According to the “Sanhedrin,” one of theTractates (volumes) of the collection of scholarly rabbinical interpretations of Jewish law and tradition known as the Talmud (200-500 AD), the animals housed in the ark were the very best of their kind and behaved with exceptional restraint, staying celibate throughout the entire duration of the ark’s voyage. As a consequence, it is said that the number of animals that left the ark at the end of the great flood remained exactly the same as the number that had entered into it. In light of this rabbinical gloss, the ark can thus be interpreted not simply as a safe repository for the residual (genetic) goodness in God’s creation sectioned off from the greater part that had degenerated inexorably into wickedness, but as a clearly delineated space subject to a divinely inspired and rigidly observed sense of order.
“Tale of the 11th Day — Mid Autumn” (“第十一日的传说－中秋”) ink and mineral colors on silk mounted on paper and canvas, 265 x 284 cm, 2011.
Not only was God’s creation distilled down among the animals to its most basic dualistic components: a pairing of a single male with a single female (although one Rabbinical midrash claims that the unclean animals entered the ark in twos, while the clean were in sevens), there was also maintenance of the perfection of that essential binary order, both within and between animal species, through complete sexual abstinence.
Consequently, while God, in the wake of the great flood, comes to accept the inherent tendency of humanity towards evil, he does so on the basis that the earth’s new postdiluvian phase has at least been started from a renewed position of structural perfection (an extraordinarily restrictive and somewhat improbable state of affairs, played on to great comic effect by the writer Julian Barnes in “The Stowaway,” the first chapter of his bookA History of the World in 10½ Chapters). What is more, God can be understood to have employed this renewed position of structural perfection as a platform upon which to establish new legalistic constraints limiting the worst excesses of humanity’s inherent tendency towards evil.
One might, then, with some justification put forward the view that Yang’s work presents us not just with a supplement to the Decameron, but, in addition, a heretical alternative to the trajectory of established Biblical narrative in which the animals and humans housed by the ark upon reaching dry land give way, in a moment of unrestrained eroticism, to all of their pent up bodily desires, thereby initiating a new world (dis)order entirely without the categorical limits imposed by rationalist Christian morality after the Fall. Seen in these historicizing terms, the idyll represented by Stranger than Paradise can therefore be viewed as the site of a seminal moment of orgiastic (Sadian) moral transgression that nevertheless carries with it the traces of a former state of earthly conformity to the divine (a paradise lost) where there was also no clear distinction between good and evil or conception of sin. A moment that could, indeed, be said to be “stranger than paradise”.
