The Ritual of New Creation (23 page)

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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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BOOK: The Ritual of New Creation
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Page 82
of Scripture, the new poem will not restore faith in the old ways: "I would gaze at the ruins and contemplate not reconstruction, not restoration, but restitution. What we were planning, what was being planned for us, was a serious trifling with history" (Hollander 25). A thief makes restitution when he returns stolen goods to their rightful owner. Because the Text has stolen itself away, a new Text must be provided. But whether such restitution can ever satisfy the questingor exiledpoet always remains in doubt:
It is as if one lived by a Scripture whose original tongue had been totally forgotten, all other texts in it lost or defaced, and that had only been preserved in a mocking and contemptuous translation, elegantly but insincerely done. And yet it would have had to have done for one's Text. (Hollander 22)
As Harold Bloom says of the Jewish writer in his mournful essay "The Sorrows of American-Jewish Poetry," "Whatever else is possible for him, it is hardly given to him that he may forge the uncreated unconscience of his people, the people of the Book and of the
halakhah
."
6
Following Bloom, it could be argued therefore that a successful Jewish poet will not only find strength in belatedness, but will celebrate what is understood to be an inadequate substitution for the lost or decayed original. The subtitle of
Spectral Emanations
is "A Poem in Seven Branches in Lieu of a Lamp," referring to the Menorah supposedly taken from the Second Temple, and all that it symbolizes, including the Torah.
7
Similarly, Mandelbaum's
Chelmaxioms,
"the Maxims Axioms Maxioms of Chelm," is put forward in the book's Preface as a potential addition to the Talmud: "Indeed, if the Talmud already has two redactionsJerusalem's and Babylon'swhy not, the maxioms ask, a third?''
8
The lost town of Chelm, supposedly destroyed in World War II and rediscovered in Mandelbaum's text, is both "the Diaspora writ large" and "the Diaspora writ small" (xv). Thus in the poems of Mandelbaum and Hollander, we encounter a strange but crucial blending of inventive pride and melancholy humility.
This tonal ambiguity, derived from the poets' self-consciousness of their historical and cultural position, relates in turn to the structure of the poems, their versification, and their rhetoric. In the Preface of
Chelmaxioms,
the Hoarse Savant (the poet's rather pedantic persona) reminds us that the poem's penchant for elaborate structural devices looks back to "the divagations, digressions, the discreet
 
Page 83
and indiscreet parentheses native to talmudic/midrashic exegesis." But this noble scriptural ancestry also produces
the absurdity inherent in analogical and numerological reveryeleven tribes, eleven quays, six findings, five gates, five cesurasongs, two tutelary birds, two tutelary shapes. The absurdity inherent in too tenacious lust for the Absolute. (xvi)
The structure of
Spectral Emanations
is imbued with the same such "absurdity": Hollander's Notes to the poem revel in numerological details of the verse and astronomical analogies to the various colors of the spectrum which divide the work into its seven sections. Such an obsession with order in these late Jewish poems of substitution is a sign of their authors' uncertainty: can the new Text, however much a product of midrashic divagations, of the making and unmaking of verbal form, truly compensate for that which has been lost? Perhaps this is what Bloom means when he says of
Spectral Emanations
that "Scheme, in a sense, is part of the poem's undoing."
9
This doubt, this internalized threat of undoing, also accounts for the versification of both poems. Given the range of verse forms and metrical possibilities available to contemporary poets, Mandelbaum and Hollander usually would be considered "formalists," "traditionalists," or "academic poets." These terms carry all sorts of ideological baggage with them and are often applied with insufficient refinement. Still, we can safely assert that both poets are devoted to regular meters and rhyme, and are acutely aware of their problems and possibilities, as seen not only in their poetry, but in Hollander's criticism and his handbook of forms (
Rhyme's Reason
), and in Mandelbaum's extraordinary translations. It is also safe to say that generally, formal poetry, especially in comparison with free verse, is associated with an overt sense of aesthetic order and a relative fixity of intent and will on the part of the writer. How have these formal concerns manifested themselves in Hollander's and Mandelbaum's major Jewish works?
The lines of
Spectral Emanations
make use of complex syllable counts and stanza divisions, while
Chelmaxioms
is variously rhymed throughout. Yet the verse in these texts depends upon frameworks of
prose
. Hollander notes that in his substitute menorah, "Below each cup of color [the verse] is a branch of prose, fulfilling and supporting it" (3). As for
Chelmaxioms,
though readers could conceivably move through its one hundred forty pages of rhyme without a break, they
 
