The Ritual of New Creation (16 page)

Authors: Norman Finkelstein

Tags: #History, #Jewish, #Religion, #General, #test

BOOK: The Ritual of New Creation

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glaring novelty, they were not regarded as a break with traditional authority. ¹⁹

But the situation of modern critics is not that of Luria: glaring novelty is less easily subsumed by tradition because the study of secular literature, practically by definition, does not lend itself to the establishment of authority in the religious sense of the term. Indeed, in the present climate, the inevitable fragmentation of literary theory and of any unified literary canon is accepted and frequently endorsed.

Scholem's subtle interpretation of interpretation has direct bearing on the problem of such fragmentation, of the indeterminate center and fictionality of meaning with which contemporary critics are so concerned. The obvious difference between Jewish religious commentary and secular interpretative and canonic economies lies in the fact that secular literature, despite the presences of immensely authoritative works, is not considered to have emerged as a tradition based upon revelation. Nevertheless, the concept of freedom in a productive tension with authority remains a viable one, capable of informing paradigms of interpretation and canon formation which neither petrify an exclusive sequence of masterworks nor lose sight of the undeniably compelling force of the binding text. The writers, critics and teachers of every generation (all of whom eventually produce commentary of one sort or another) receive or seek for authoritative literature in much the same way as does the kabbalist yearning for the divine Word. Even when this impulse has been resolutely secularized, revelation continues to operate as a psycholinguistic force that demands interpretation, emendation, revisionthe unfolding, dialectical process of commentary. What we must realize is that for "profane" literature,
there is no text that could not potentially constitute "revelation."
Any text or writer can come to be regarded as authoritative through participation in commentary as a progressive sequence of literary-historical events. We may now regard as "canonical" that work which functions simultaneously as "Oral Torah" and "Written Torah,'' freely troping within an identifiable tradition and generating variously interpretative texts that would attest to its own power of "revelation."

Scholem's understanding of these categories and its potential application to our current theoretical situation may be seen in the long, combative discussion he held with his friend Walter Benjamin over the work of Franz Kafka. In a letter to Zalman Schocken, Scholem speaks of Kafka as one who "walked the fine line between

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religion and nihilism." It was this condition in Kafka's work "which, as a secular statement of the Kabbalistic world-feeling in a modern spirit, seemed to me to wrap Kafka's writings in the halo of the canonical."
²⁰For Scholem, as for Benjamin, there is no question that Kafka is a canonical figure: but what effect does Kafka's borderline state between religion and nihilism have upon the modern understanding of the canonical? Benjamin, as we have seen, notes of Kafka that "his students are pupils who have lost the Holy Writ," a position which, as Anson Rabinbach observes, ''is bound up with an irreparable condition of exile which is the (German-Jewish) tradition of modernity."
²¹Scholem, however, disagrees: "Those pupils of whom you speak at the end [of Benjamin's essay on Kafka] are not so much those who have lost the Scripturebut rather those students who cannot decipher it."
²²Rabinbach expounds upon this side of the argument as well: "the cosmic exile of the Jews is also an exile from the meaning of the Law, but not from the Law itself."
²³

This, then, is our choice regarding the modern status of canonic literature and, concomitantly, of the activity of interpretation: either the source of textual authority is lost to us, turning interpretation into Benjamin's "untrammeled, happy journey"; or textual authority is present but undecipherable, making interpretation into a ritual performed on the line between devotion and the void. How similar this is to Derrida's two interpretations of interpretations! And long before Derrida, before even Scholem and Benjamin, Kafka himself recognized the dilemma. Writing to Max Brod about their generation of German-speaking Jews, he speaks of how their despair over their confused identities became their inspiration, and proceeds to sketch out a number of "linguistic impossibilities":

The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently. One might also add a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing (since the despair could not be assuaged by writing, was hostile to both life and writing; writing is only an expedient, as for someone who is writing his will shortly before he hangs himselfan expedient that may well last a whole life).
²⁴

It is out of these impossibilities, preeminently the conditions of writing in exile, that comes the uncanny doubling of pious commentary and modernist innovation which Scholem and Benjamin attempted to codify and which has since been passed down to all their heirsif

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the notions of "passing down," of inheritance and tradition, were not themselves of issue! Thus our most influential critics today seem almost temperamentally incapable of remaining simple exegetes; it is impossible for them to write in the way that was traditionally expected of them. But it is equally impossible for them not to write, as the texts to which they are so devoted continue to demand a response.

I have been arguing that Scholem's work can be useful for a theoretical understanding of literary criticism (the interpretation of interpretation) and for the more practical act of reading as well. Individual texts cast light upon the tradition in which they are contained, but also must be regarded as products of determinable currents in that tradition. Here then is an exegesis of one particular poemWallace Stevens' "Large Red Man Reading" (1948)in which I attempt to employ the critical principles I have derived from Scholem's notions of tradition and textuality. Surprisingly little has been written about this poem, even by those critics who have moved through Stevens' entire canon, what the poet calls in
The Auroras of Autumn
(1947) "that crown and mystical cabala."
²⁵Even in his encyclopedic study of Stevens, Bloom offers only a paragraph on "Large Red Man Reading," and while he identifies a precursor text from Emerson, he overlooks (or represses) a great deal that is more directly kabbalisticor should I say Scholemesque? At any rate, here is the poem:


There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases, As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae. They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.


There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life, Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them. They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,


That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

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