Eve and the Symbols of Evil: The Book of Genesis in the 21st Century

• In Event: Narrative and Political Theory: Experimentation, Canon Dynamics, and Reinvention

Abstract

Carmen Boullosa’s recent novel The Book Eve (2020) tells us the story of Genesis “as it truly happened,” narrated (mainly) by Eve herself. It has been received and discussed as a feminist appropriation of the story of Garden of Eden, in which, according to the author herself, Eve is presented as a “full-fledged human being,” with agency and a voice of her own. In this paper, I will argue that Boullosa’s Eve is best read, not as a true human being with “flesh on her bones,” but as a symbol of humanity—one that, moreover, is morally ambiguous. I will do so through a comparison between Boullosa’s novel and Lord Byron’s Cain (1821), with Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrativity and the symbolism of evil as a framework. The contrast will allow us to see Boullosa’s account as a contemporary reflection on the character of human evil, as Byron’s play was for his times.
Just as The Book of Eve, Cain intends to tell “the true story of the Fall” by proposing a different version of what happens in The Book of Genesis, in which he redirects our attention to Cain, instead of Adam (and Eve), as the first perpetrator of evil. Byron’s play symbolically portrays the “existential” impact that modern science had on man in displacing him from the center of the divine order and confining humanity to a corner within an infinite universe. Cain realizes (with the help of Lucifer) the insignificance of human existence and murders Abel. The “true” motive, thus, is not envy for the preference Abel enjoys before God, Adam and Eve, as it is regularly depicted, but rather Cain’s disdain toward the naïve piety and belief of his brother. In killing Abel, Cain rebels against an eternal order in which he can believe no more.
Cain has also an important part in Boullosa’s account (in fact, she opens her work with a quotation from Byron’s play). In Boullosa’s version, however, Cain murders Abel because the latter, in conjunction with Adam, has instituted a regime of violence both against nature and against women. Read from the perspective of Boullosa’s Cain, as we will see, her Eve will prove to be a symbol of social (male and female) negligence towards gender violence, as well as of social complicity regarding the exploitation of nature.
By offering a dialogue between the desire to transcend human finitude and the willingness to accept it, Byron’s Cain speaks to the problems of his time. Similarly, The Book of Eve invites us to reconsider two of the main problems of ours: social indifference toward both gender and environmental violence. As I will try to show from a Ricoeurian perspective, both Byron and Boullosa invite us to reimagine our founding myths, and thus, to transform the identities that are formed within them.

Author

• Adriana Alfaro, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico