girl" paints a vivid (although fictionalized) picture of the Boleyn family at the English court.

The story spans the years 1521-1536. It covers the aspirations of the Boleyn family, led by young Anne, the coldest and most scheming among them. She is determined from the start to charm her way into a marriage proposal from none other than the king. The tale is told from the perspective of Anne’s sister Mary, the most conscience-driven of the Boleyns, whose real aspiration is a quiet family life on a farm but who is nevertheless forced by her family to participate in amorous intrigues at court. Their brother George is also a key player.

On one occasion, Anne instructs George, "Don’t call me Annamaria any more. And don’t call her Marianne. She is Mary, the other Boleyn girl. And I am Anne, Queen Anne to be. There is a world of difference between us two. We don’t share a name. She is next to nobody and I will be queen." This is typical of her character. It is also typical of Mary to muse quietly out of her sister’s earshot: "You know, there might be some joy in being a nobody."

At over 650 pages, "The Other Boleyn Girl" is long for a novel, and it certainly could have been shorter. The characters’ loyalties are straightforward: the three siblings form a united front for their own social advancement, trusting few others. (Sometimes, however, they are at odds even with each other. "For a moment we glared at each other, stubborn as cats on the stable wall, full of mutual resentment and something darker," Mary intones, "the old sense between sisters that there is only really room in the world for one girl.") Gregory sets the scene quickly, and overall there are not many plot-driven events that would seem to require the overall word count. The story is a succession of infidelities, marriages, babies, and the occasional execution. Henry’s separation from the Church of Rome is mentioned but not examined in depth.

On the other hand, those who enjoy losing themselves in the world of a long novel will appreciate the imaginative detail given to the family’s story. Gregory particularly does an excellent job of creating a sense of what it felt like to live in that era. Descriptions of period clothing are woven into the characters’ actions (such as their dressing and undressing), and this helps the reader to visualize the scene. Her story elements suggest what it was like to wait months for someone to return from another country on horseback without receiving any word from them, to have servants carry out the chamber pot, and to believe that one’s survival at court is determined by the ability to carry a pregnancy to term.

Moreover, anyone who reads it will not soon forget the tale of Anne Boleyn and her place in history.

Originally posted to Helium Network on March 31, 2013.

Image: Anne Boleyn is most famous for her neck. In "The Other Boleyn Girl," she favors a pearl necklace. The photographer of the pearl necklace is unknown. From the Smithsonian Institution Archives. © No known copyright restrictions. Flickr.

Jesus preaches eros in James Frey’s ‘The Final Testament of the Holy Bible’

James Frey's latest novel, "The Final Testament of the Holy Bible," features an enigmatic Christ-figure named Ben who is born in the modern United States. He is followed mainly by drug dealers and prostitutes and by most other people who happen to cross paths with him. People are impressed by his apparent lack of fear when facing persecution or pain and they are stunned by his miraculous recoveries from ghastly wounds. However, what really attracts them to him and convinces them of his Messianic nature is something ineffable about his presence, his glow, his magical handshakes and kisses. In his presence, his followers find the strength to stop using drugs; they have more loving sex; they care for their families; they stop feeling guilty. Lacking formal education in theology, they express uncomplicated, sincere beliefs about God in direct language.

James Frey is infamous for appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2005 to promote a memoir of drugs and crime that turned out to contain significant fabrications. The literary world forgives an author's sordid past - indeed, it makes for great confessional material - but is staunchly unforgiving of plagiarism. Frey has since turned his sights to fiction, which one would expect to be a better fit for him. Indeed, if he had pulled it off brilliantly in "The Final Testament of the Holy Bible," one might even have been inclined to stop mentioning his past transgression.

"The Final Testament of the Holy Bible" was self-published online on Good Friday 2011. An art gallery owner also published 11,000 print copies. Three weeks after its release, Amazon's ranking system revealed that over 15,000 other titles were selling better than Frey's new book. Nearly three years after its release, it had slipped to 72,000 in the rankings for Amazon Kindle books.

