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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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BOOK: The Ritual of New Creation
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Page 8
Ozick's stories or Allen Mandelbaum's poetry, however infused with exilic longing, strikes us as notably assertive and definitive. Yet we are still dealing here with writers, however magisterial they may sound, who deeply intuit that, as Mandelbaum says,
Diaspora
is still the way
of shreds and shards,
of all that frays,
discolored words,
and leaves astray,
and winds that scatter
nesting birds
25
Perhaps this is what Benjamin understood when he spoke of even Kafka's work as having "the purity and beauty of a failure."
26
Few Jewish writers have done so well in failing, for it was a failure which, in its lack, most fully expressed the messianic condition of exile. Small comfort though it may be for Kafka's literary descendents, failure remains a badge of honor for writing in, for writing as, exile.
Having defined the pervasive themes of this study, it remains for me to describe the progress of its chapters, which can be understood conceptually and, to some extent, stylistically as well. Along with this Introduction, my first chapter, on Postmodernism and the Jewish literary intellectual, is the most generalizing section of the book; it is to be read as a meditation on some of the contemporary forces affecting Jewish writing, as well as the place of that writing in the culture at large. Some of the issues raised in this chapter, notably those which concern the problematic of Jewish tradition, are then developed in chapters dealing with Harold Bloom and Gershom Scholem, two figures who, from their original areas of expertise, have gone on to have great influence on the way we understand the overall workings of modern Jewish thought and writing.
Growing increasingly specific, I next examine some representative literary texts. In the work of Cynthia Ozick, John Hollander and Allen Mandelbaum, we see the ways in which the cultural and literary themes identified in the earlier part of the book are worked through in relation to the specific generic demands of prose fiction and of poetry. This line of inquiry culminates in a chapter on George Steiner, one of the few Jewish literary intellectuals today who can still lay
 
Page 9
claim to that old-fashioned, even troubling, but still powerful title of "man of letters." As a theorist, a practical critic, and a novelist, Steiner compells me to broaden my perspective again, as does his doubly authoritative rhetoric of cosmopolitan, universalizing culture and of specifically Jewish tradition.
The Ritual of New Creation
ends in a different but certainly related key, with two "writerly" chapters, one focused on an individual, one on a mood. My consideration of Walter Benjamin self-consciously appropriates a frequently observed but rarely engaged aspect of his work: his creation of fragmented "constellations" of ideas resulting in a "dialectic at a standstill," a means of writing which I consider to be particularly appropriate for a discussion of his messianic thought. My final chapter, on nostalgia and futurity in contemporary Jewish culture, is meant to complement the meditation on Postmodernism in Chapter 1. These last sections, more than any that precede them, are meant to be read as enactments of the Jewish ritual of new creation I have discussed above. Their relation to the tradition of Jewish writing is midrashic, which is to say that in ritually troping on the past, they intend to create a space for themselves in whatever comes to be understood as the Jewish cultural tradition of the future.
 
Page 11
Chapter 1
Postmodernism and the Jewish Literary Intellectual
Though the two terms which constitute the title of this chapter are both rather amorphous, they have decidedly different and variously revealing histories. Secular by definition, culturally heterogeneous, and inspired by the urgent need to rescue the past, Jewish literary intellectuals always come to us bearing a specific historical pedigree. More often than not, they are examples of Isaac Deutscher's "non-Jewish Jew," who have "found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting."
1
Yet they bear the mark of their Jewish heritage in that they live "on the borderlines of nations and religions" and can "comprehend more clearly the great movement and the great contradictoriness of nature and society."
2
This dialectical understanding extends to the contradictions of secular literature, to which modern Jewish intellectuals nevertheless cling as do traditional Jews to the Law. We must think of such figures in the way that Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi insists that the modern Jewish historian think about himself: as "a product of rupture.'' For Yerushalmi, Jewish history itself entails "ruptures, breaches, breaks," a series of losses and salvage operations which modern Jews deny only at great social and spiritual risk. No wonder that Walter Benjamin has become the paradigmatic Jewish literary intellectual of our century. The particular fate of such a man and his work in what had become the maw of Western Civilization appears to us now with, to use his own expression, an auratic intensity that seems to be the light of historicity itself.
If the notion of the Jewish literary intellectual invites historicization, then Postmodernism in the arts and human sciences resists
 
Page 12
such treatment. Recent fiery discussions of Postmodernism are certainly worth considering, but can they be said to constitute its history? Given Postmodernism's antipathy to historical understanding, the very notion of its history would be laughable if it were not so important to our current state of affairs. Postmodernism involves a strong suspicion, if not outright rejection of the frame of historical knowledge; nevertheless, there are occasions when we must impose such a frame, treating Postmodernism with unwonted critical rigor. As Fredric Jameson observes of the Postmodern's disturbingly playful treatment of history, "the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations, the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective futurehas meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum."
3
Confronted by this Postmodern simulacrum, it becomes increasingly difficult to engage in that project, both Marxist and Jewish, set forth by Benjamin in a sentence that no doubt Jameson is recalling: "Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that
even the dead
will not be safe from the enemy if he wins."
4
The questions I must pose, then, are difficult ones, in that their terms are so variously intractable. What happens to Jewish literary intellectuals, imbued as they are with both a strong historical perspective and with the morality of that perspective, when they encounter a cultural tendency which has as one of its most salient qualities the insistent leveling of historical heights and depths? How do thinkers who inhabit a world of voices echoing over long distances respond to a startlingly immediate environment of sheer surface and explosive multiplication of images? What attraction would Postmodernism, with its cool exploitation of perpetual rupture, its paradoxical shaping of brilliant, superficial changes into what Benjamin calls "
Das Immergleich,
" the ever-the-same, have for those who brood continually over breaks and restorations in a historical continuum that is all too palpably real? In short, how can we continue to ponder civilization and its discontents when David Byrne urges us to "stop making sense"?
At first glance, the answer to these questions appears relatively straightforward: Jewish writers and critics, both in the United States and abroad, tend to resist the blandishments of Postmodernism. Cynthia Ozick's critique of Postmodern fiction as idolatrous comes to mind, as does Marshall Berman's strong distinction between Modernism and Postmodernism, with his insistence on the continued viability
 
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of the former and the static nihilism of the letter.
5
In France, which can be considered the home ground of theoretical Postmodernism, Olivier Revault d'Allonnes opposes the deconstruction of the human subject with what he calls "the duty of inwardness."
6
In a different register, Saul Friedlander identifies the "neutralization" of history and a kind of Postmodern kitsch in a number of important novels and films and associates them with the most insidious of all forms of kitsch, that of Nazism.
7
Indeed, the cultural promiscuity which Jameson labels "the nostalgia mode,"
8
so remote from Benjamin's revolutionary nostalgia, covers a great deal of the territory we have come to know as the Postmodern. Could such blithely threatening cultural amnesia maintain an attraction to Jewish intellectuals, steeped as they are in what Berman recognizes as a tradition of progressive modernity? Jean-Francois Lyotard defines the Postmodern "as incredulity toward metanarratives."
9
A long line of secular Jewish intellectuals took a great part in the original composition of those metanarratives: who among their contemporary heirs really would find them incredible?
If (according to Lyotard), Postmodernism represents an epistemological as well as a cultural transformation, and if (according to Jameson), Postmodernism is to be understood not as a mere style but as a full-blown "cultural dominant," then Jewish intellectuals' relative assimilation or rejection of the Postmodern is of great moment, and not only to Jewish traditions of thought and writing. I have said that at the outset, it would appear that the Jewish intellectual response is one of caution, suspicion, resistance and repudiation to a cultural tendency which displays an aggressive indifference to history. Jews were in the vanguard of Modernism because Modernism defined itself historically as a rupture, the inception of a permanent cultural revolution. This sense of historical agon was in turn intensified by Jewish contributions to Modernist production in the all the arts and sciences. The wild dialectic of Modernist exhilaration and despair, that sense of history accelerating to the breaking point which Berman describes so well in
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air,
takes on, for the Jews, a special poignancy, as the general crisis of modernization is compounded by the specific crisis of assimilation.
This particularly Jewish dialectical intensityin a sophisticated but deeply torn figure such as Benjamin it amounts to a pathosmay also be at the heart of the apparently benign, general definition of the literary intellectual at which Berman's mentor, Lionel Trilling, arrives:
 
Page 14
Less committed to method and to fact than the philosopher or the social scientist, licensed in emotion and intuition by the tradition of the subject he has studied, he ranges freely and directs his arguments to man-in-general. It is he who shows the most indignant face in moral and cultural dispute and who is most apt to assume that the intellectual life is dramatic.
10
This passage has just the hint of autobiography, and I will have more to say about Trilling himself later. For now, I want to speculate that Berman's understanding of Modernism's whirlwind progress or Trilling's emphasis on the literary intellectual's sense of indignation and drama in cultural dispute is at least informed by, if not altogether the product of that secular Judaism which is coincidental with Modernism itself. The great flowering of secular Jewish intellectual life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enters into a crucial dialectic, lives out a great drama with the general rise of Modernist culture. As Jews entered the mainstream of Western cultural life, Judaism was to be remade under the aegis of modernity. Kafka is one of our best and most obvious examples: of his father's weakened, transitional Judaism, Kafka says that "precisely the getting rid of it seemed to me to be the devoutest action,"
11
but he still studies Hebrew and Yiddish and, as I noted in my Introduction, longs for a literature that "might easily have developed into a new secret doctrine, a Kabbalah."
But there is a price to be paid before the recently Westernized Jew of culture produces his Modernist Kabbalah and presents it to either a Jewish or a Gentile readership. I am referring to what John Murray Cuddihy calls "the ordeal of civility." Contributing to Western culture, even when one's contribution is radically Modernistic, cannot occur before one undergoes the process of "refinement." As Cuddihy observes in his discussion of the Jewish aspects of psychoanalysis:
The "shock" of Jewish Emancipation had come first. Lured by the promise of civil rights, Jews in the nineteenth century were disillusioned to find themselves not in the
pays légale
of a political society but in the
pays réel
of a civil society. Lured by the promise of becoming
citoyens,
they found that they had first to become
bourgeois
. The ticket of admission to European society was not baptism, as Heine thought, but
Bildung
and behavior.
12

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