Star Trek: Origins and Exegesis

So what counts as an origins story?  The recent Star Trek movie was immeasurably better than the Wolverine discussed here a few posts ago.  As Yglesias points out, it’s particularly apt that Star Trek would use a time travel device for this movie, since Star Trek’s shows were, historically, “full of goofy time travel plots.”

But more than that, it allows the movie to explore a possible past rather than fill in the blanks of a back-story that has already been determined.  In other words, when Uhura turns around on the bridge and looks at the audience, saying “You mean… an alternate reality?” she’s giving the go-ahead for all kinds of crazy shit to go down and for a lot of uncertainty (and thus authorial freedom) to enter the story line.

Besides being a better, funnier, more compelling story in the first place and being better directed than Wolverine (movement, pacing, whatever), I think that this structural throwing-of-the-wrench-into-the-system device allows for the origins story to take on new life.

I have to admit, again, that I’m not a comic book nerd or a Star Trek nerd except by association.  Growing up abroad before the uber-digital-age without cable meant, well, not so much with following Next Generation, but my brother and I did watch all six original movies, so I’ve always preferred movie story lines that pick up on the Kirk-Spock character set.

In fact, my real reason for being interested in comic book origins stories is my interest in religious studies and their origins stories.  I took this great undergrad course on exegetical literature on the first ten chapters of Genesis.  There is a ton of it, and different kinds of interpretive commitments, interests, and sources inform how this literature turns out.  My professor described it as a sort of “fan literature.”  When the texts you’ve got simply won’t do and you’ve just gotta have more (more answers, more rules, more sense, more consistent God character).  In a way, people tried to fill in the back-stories of their favorite characters — characters who meant a great deal to them.  But they weren’t always aiming to clean things up, and the problem with fan-fiction (as opposed to a franchise, like the church) is that there’s very little control over what or how these stories get told.

Nevertheless, early exegetical traditions (unlike many modern ones) were often not that interested in getting a unified, sensible story without contradictions so much as they seemed hungry for more and more information, minute details, and quite often the opening up of very different possible readings for a single verse, multiplying rather than reducing its narrative potential.

In much of the rabbinic material and medieval Islamic material on Genesis that I read (significant portions of which overlap in surprising and interesting ways), there’s a much stronger drive at compiling all of the possible meanings and all of the known traditions about a particular verse, issue, or question.  When dealing with the early prophets like Adam, the great Baghdadi compiler Tabari (d. 923) had recourse to the interpretations of “the people of the book” (ie. Christians and Jews) and saw fit to include them in his Qur’anic commentary and his universal History (from the creation to the present).

More often than not, Tabari would list all the possible interpretations of a given Qur’anic verse, throw out one or two that were contradicted by other explicit passages in the Qur’an, and then accept all the other traditions (sometimes as many as ten or more) as possible interpretations.  This sort of sensibility, particularly in Baghdad around that time, seems to me to have been widespread (for evidence of such, see the great, short, and very readable book by the eminent scholar of Islamic theology, Josef Van Ess entitled The Flowering of Muslim Theology).  There was an anecdote in the first chapter of that book, though I’m afraid I lost my own copy so I can’t say exactly where, in which a Christian priest from Europe traveling in Muslim lands on pilgrimage was horrified at the fact that all Muslims really had to believe in was the shahāda… what a doctrinal mess!  Don’t they know that real religions persecute dissenters?  Amusingly, current Christian discourse criticizes Islam for the exact opposite reason…

Anyhow, speaking of Tabari and origins stories, one of the most fascinating things he does is try to reconcile the Persian line of kings (most beautifully expressed in Ferdowsi’s (d. c. 1020) Shahnameh) with the Jewish/Christian/Muslim line of Prophets beginning with Adam.  Here I quote from Tarif Khalidi’s Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period, p78-9:

Tabari therefore set himself the task of bringing these histories [Israelite, Persian, Muslim] into harmony by synchronization of chronologies.  This meant that the Biblical line of descent from Adam and his progeny was to be reconciled to the line from Kayumarth, the Persian Adam, and his royal successors.  Thus, the stories of such figures as Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses were taken from the Islamic historical tradition, amended if necessary by reference to the Qur’an and Hadith, and then interwoven with their contemporaneous Persian kings.  One, continuous and comparative history of the pre-Islamic world was now created.  The umma was thus shown to be the prophetic heir of the Biblical tradition and the temporal heir of Persian dominion.

This kind of hermeneutical commitment is, what I’d call totally awesome.  Tabari, who authored the compendious History of Prophets and Kings came from Tabaristan (hence the guy’s name), which is a mountainous region that sits on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea.  For whatever reason, he found this particular vision of the pre-Islamic past to be hugely important or, on the other hand, so obvious as to be required of anyone writing such a history.  Unlike Tabari’s strategy of listing different opinions and deciding not to adjudicate between them, this simultaneous strategy requires (or assumes to be necessary) the reconciliation of different traditions into a chronological lineage.  Awesome… It would (or maybe it wouldn’t) be like if someone tried to write a back-story that explained how Star Trek, Star Wars, and Star Gate are all actually part of the same future time-line (without using the alternate-reality cop-out).