In reviewing this novel for the Guardian, Mark Lawson explained that "Fictions of this kind operate an unusual kind of suspense, in which the main tension is not what might happen but whether certain expected events still will." In other words, the reader constantly wonders: is there going to be a virgin birth, a persecution, a crucifixion equivalent? Such events from the life of Jesus, with modernized and inexact twists, are revealed gradually over the course of the 400-page novel. While Lawson seemed to find this approach sufficiently suspenseful (he described the book as "compelling as both a thriller and a provocative riposte to religious orthodoxies"), not every reader will share this fascination. After all: Either Ben will turn out to have been born of a virgin or he will not. Either he will rise from the dead or he will not. Nothing is at stake. The answers to these questions are not posed as having potential psychological effect on any characters, nor is it clear how the answers would affect the storyline or the validity of Ben's message. As such, one might easily perceive this as a long, meandering story that has been heard before, a "remake" of the old movie in which a few scenes have been changed or portrayed more graphically but the backbone remains the same.

Secondly, the presentation of Ben as an advocate of free love - any gender combination, multiple partners, in public - is a bit bewildering for a Christ figure, as is his complete rejection of the Bible as a source of wisdom. According to Ben's own "common sense" (as opposed to divine revelation), there is no reason to obey Biblical morality because we don't "live in a two-thousand-year-old mud hut with no electricity...This world is not that world. That world is dead. Those books were written for that world. Those books are dead." Likewise, "Books are for telling stories. They're not for denying people the right to live as they choose."

Point taken, but this message is not shocking to many Americans in 2011. So, why would the Messiah return to Earth and suffer pain only to preach this anti-literalist message to a group of people who largely weren't obeying Biblical morality to begin with? And if the Bible is no longer relevant, why is he repeating his same basic life story that was originally recorded in the Bible? And why, for that matter, should readers take seriously any of Ben's orgasm-afterglow fictional sermonizing unless we decide, upon reflection, that his points make sense in the real world, the one we live in?

In his review, Lawson pointed out that the story

"creates a Jesus who conveniently preaches the values of liberal America – pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, anti-churchgoing – but there's no reason why this figure should have more validity than the historical one being dismissed. Using fiction to accuse something of not being true is an inevitably flawed manoeuvre."

In a similar vein, readers of fiction often hope and expect not to be preached to. If we must be preached to, we hope to hear something of substance or great artistry. Using fiction to deliver a simple, numbingly repetitive philosophy is a disappointment.

To be fair, this book has moments of lucid spiritual insight. For example, one character claims that

"Love is the only way to alleviate suffering. Love is the only way to find freedom. Love is the only place in all of humanity where there is security. And even love doesn't work for very long. Love always disappears or vanishes...What we know as love doesn't really make us happy. If anything, it makes us suffer more."

This paradox of love as suffering and the antidote to suffering is a valuable interpretation of the life of Jesus. We hear that "if there were a Devil, faith would be his greatest invention...[the world] is going to end, because of faith." Quite possibly true. And of the experience of witnessing the Second Coming of Christ: "It was something that scared me because it felt like I could lose control of it. And loss of control is always the source of fear. It is also, however, always the source of change." Although we know it's fiction, that has the ring of truth.

Overall, however, this story was a long slog. The third major obstacle for me was that, in the same way that the Bible tells the story of Jesus through Gospels written by various people, Ben's story is told from the perspective of the people he meets. Each character has a unique voice. Most of them are portrayed as immature, uneducated, wayward, and only partially able to articulate their experiences in interesting ways. For example, one character reports that Ben behaves "like he was Mercedes' dad and Mariaangeles' husband and the girl was part of their family somehow and it was really super cute." Any character who speaks in run-on sentences that describe the flesh-and-blood Second Coming of Christ as "really super cute" should not be allowed to have the seemingly endless monologue that she is given. This character alone could prompt a reader to take extended breaks from this book.

