The recent revelation of the recording in which a presidential candidate bragged that he could grab women without repercussions provides us with a rich impetus for literary reflection. His remarks concern what Western literary tradition casts as the original monarchal sin. The Bible and the Iliad—European culture’s twin foundational narratives, “sacred” and “pagan”—both begin by addressing our fears of a sexually predatory king.

The biblical saga of the patriarchs begins with a picaresque introduction to Abraham, who travels to Egypt during a famine and instructs his wife to “Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister” (Genesis 12:12-13). Fearing that the Pharaoh will desire her and kill her husband, Abraham offers her up. Sarah is indeed “taken into Pharaoh’s house” (Genesis 12:15). Remarkably, the Iliad begins with a perfectly analogous scenario: a captive woman’s father begs her monarch/captor for her release (Book I).

Both supplicants, as oracle and prophet, are able to call upon their gods (Yahweh and Apollo, respectively) to bring plagues upon the monarch who has taken their family member hostage. The plagues are effective; the damsels are released. Each narrative, then, begins with an explicit showdown between state and religious authority, where representatives of the two institutions wrangle over a beautiful woman, and a god prevails over a king. There is obvious reason for a religious text to start this way: in order to initiate a polemic against its likeliest earthly rival for authority. Divine contention with human counterparts is a primary subject of The Iliad and Genesis, but in each, God wins.

Where is divine justice today? God sends no plagues. A New York Times editorial rebuking “sleaziness” is closer to name-calling than to retributive justice. In modern liberal democracy, justice tends instead to come in the form of elections and legal verdicts—or at least a fall in consumer demand—rather than lightning bolts.

Though Abraham visits Egypt, he is not Egyptian. After he heeds God’s exhortation to leave his country, kindred, and father’s house, he takes on the status of what we might today call a stateless migrant. Wifeless, childless, and probably fatherless, he travels, pitching his tents on a number of different mountains, and rescues his nephew from invading kings, but does not identify or align himself with a particular kingdom. The founder of the Abrahamic faiths might therefore be described as outside of state authority, while his God seems to be above it.

We have an American pharaoh, but are there Abrahams in the land? There are, at least in American literature. In Faulkner’s Joe Christmas (in Light in August) and James’s Felix (in The Europeans) are fatherless. Both have crossed into regions beyond their homeland; each is either binational or biracial. Their outsider status presents challenges for them but is a boon to writers and readers: their dislocation brings into communication spheres of American life that tend otherwise to remain siloed. It is as if they crash through facades or are able to exist on both sides of them, and are thereby able to understand each side in relation to the other.

Fatherlessness and migration have analogical significance in novels and scripture. These are characters who lack not just parents or community but have lost faith, if they ever had any, in all structures of authority and meaning. By leaving their place of origin, they seek to find or engender new ways of life that might fit their unusual needs. Abraham is triumphant, while the Americans face tragic ends. (We could defensibly add God to the list of characters who are ill at ease in their circumstances. Profoundly disappointed with his creation, he kills humanity and effectively restarts the race with Noah.)
In each foregoing example, a break with family, country, or faith is the condition for a narrative beginning. This rupture with norms is both the starting point of narrative and the event that brings rival perspectives into view. This movement outside the boundaries of norms creates a state of spiritual or literal exile, a strange condition as important for Abraham as for countless later migrants, protagonists, pícaros, and prophets.