Page 84
must first read the three crucial pages of the Preface, and are often moved to consult the thirty pages of notes or "Scoriae from
The Vast & Versal Lexicon
" which follow and purport to explain the dozens of obscure words and arcane references which appear in the body of the text. In short, Hollander and Mandelbaum feel obliged to provide commentaries to their new Scriptures. The sense of achieved form remains problematic; the enactment of triumphant will that one often associates today with successful poetry in rhyme and meter is ridden with doubt. The dialectic of verse and prose upon which the poems' trajectories depend also reminds us of the central absence around which the poems are built.
However, not only structure and prosody, but rhetoric too, the texts' quality of language or mode of discourse, signifies the poems' awareness of lack, their self-consciousness of loss.
Spectral Emanations
and
Chelmaxioms
are scholarly poems; their authors are, as Wallace Stevens (who stands behind them) says, "dark rabbi[s]" who observe "the nature of mankind, / In lordly study."
10
But as we have seen, they are insecure in such a role, which may account not only for their stupendous poetic erudition (Mandelbaum's "talk of talk and talk of text" [xvi]), but their nervously joking attitude toward such scholarly discourse as well.
Here the specifically Jewish problem of the withdrawal of halakhic certainty coincides with a general problem of modern poetry, that of accessibility. Certain types of modern poetry (
The Waste Land,
replete with notes, is our
locus classicus
) are often called "difficult," "obscure," even "hermetic." Their languageesoteric, allusive, insistently privatepresents even the well-schooled reader with both an invitation and a rebuff, and the result is often great frustration on the reader's part. Reception theory has demonstrated that over the course of time, readers become naturalized to the problems presented by new and difficult works, learn to negotiate their baffling techniques, and in doing so, expand their arsenal of reading strategies while at the same time domesticating, perhaps even canonizing previously recondite and resistant texts.
11
While this optimistic paradigm certainly could apply to the poems under discussion here, which, like all serious literature, also must suffer the general decline of literacy in what George Steiner calls our "post-culture," we are still faced with nagging questions.
Given the erudite discourse and "bookish" nature of what are already specifically Jewish poems, who, even among the small potential audience of educated Jewish-Americans, will read such rarefied
 
Page 85
texts? Can we be satisfied with a mandarin Jewish poetry, which, for all its sublime gestures and honorable aggadic heritage, still reduces to a coyly playful antiquarianism? If the poets themselves understand their work as a more or less inadequate substitution, can we see them as any more than quixotic rhymsters, Hollander's joking "Pancho Manza,
homme/De terre
" (30)? Not even the usual response, that poetry has always been, finally, an elite genre, can really provide solace at this late date.
In
Chelmaxioms,
Mandelbaum writes:
It's not that he forgets. But the endured
is more than can be rendered.
How they crack:
the word and the appeasing act.
But even as they shatter,
he gathers fragmentary matter. (119)
This lyric, called "Second Song of Scavenging," goes some way toward an answer to our questions. If traditional Jewish writing has passed its wisdom down in any degree to its contemporary secular descendents, such wisdom is to be found in lines like these. Diasporic Jewish experience is almost incommensurable with the act of writing, but however little the word can render what is endured, it is only the word which grants that endurance. The inadequacy of language always confronts the Jewish writer, for it is only God's word (and in the Kabbalah, not even God's word) which can bring about and sustain creation to any extent. But the breaking of the vessels, that great metaphor to which Scholem and Bloom have given us access, signifies both disaster and new hope. Word and act are no longer one, the myth tells us, but in the ruins of the fallen language-world, those who are faithful to the original power of verbal creativity may gather the fragments again.
The ambivalence of Mandelbaum's and Hollander's poems are thus matters of audacity and devotion. Their writing is a bold substitute for the Law and a dutiful attempt to restore lost mythic wholeness. The excavation of Chelm and the poem that took the place of a menorah may be irreverent but they are not irreligious. These are works by good-natured versions of "the pious atheist," Scholem's term for Kafka, "for whom nothing has remained of God but the voidin Kafka's sense, to be sure, the void of God."
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