Perhaps part of Frey's intended spiritual lesson is in helping the reader to pay attention to their own strong reactions to the less articulate characters. Frey's version of Jesus didn't come to advise the philosophically inclined; he came to bestow a revolutionary feeling of love and empowerment to teenage moms who need to get off drugs. It isn't about you, dear reader; it's about them. If you, as the reader, are not satisfied because this Jesus character doesn't do anything for you, maybe that's part of the point.

Or maybe it's not. And maybe it's fair for readers to choose to practice their patience elsewhere.

Originally posted to Helium Network on May 15, 2011.

Image: Wikimedia Commons user 'Lestath' (Jan Mehlich) © Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license Wikimedia Commons.

Leveraging the power of emotional words

Writers can intentionally modulate their voice by choosing words based on their emotional connotations. Words do not have “dictionary meaning” alone; they also have a variety of associations. While each reader will have slightly different associations with each word based on their personal or cultural experience, it is possible to make general statements that some words deliver more emotion than others. Writers should be aware of the subtle power of these words.

In Robert D. Hare’s 1993 book Without Conscience, he cited “recent laboratory research” showing that people more rapidly identify words when those words have emotional content. Experimenters showed people nonsensical strings of letters (imagine “norkleft” and “beemard”) as well as real words, and asked them to push a button to indicate which words were real. People pushed the “real word” button slightly more quickly when they saw a potentially emotional word like “death” as opposed to an unemotional word like “paper.”

One possible implication for writers is that their readers may feel more easily drawn into a book that contains emotional words. Because the reader puts less cognitive effort into reading emotional words, a story using those words may feel more “immediate” and “real.”

Words are especially emotional when there is a cultural prohibition associated with them. Taboo words “excite the lower-brain circuitry responsible for emotion, which creates electrical impulses that can be measured in the skin,” as Melissa Mohr described it in her book about swearing. She referred to a study by Timothy Jay, “Recalling taboo and nontaboo words,” in which people who heard a list of 36 words were more likely to recall the taboo words. These easily recallable words referred to race, gender, and sex (you can fill in the blanks for yourself about just what those words might be) and were the same words that “caused higher skin conductance frequencies.” Mohr also cited research showing that trial juries perceive witness statements as more believable when the witnesses use swearwords.

Gina Kuperberg performs research at Tufts University about how the brain reacts to emotional language. As Jacqueline Mitchell described the study in TuftsNow: “...volunteers were given three types of nearly identical sentences that began: Sarah is in her hotel room when the man comes in with a [blank]. The last word — either rose, tray or gun — radically altered the scene described.” A particular kind of brain response was larger for the words “rose” and “gun” (which connote romance and violence) than for “tray.” Her lab also studied what happens when the sentence was in second person (e.g. “You are in your hotel room...”) and found a difference in perception when emotional words are related to oneself.

As a writer, you can use this information to carefully consider how you reveal an interesting piece of information. Suppose, in your storyline, a man walks into a hotel room bearing three things: a rose, a tray, and a gun. The rose lies visible on the side of the tray, while the gun is initially hidden under a silver cover which is then lifted. There are multiple ways of revealing the sequence of events. You may wish to say that the man was bearing a gun, and only later reveal that the gun had been hidden. (This is how a detective might reconstruct the story of a murder.) You may wish to emphasize how the rose was used as a ploy to gain entrance to the room. Or you may wish to briefly trick the reader by beginning with the mention of an uninteresting tray, and then take the reader by surprise by describing what is on it. There's no one "right answer." These are simply different ways of engaging the emotional circuits in the reader's brain.

Sometimes writers hear advice like this and wonder if it recommends that an excessive amount of attention be paid to the individual words that make up a story or essay. The rejoinder is that writing is made up of words. The writing may be analyzed at a higher level, but at the end of the day when the interpreters go home, all that persists are the words themselves. Just as a construction company must worry about the integrity and placement of each brick, a writer must be concerned with each word. Awareness of the impact of emotional words in particular can help a writer achieve greater success.

Originally posted to Helium Network on June 2, 2013.

Image by "MoBen," 2007. From the e-Spotting 9/11 Internet Virtual Reality installation. © Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Wikimedia Commons.